International conference proceedings, New York University, February 2000, and Humboldt University, June-July 2000.

Could the concepts of »metropolitanism« and »thick space« aid our understanding of historical and contemporary urban change? Essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic provide interdisciplinary approaches to the complex dynamics of large-scale urbanization. The book opens with conceptual questions regarding the development of metropoles and metropolitan studies. The following sections provide analyses of the social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of metropolitan spaces from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, such as the role of planning and urban parks, the impact of ethnic diversity and segregation, the place of cinematic visions or the centrality of infrastructures and architecture.

Diversity of Belonging in Europe analyzes conflicting notions of identity and belonging in contemporary Europe. Addressing the creation, negotiation, and (re) use of diverse spaces and places of belonging, the book examines their fascinating complexities in the context of a changing Europe. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the volume examines renegotiations of belonging played out through cultural encounters with difference and change, in diverse public spaces and contested places. Highlighting the interconnections between social change and culture, heritage, and memory, the chapters analyze multilayered public spaces and the negotiations over culture and belonging that are connected to them. Through analyses of diverse case studies, the editors and authors draw out the significance of the participation or exclusion of differing community, grassroots, and activist groups in such practices and discourses of belonging in relation to the contemporary emergence of identity conflicts and political uses of the past across Europe. They analyze the ways in which people’s sense of belonging is connected to cultural, heritage, and memory practices undertaken in different public spaces, including museums, cultural and community centres, city monuments and built heritage, neglected urban spaces, and online fora. Diversity of Belonging in Europe provides a valuable contribution to the existing bodies of work on identities, migration, public space, memory, and heritage. The book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in contested belonging, public spaces, and the role of culture and heritage. Susannah Eckersley is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK, an Associated Research Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany, and the Project Leader of en/counter/points – a collaborative European research project on public spaces and belonging funded by HERA. Her expertise is in memory, museums, difficult heritage, migration, identities, and belonging. Claske Vos is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of European Studies at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her current work focuses on the intersection of EU funding, cultural activism, and enlargement. Her expertise is in European cultural policy, cultural heritage, Southeast Europe, and European identity formation.

In the planning of city development, it is important that different groups should be able to live in peaceful coexistence. This is how the concept 'multicultural' came about. During the 1970s, multiculturalism was developed into a model of political democracy-a strategy for society's rapid change. The term multiculturalism suggests that contemporary urban cultures somehow co-exist in a condition of mutual respect and possible equality. The new multiculturalism seems very different from the migration that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The essays in this collection address the general themes of ethnicity and contemporary European urbanism in many different ways, examining a wide variety of cities and city pairings. The common bond in these writings is the impact that a contemporary merging of ethnicity and culture is having on the new urbanity that is now widely accepted as driving the new Europe. The effect is far greater than might be predicted from the relative social powerlessness of many of the bearers of these cultures. At the same time, existing urban processes continue to ensure the marginality of these groups.

Urban spaces have always functioned as cradles and laboratories for religious movements and spiritualities. The urban forms a central and nourishing agent for the creation of new religious expressions, and continually negotiates new ways of being spiritual and establishing spiritual ideas and practices. This book explores the intense and complex interplay between the (post) modern city and new religious and spiritual movement, bringing the city and its annexes into the foreground of current research into religion. It develops a new, ethnography-based analysis of the ways in which the pluralist experience of the "urban" inscribes itself into various religious practices and vice versa: how do religiosity and spirituality appropriate and transform meanings of the urban? It focuses on new religious expressions, cosmologies and ways of life that go beyond established belief systems and religious understandings, and explores new conceptions of the word "urban" in a world of increasingly extended urban environments. The book examines how cities are both considered as sites and sources of spirituality, where the globalization of religions takes place as well as the fact that globalization is linked closely to the process of localization. The socio-cultural and political uniqueness of the specific urban context are analyzed to present an innovative perspective on how the interplay between the urban, spiritual and religious should be understood. This book brings a timely new perspective and will be of interest to academics and students in geography, sociology, urban studies, cultural studies and anthropology, as well as for urban planners and policy makers.

An encyclopedia about various topics relating to urban studies.

Theories of Globalization offers students and scholars a comprehensive and critical introduction to the concept of globalization. Barrie Axford expertly guides readers through the full range of perspectives on the topic, from international political economy to geography, global anthropology to cultural and communication studies. In so doing he draws out the common threads between competing theories, as well as pinpointing the problems that challenge our understanding of globalization. Key terms such as 'globalism' and 'globality' are carefully explained and central themes like capitalism, governance, culture and history explored in full. In assessing the contribution made by globalization theory, Axford's account also sheds new light on several crucial current issues. These range from the changing shape of democracy and citizen engagement with governance, to issues surrounding 'just war' and humane intervention, and problems relating to empire and post-colonialism. This wide-ranging and detailed new book will be essential reading for students and scholars of international politics, sociology and any area where the concept of globalization is discussed and disputed.