Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age - Softcover

"This in-depth and wide-ranging study of the results of urban development in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East points not only to the radical transformations effected by the globalization of neoliberal capitalism but also to their fundamentally different effects on culture, city-form, and daily life, a mark of the `local' in the `global.' Written by experts in their respective fields and geographical areas, this unique collection of essays is unified by the editorial guidance provided by Andreas Huyssen, who has adroitly organized the book as a primer in the cultural analysis of worldwide economic transformation."-Anthony Vidler, author of Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism "Other Cities, Other Worlds offers quite brilliant and absorbing accounts of urban imaginaries in major cities outside the West. This is not just another globalization book but one of real distinction about contemporary urban life `elsewhere.'"-George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary "Other Cities, Other Worlds is interdisciplinary in the best sense of the term. Architects and architectural historians and critics, art curators, anthropologists, cultural analysts and social theorists, historians and sociologists speak to and through each other, relating older urban forms to emergent ones, drawing on contemporary critical theory developed in the metropoles but put to new work. This book will affect how we think of globalization itself, as not just a top-down linear form of development and displacement but a far more complex set of interactions that the contributors do a very good job of beginning to comprehend."-David Theo Goldberg, author of The Racial State

Other Cities, Other Worlds brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities. The contributors focus on urban imaginaries, the ways that city dwellers perceive or imagine their own cities. Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of urban life, they bring to their essays deep knowledge of the cities they are bound to in their lives and their work. Taken together, these essays allow us to compare metropolises from the so-called periphery and gauge processes of cultural globalization, illuminating the complexities at stake as we try to imagine other cities and other worlds under the spell of globalization. The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (Sao Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Nestor Garcia Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk's meditation on his native city of Istanbul. Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang