Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics

(Hardback)

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Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies, political resistance, friction between human and non-human worlds, and the confluence of art, policy, and identity formation in placemaking. With essays by scholars working in a variety of fieldsfrom architecture to literature to music to sociologythis collection maintains that any hope for achieving urban sustainability will require taking seriously the ways in which cities are imagined. Efforts to make cities sustainable must fully incorporate the humanities because critical endeavors and creative expressions that fall within the purview of the humanities are vital to closing the conceptual gulf, as well as the practical gap, between human and non-human conservation. Even if the environmental humanities embrace cities, critics must ask whether coalescing the terms sustainability and city may actually obstruct human action to combat climate changewhich, from some angles, seems impending, self-imposed apocalypse. To examine the urban turn, Sustainability and the City attends to culture. Essays in the first part of the collection approach urban sustainability from various disciplinary vantage points to emphasize history, ideology, pedagogy, and critical theory. The second part of the collection analyzes urban commons on four different continents. Finally, the collection moves from a diverse set of interpretations of on-the-ground urban phenomena to a compilation of readings of sustainability in different media and genressound art, drama, fiction, and filmset in, or evocative of, cities. The collection carves out a place for artists and critics to help realize social justice in cities, which generate remarkable power, but power that is too often and too easily used destructively, unfairly, and wastefully despite cities unique capacities to inspire and sustain humanity.

Reviews

Cities do not arise from the sole will and skill of architects, planners, surveyors, and politicians. They have to be nurtured by their inhabitants. Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politicsaims at understanding urban sustainability by deciphering the eternal game between what the authorities, whatever their form, try to impose on the social fabric, and what the social fabric impose on the authorities, through deception or force, through confrontation or bargaining. It is a book of great interest to anyone thinking about cities and sustainability. -- Franois Mancebo, Universit de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
This fascinating volume thinks through the complexities of environmental issues in urban space. The interdisciplinary breadth and accessibility of its essays is unmatched. -- Sunny Statler-Pace, Auburn University

Author Bio

Lauren Curtright is assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, Perimeter College. Doris Bremm is area coordinator for culture and literature at the Familienbildungssttte, Bonn.