Imagining Urban Complexity

Imagining Urban Complexity brings the humanities and urban studies together. It argues that tropes, media and genres work as cultural techniques that shape complexity in cities by distributing affordances, modes of sensing and modes of sense-making. The book looks at urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 cities around the world.

Its central claim is that cities appear as themes in literature and art, but are also shaped, perceived, interpreted and experienced through the sense-making techniques that the humanities have long studied. According to the book, these techniques set up a dialectic between urban imaginations and cancellations. Tropes, media and genres are both aesthetic and political: they drive imagination and open up many urban possibilities, but they also naturalize existing orders and cancel alternatives.

The analysis moves between close readings of city spaces and broader systemic and infrastructural views of urban environments. It offers tools and strategies that readers can adapt and extend to understand urban complexity in other cultural and political settings.

The book is written for a global audience and comes from a continental philosophical tradition. It is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates and academic researchers in critical urban studies, urban design, comparative literature, cultural studies, cultural analysis, ecocriticism, political theory and ethics.