URBAN THEORY AND THE URBAN EXPERIENCE

URBAN THEORY AND
THE URBAN EXPERIENCE
Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches
to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies and the often unacknowledged
debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe one another.
From the foundations of modern urban theory in the work of Weber, Simmel, Benjamin and
Lefebvre to the writings of contemporary urban theorists such as David Harvey and Manuel
Castells and the Los Angeles school of urbanism, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience traces the
key developments in the idea of the city over more than a century. Individual chapters explore
investigative studies of the great metropolis from Charles Booth to the contemporary urban
research of William J. Wilson, along with alternative approaches to the industrial city, ranging
from the Garden City Movement to ‘the new urbanism’.
The volume also considers the impact of new information and communication technologies, and
the growing trend towards disaggregated urban networks, all of which raise important questions
about the viability and physical and social identity of the conventional townscape. Urban Theory
and the Urban Experience concludes with a rallying cry for a more holistic and integrated approach
to the urban question in theory and in practice if the rich potential of our cities is to be realised.
For the benefit of students and tutors, frequent question points encourage exploration of key
themes, and annotated further readings provide follow-up sources for the issues raised in each
chapter.
This book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners and all those who wish to learn
more about why the urban has become the dominant social, economic and cultural form of the
twenty-first century.
Simon Parker is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York, UK.