Imagining Urban Complexity

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between humanities and urban studies. It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making.

Focusing on urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 global cities, the book shows that urban environments are thematized in literature and art, but are also entities that are shaped, perceived, interpreted, and experienced through sense-making techniques that have long been central to the humanities. These techniques activate a dialectic between urban imaginations and cancellations because tropes, media, and genres are aesthetically and politically powerful: they propel imaginations and open up multiplicities of urban possibilities, they naturalize actualized orders and cancel alternatives. This book moves between close readings of city spaces and more systemic and infrastructural approaches to urban environments, providing tools and strategies that can be adapted and extended to understand urban complexity in different cultural and historical contexts.

The book speaks to global audiences from a continental philosophical tradition. It is aimed for scholars and researchers in the field of the Humanities, Social Sciences, Urban Studies, urban complexity, aesthetics, and politics. It is relevant to graduate or postgraduate students in critical urban studies, urban design, comparative literature, art history, cultural studies, cultural analysis, ecocriticism, citizenship, political theory, and ethics.