Questioning Cities
About the Book Series
The Questioning Cities series brings together an unusual mix of urban scholars under the title. Rather than taking a broadly economic approach, planning approach or more socio-cultural approach, it aims to include titles from a multi-disciplinary field of those interested in critical urban analysis. The series thus includes authors who draw on contemporary social, urban and critical theory to explore different aspects of the city. It is not therefore a series made up of books which are largely case-studies of different cities and predominantly descriptive. It seeks instead to extend current debates, through in most cases, excellent empirical work, and to develop sophisticated understandings of the city from a number of disciplines including geography, sociology, politics, planning, cultural studies, philosophy and literature. The series also aims to be thoroughly international where possible, to be innovative, to surprise, and to challenge received wisdom in urban studies. Overall, it will encourage a multi-disciplinary and international dialogue always bearing in mind that simple description or empirical observation, which is not located within a broader theoretical framework, would not - for this series at least - be enough.
Why Transportation Fails: Critiques from South Africa and Beyond
1st Edition
By Astrid Wood
July 29, 2025
Why Transportation Fails offers an in-depth critique of transportation failures in South Africa and beyond. Minibus taxis are unreliable and overcrowded; buses and trains are old and poorly maintained; and new services are derailed by spiraling capital and operational costs, protracted and ...
Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities
1st Edition
Edited
By Henrik Ernstson, Erik Swyngedouw
December 13, 2018
Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban ...
Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities
1st Edition
Edited
By Christoph Lindner
March 30, 2016
What connects garbage dumps in New York, bomb sites in Baghdad, and skyscrapers in São Paulo? How is contemporary visual culture – extending from art and architecture to film and digital media – responding to new forms of violence associated with global and globalizing cities? Addressing such ...
Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, assemblies, atmospheres
1st Edition
Edited
By Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías
January 26, 2016
Invoking the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, this volume shows how and why cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds of cohabitation. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple assemblages of...
The Urban Condition
1st Edition
By Brendan Gleeson
April 22, 2015
This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown...
Cities, Nationalism and Democratization
1st Edition
By Scott A. Bollens
March 31, 2015
Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization provides a theoretically informed, practice-oriented account of intercultural conflict and co-existence in cities. Bollens uses a wide-ranging set of over 100 interviews with local political and community leaders to investigate how popular urban policies can...
Cities in Globalization: Practices, Policies and Theories
1st Edition
Edited
By Peter Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey, Frank Witlox
March 21, 2012
Despite traditionally being a strong research topic in urban studies, inter-city relations had become grossly neglected until recently, when it was placed back on the research agenda with the advent of studies of world/global cities. More recently the ‘external relations’ of cities have taken their...
Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies
1st Edition
Edited
By Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender
August 16, 2011
This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects—space, culture, politics, economy—but these too often address each domain and the ...
Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, Justin Steil
April 10, 2011
Cities are many things. Among their least appealing aspects, cities are frequently characterized by concentrations of insecurity and exploitation. Cities have also long represented promises of opportunity and liberation. Public decision-making in contemporary cities is full of conflict, and ...
Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and Sao Paulo
1st Edition
By Lucia Sa
December 11, 2007
The modern metropolis has been called 'the symbol of our times', and life in it epitomizes, for many, modernity itself. But what to make of inherited ideas of modernity when faced with life in Mexico City and São Paulo, two of the largest metropolises in the world? Is their fractured reality, their...
Cities and Race: America's New Black Ghetto
1st Edition
By David Wilson
October 31, 2006
This fascinating book examines the 1990s rise of a new black ghetto in rust belt America, 'the global ghetto'. It uses the emergent perspective of 'racial economy' to delineate a fundamental proposition; historically neglected and marginalized black ghettos, in a 1990s era of societal boom and...
Small Cities: Urban Experience Beyond the Metropolis
1st Edition
By David Bell, Mark Jayne
August 23, 2006
Until now, much research in the field of urban planning and change has focused on the economic, political, social, cultural and spatial transformations of global cities and larger metropolitan areas. In this topical new volume, David Bell and Mark Jayne redress this balance, focusing on urban ...