Explores how urban nightlife is experiencing a 'McDonaldisation', where big branded names are taking over large parts of downtown areas, leaving consumers with an increasingly standardised experience.

The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city’s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century. The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai’s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today’s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city’s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China’s greatest global city. To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.

The SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension. Key Concepts in Urban Studies: • Clearly and concisely explains the basic ideas in the interdisciplinary field of urban studies • Offers concise discussions of concepts ranging from community, neighbourhood, and the city to globalization, the New Urbanism, feminine space, and urban problems • Constitutes a re-examination of the key ideas in the field • Is illustrated throughout with international examples • Provides an essential reference guide for all students and teachers across the urban disciplines within sociology, political science, planning and geography.

The 6th edition of this highly respected text builds upon the successful structure, engaging writing style and clear presentation of previous editions. Examining urban social geography from a theoretical and historical perspective, it also explores how it has developed into the modern day. Taking account of recent critical work, whilst simultaneously presenting well established approaches to the subject, it ensures students are well-informed about all the issues. The result is a topical book that is clear and accessible for students

Updated to reflect the most current thinking on urban studies, The Blackwell City Reader, Second Edition features a comprehensive selection of multidisciplinary readings relating to the analysis and experience of global cities. Includes new sections of materialities and mobilities to capture the most recent debates The most international reader of its kind, including extensive coverage of urban issues in Asia, China, and India Combines theoretical approaches with a wide range of geographical case studies Organized to be used as a stand-alone text or alongside Blackwell's A Companion to the City

Ambitious projects to modernize European capital cities emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The need for urban planning and urban expansion in European cities resulted from industrialization, modernization and economic development that created huge waves of immigration from rural areas into cities. These social and economic changes also laid the infrastructure for the mass tourism that would follow later. This comprehensive collection investigates the interrelationship between urban planning and tourism consumption in European cities, and its evolvement and transition over time. The authors focus on different cases of urban planning and tourism consumption in a range of European cities – Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, Budapest and Skopje. In addition to being political and cultural capitals, these cities are also places where ordinary people live and work. This book addresses questions and concerns regarding the social and economic carrying capacity of these capital cities due to the growing intensity and volume of tourism. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and professionals in the fields of urban planning and tourism geography. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Tourism Geographies.

A buoyant, creative economy can be seen as the saviour of many cities, but behind such 'urban makeovers' lie serious problems such as widening inequalities and gentrification. Blending lively city case studies with broader theoretical debates, this book explores the opportunities for a more just and sustainable urban future.