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This book argues that understanding global urbanism in the twenty-first century requires us to cast our gaze upon vast city-regions without an urban core.
List of contents
Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the eclipse of modernist city building and the modern metropolis; Part I. Setting the Stage: 1. Global urbanism at the start of the twenty-first century; 2 The shape of cities to come: distended urban form as the template for global urbanism; Part II. Aggregate Urbanism: 3. Spatial restructuring on a global scale: enclave urbanism and the fragmentation of urban space; 4. Cities as an assemblage of enclaves: realizing the expectations of Late Modernity; Part III. Zone Formats and the Urbanism of Exception: 5. Autonomous zones and the eclipse of territorial sovereignty; 6. Typologies of zones; 7. Hybrid zones and the breakdown of conventional modalities of urban governance; 8. Urbanism as exception; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Martin J. Murray is a Professor of Urban Planning at the Taubman College urban planning faculty. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His current research engages the fields of urban studies and planning, global urbanism, cultural geography, distressed urbanism, development, historical sociology, and African studies. In addition to six books and three co-edited volumes, he has produced close to eighty journal articles and book chapters that focus on diverse geographical areas of the world at different historical periods, ranging from colonial Indochina to contemporary southern Africa.
Summary
This book challenges the conventional understanding of cities not only as bounded spaces with a coherence all of their own but also urbanization as a universal process along a linear pathway toward a common end-point. Increasingly, urbanizing processes on a global scale have produced distended urban regions that resemble assemblages of enclosed enclaves and discontinuous zones.
