Urban Rhythms Mobilities, Space and Interaction in the Contemporary City

This insightful addition to the academic literature on the contemporary cityscape explores the rhythms of urban mobilities, temporalities and interactions. It interprets the city in its full complexity; interwoven with networks, fluidities and constant movement, and at the same time defined and tempered by the processes of crisis and decay as much as by those of regeneration and renewal. The chapters selected for this volume travel to a global range of urban locations, interpreting the soundscapes of British railway stations, the carnival crowds of Rio de Janeiro, and the fluid relationship between modernity and the past in Shanghai.

From the everyday movements and circulations of the pedestrian city to the urban transformations wrought by decay, rupture, and renewal, the material draws on theory and empirical research to capture not only the dominating rhythms of the city and the ways in which such cadences are constituted, negotiated, resisted, but also contemporary forms and spaces of creativity and organic polychronicity. The book confronts the myriad challenges that face urban planners and designers, citizens, and researchers alike, with research by established and emerging scholars who have adopted and extended the precepts of Henri Lefebvre in deploying the concept of rhythm as a potentially transformative mode of urban analysis. The contributors unearth the essential, organising, principle of rhythm at play in the contemporary city, a music forged by a fusion of linearity and repetition, peak and decline, past and future potential.

Series editor s introduction (Chris Shilling)

1. Urban rhythms: mobilities, space and interaction in the contemporary city (Robin James Smith and Kevin Hetherington)

2. Rhythm and noise: the city, memory and the archive (Kevin Hetherington)

3. Contested urban rhythms: from the industrial city to the post–industrial urban archipelago (Stavros Stavrides)

4. Points of departure: listening to rhythm in the sonoric spaces of the railway station (George Revill)

5. Carnival crowds (Beatriz Jaguaribe)

6. No time out: mobility, rhythmicity and urban patrol in the twenty–four hour city (Robin James Smith and Tom Hall)

7. Majority time: operations in the midst of Jakarta (AbdouMaliq Simone and Achmad Uzair Fauzan)

8. From momentary to historic: rhythms in the social production of urban space, the case of Calçada de Sant Ana, Lisbon (Panu Lehtovuori and Hille Koskela)

9. Communicating the rhythms of retromodernity: confused and mixed Shanghai (Amanda Lagerkvist)

Notes on contributors

Index

Robin Smith teaches sociology and qualitative methodology at Cardiff University. His existing research has been broadly focused upon the interaction order of everyday urban public space. He is, in particular, interested in the street–level accomplishment and politics of encounter, mobility and territory. 

Kevin Hetherington is Professor of Geography at the Open University where he is currently Dean and Director of Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He previously held a Chair in Cultural Sociology at Lancaster University and has worked across the boundary of both disciplines for most of his career. He currently researches on issues of museums, heritage and urban regeneration and social and spatial theory.  His seven books include The Badlands of Modernity (1997), Capitalism s Eye (2007), and (with Anne Cronin) Consuming the Entrepreneurial City (2008). He is currently writing a book on museums. He is a member of several editorial boards including a recent re–appointment to the board of The Sociological Review having been previously involved from 1994–2003.  He was a founding co–editor of the journal Museum and Society (co editor from 2003–09) and currently co–edits the book series Culture, Economy and the Social for Routledge.