Urban Space and Cityscapes Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture

From the verticals of New York, Hong Kong and Australia's Gold Coast to the sprawls of London, Paris and Jakarta, this cross-disciplinary volume of new writing examines constructions, representations, imaginations and theorizations of urban space and cityscapes in modern and contemporary culture. Linked by a shared concern for issues of spatiality, the essay topics are organized around three interrelated themes - image, text, and form - and range from the examination of cyberpunk skylines, postcolonial urbanism, and the cinema of urban disaster, to the analysis of iconic city landmarks such as the Twin Towers, the London Eye, and the Jewish Museum Berlin.
Working at the intersections of visual, material, and literary culture, "Urban Space and Cityscapes" seeks in particular:
- to provide new critical and theoretical perspectives on the city at a time when the condition and future of urbanism are major subjects of international and public concern.
- to examine the aesthetic, narrative, and representational strategies used to interpret the dynamic space of cities.
- to explore the relationship between urban space and a variety of pressing cultural concerns, including issues of identity, memory, technology, class, gender, nation, and ethnicity.
With original essays from the fields of architecture, cultural theory, film, geography, literature, and visual art, "Urban Space" "and Cityscapes" offers fresh insight into the increasingly complex relationship between urban space, cultural production, and everyday life.

From the verticals of New York, Hong Kong and Singapore to the sprawls of London, Paris and Jakarta, this interdisciplinary volume of new writing examines constructions, representations, imaginations and theorizations of 'cityscapes' in modern and contemporary culture. With specially-commissioned essays from the fields of cultural theory, architecture, film, literature, visual art and urban geography, it offers fresh insight into the increasingly complex relationship between urban space, cultural production and everyday life. This volume draws on critical urban studies and moves beyond familiar cultural representations of the city by considering urban planning and architecture. Organized under three inter-related themes - image, text and form - essay topics range from the examination of cyberpunk skylines, pagan urbanismand the cinema of urban disaster, to the analysis of iconic city landmarks such as the twin towers, the London Eye and the Judisches Museum Berlin. Covering a diverse range of cities, including Berlin, Chicago, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Venice, this fantastic resource for students, scholars and researchers alike, works expertly at the intersections of visual, material, and literary culture.

Foreword: Cityscapes as Cityspaces 1. Revisioning Urban Space and Cityscapes Part 1: Image 2. Cityscape with Ferris Wheel: Chicago, 1893 3. Seeing Only Corpses: Vision And/Of Urban Disaster in Apocalyptic Cinema 4. New York. 9.11 5. The Idea of Hong Kong: Structures of Attention in the City of Life Part 2: Text 6. Paris Underground: Juan Goytisolo and the ‘Situationist’ City 7. Negotiations of London asImperial Urban Space in the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel 8. Reading Urban Spaces in African Texts 9. Reading the Illegible Cityscapes of Postmodern Fiction 10. The Death and Return of the New York Skyscraper: Cather, Libeskind, and Verticality Part 3: Form 11. The Museum, the Street, and the Virtual Landscape of Berlin 12. The Reversible City: Exhibition(ism), Chorality and Tenderness in Manhattan and Venice 13. Australia’s Gold Coast: A City Producing Itself 14. Cognitive Mapping the Dispersed City

Christoph Lindner is Assistant Professor of Literature and Film at Northern Illinois University