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Cities shape the people who live in them, while in turn, people shape the cities in which they live. In this book, Quill R Kukla explores how city living is distinctive, and how people build territories for themselves and make themselves at home in cities. Through a philosophical exploration of what it means to be a city dweller, and rich and detailed explorations of particular cities such as Berlin, Johannesburg, and Washington, D.C.,
City Living shows how the cities we live in penetrate every dimension of our lives, from how we move to how we see, and conversely, how city dwellers creatively bend their cities to their needs.
List of contents
- Preface
- Guide for Readers
- Chapter 1: Inhabiting Space
- Chapter 2: Urban Space and City Living
- Chapter 3: Living with Gentrification
- Chapter 4: Introduction to Repurposed Cities
- Chapter 5: The Repurposed City of Berlin
- Chapter 6: The Repurposed City of Johannesburg
About the author
Quill R Kukla is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, as well as a Humboldt Scholar at Leibniz Universität Hannover. They are completing a Master's Degree in Urban and Regional Planning at Georgetown University. Their previous books include Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mother's Bodies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and, with Mark Lance, 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard University Press, 2009). They are also a competitive amateur boxer and powerlifter.
Summary
City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense civil unrest. During such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective.
Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.
Additional text
City Living is an ambitious book that engages the reader through a phenomenological account of how people living amongst, engaging with, and navigating each other shape urban spaces, and how all that lively embodied and emplaced activity turns around to shape them. We inhabit spaces but those spaces inhabit us. Kukla's analysis gracefully weaves theories of territory and place-making, confronts the challenges of urban gentrification to deliver vital lessons about identity and disruption, all the while taking the reader on philosophical passages through Washington D.C., Berlin, and Johannesburg to face the social-spatial dynamics of how 'city dwellers make and are made by territories.' The journey concludes with an innovative view of what the 'right to the city' means. For Kukla, the expression of this aspirational right goes beyond claims to housing by extending to the right to live one's life and to shape the cities that shape us.
