Mapping key co-ordinates of meaning, identity and power across sites of body and city, the author explores a wide range of critical thinking including Lefebvre and Freud and analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external.

From Classical Greece and Rome to medieval and Renaissance Europe, from Hogarth's London to the metropolis of today, cities have been at the centre of human existence for thousands of years. By examining individual cities at their most pivotal moments in history, and the way people lived in them, Richard Sennett traces changing attitudes to concepts such as space, burial, sanctuary and planning. He provides fascinating insights into the interaction between the human body and the spaces of the city it inhabits, evoking the sounds, smells and bustle throughout the centuries. And he asks whether modern cities starve people's sensual experience.

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life—how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love—all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city—the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

Over the last century, psychoanalysis has transformed the ways in which we think about our relationships with others. Psychoanalytic concepts and methods, such as the unconscious and dream analysis, have greatly impacted on social, cultural and political theory. Reinterpreting the ways in which Geography has explored people's mental maps and their deepest feelings about places, The Body and the City outlines a new cartography of the subject. The author maps key coordinates of meaning, identity and power across the sites of body and city. Exploring a wide range of critical thinking, particularly the work of Lefebvre, Freud and Lacan, he analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external world to present a pathbreaking psychoanalysis of space.

Engaging with critical theory, poststructuralist perspectives, cultural studies, film theory and urban studies, the book provides stunning insights into the micropolitics of ethnicity, identity, security, subjectivity and sovereignty.

The Cinematic City offers an innovative and thought-provoking insight into cityscape and screenscape and their inter-connection. Illustrated throughout with movie stills, a diverse selection of films (from 'Bladerunner' to 'Little Caesar'), genres, cities and historical periods are examined by leading names in the field. The key dimensions of film and urban theory are introduced before detailed analysis of the various cinematic forms which relate most significantly to the city. From early cinema and documentary film, to film noir, 'New Wave' and 'postmodern cinema', the contributors provide a wealth of empirical material and illustration whilst drawing on the theoretical insights of contemporary feminism, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, and others. The Cinematic City shows how the city has been undeniably shaped by the cinematic form, and how cinema owes much of its nature to the historical development of urban space. Engaging with current theoretical debates, this is a book that is set to change the way in which we think about both the nature of the city and film. Contributors: Giuliana Bruno, Iain Chambers, Marcus Doel, David Clarke, Anthony Easthope, Elisabeth Mahoney, Will Straw, Stephen Ward, John Gold, James Hay, Rob Lapsley, Frank Krutnik