Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction

Urban Geography presents a comprehensive introduction toa wide range of critical themes and conceptual ideas relating tocontemporary urban geography including patterns and processes ofurbanization, urban development, urban planning, and lifeexperiences in modern cities. Building upon a wide range of topicalexamples and illustrative case studies from several internationalcities, the text brings to light all of the key ideas, concepts,and themes most widely utilized in critical geographical approachesto contemporary urban spaces.

Initial chapters offer an introduction to critical approaches tothe city before exploring the evolution of contemporary globalprocesses of urbanization and urban development. These are followedby more in–depth coverage of such topics as labor, planning, placemarketing, social reproduction, nature, experience, art, culture,citizenship, and alternative urban spaces. Individual chaptersstrike a careful balance between a depiction of the diversity ofordinary urban geographies and an exposure of the networks, flows,and relations which increasingly connect cities and urban spaces atthe global level.

Urban Geography offers valuable insights into criticalgeographical approaches to the modern city, along with the diverseset of policies, practices, and challenges of contemporary urbanliving and its rapid movements and changes.

This book s cover shows the Ashton Canal dissecting theformerly industrial area of Ancoats in Manchester, England. Urban landscapes like this one are palimpsests that speak to howcities change in tandem with social, economic, and architecturaltransformations over time.  A heartland of 19th Century urbanindustrialism, Ancoats is now rebranded as NewIslington and, as the contemporary apartment buildings alongthe canal suggest, is undergoing gentrification.  Cities arealways changing.  This book explains how, why, where, and inwhose interests.

Andrew E.G. Jonas holds a Chair in Human Geography at theUniversity of Hull in the UK. His co–edited books include TheUrban Growth Machine; Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later(1999, with David Wilson), Interrogating Alterity (2010,with Duncan Fuller and Roger Lee), and Territory, the State andUrban Politics (2012, with Andy Wood). He serves on theeditorial boards of Urban Geography and TerritoryPolitics and Governance.

Eugene McCann is a Professor of Geography at Simon FraserUniversity, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. He is co–editor,with Kevin Ward, of Mobile Urbanism: Cities & Policymakingin the Global Age (2011) and, with Ronan Paddison, Cities& Social Change: Encounters with Contemporary Urbanism(2014).

Mary Thomas is Associate Professor in Women s, Gender andSexuality Studies at Ohio State University. She is the author of Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the ConflictedSpaces of American Education (2011), and co–editor of ACompanion to Social Geography (2011).