Urban Imaginaries Locating the Modern City Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender, editors Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 0-8166-4802-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4802-3 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4801-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4801-6
New global perspectives on urban life. For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals. The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience. “The editors are to be commended for providing an open platform for multiple perspectives on specific locations.” —Modernism/Modernity “An edited volume exploring what we mean by ‘urban’ through case studies is most welcome. And it delivers.” —Contemporary Sociology “Urban Imaginaries offers interesting examples of cities that challenge the notion of a hard city with clear borders and the way in which the media construct realities that are valuable for architects, historians and artists.” —Leonardo Review “Urban Imaginaries is well written and accessible to a broader sociological audience. I would strongly recommend Urban Imaginiaries to readers . . . Urban Imaginaries would be a particularly wise choice for adoption in senior undergraduate courses in urban anthropology, and in comparative urban sociology and politics.” —Canadian Journal of Sociology Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Camilla Fojas, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Anthony D. King, Mark LeVine, Srirupa Roy, Seteney Shami, AbdouMaliq Simone, Maha Yahya, Deniz Yükseker. Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey and author of Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University. 336 pages | 15 halftones | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: The City: Experience, Imagination, and Place Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender Boundaries, Networks and Cities: Playing and Replying Diasporas and Histories Anthony D. King Part I: The City and Its Boundaries 1. Economy and Gender in the Urban Borderland: The Public Culture of Laleli, Istanbul Deniz Yükseker 2. Borderlined in the Global City (of Angels) Camilla Fojas 3. Modernity on the Waterfront: The Case of Haussmann’s Paris Margaret Cohen Part II: Competing Narratives of the City: Contested Inclusions and Exclusions 4. Assembling Douala: Imagining Forms of Urban Sociality AbdouMaliq Simone 5. Cities without Maps: Favelas and the Aesthetics of Realism Beatriz Jaguaribe 6. Fateful Triangles: Modernity and Its Antinomies in a Mediterranean Port City Mark LeVine Part III: The City and the Vision of the Nation 7. The Imagined Community as Urban Reality: The Making of Ankara Alev Çinar 8. Urban Space, National Time, and Postcolonial Difference: The Steel Towns of India Srirupa Roy 9. “Amman Is Not a City”: Middle Eastern Cities in Question Seteney Shami 10. Let the Dead Be Dead: Communal Imaginaries and National Narratives in the Post Civil War Reconstruction of Beirut Maha Yahya Conclusion: Reflections on the Culture of Urban Modernity Thomas Bender Contributors Index