"An introduction, by R. Sennett.--The nature of the city, by M. Weber.--The metropolis and mental life, by G. Simmel.--The soul of the city, by O. Spengler.--The city; suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. Human migration and the marginal man. By R. Park.--Urbanism as a way of life. Rural-urban differences. Human ecology. By L. Wirth.--The folk society, by R. Redfield.--The cultural role of cities, by R. Redfield and M. Singer."

"An introduction, by R. Sennett.--The nature of the city, by M. Weber.--The metropolis and mental life, by G. Simmel.--The soul of the city, by O. Spengler.--The city; suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. Human migration and the marginal man. By R. Park.--Urbanism as a way of life. Rural-urban differences. Human ecology. By L. Wirth.--The folk society, by R. Redfield.--The cultural role of cities, by R. Redfield and M. Singer."

In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse selection of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and the changing urban experience in Europe and the United States since the early 20th century.

The City: The Basics provides a brief yet compelling overview of the study of cities and city life. The book draws on a range of perspectives – economic, political, cultural, and environmental aspects are all considered – to provide a broad comparison of the evolution of cities in the rich Global North and the poorer Global South. Topics covered in the book include: a brief history of cities from ancient times to the post-modern present the differences between "global cities" in the North and "megacities" in the South the environmental impact of urban life and the idea of sustainable cities urban planning, urban politics and urban poverty. Featuring suggestions for further reading, recommended websites and a number of maps and illustrations, this is the ideal starting point for those interested in any aspect of cities or urban studies.

This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organization of colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns – from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonized in French colonial practices to the part played by the relations between museums and expeditions in the organization of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the ‘cultural turn’. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies.

In Caribbean writing, place is intimately inflected by displacement - place and displacement are not dichotomous; every 'here' invariably implies a 'there'. In line with this extreme imbrication of (dis)location, Caribbean writing in French explores questions of increasing global pertinence such as the relation between writing and displacement, local and distant space, text and place, identity and migration, passage and transformation. Contributions range across genres and the work of writers such as Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, René Dépestre, Édouard Glissant, Émile Ollivier, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Ernest Pépin. Topics explored include the poetics of dwelling space, the postmodern or postcolonial dynamic of the Creole town, and the textualization of place and displacement. Also included are essays on the drama of distance, the metamorphosis of recent Haitian writing, the literary reverberations of the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and links between Ireland and the French Caribbean.