'The Emancipatory City is a wonderful addition to a growing literature on the public culture of the city. In these spaces, tolerance and intolerance, difference and indifference, transgressions, resistances, and playful spontaneity erupt to give texture to urban life. The book broadens our gaze and deepens our understanding of how cities enable people to express themselves and be free' - Robert A Beauregard, New School University, New York
Who are cities for? What kinds of societies might they most democratically embody? And, how can cities be emancipatory sites?
The ambivalent status of urban space in terms of emancipation, democratisation, justice and citizenship is central to recent work in urban geography, `new' cultural geography, critical geography and postmodern planning, as well as literature on urban social justice, public space and the politics of identity.
Seeking alternative and progressive visions of the emancipatory city through an exploration of the tensions and possibilities between the freedoms and constraints offered by the city, the authors of The Emancipatory City? build on this wealth of current perspectives to present an critical analysis of urban experience.
The Emancipatory City - Loretta Lees
Urban (Re)Visions
PART ONE: CITIES OF (IN)DIFFERENCE
Domesticating Monsters - Susan Ruddick
Cartographies of Difference and the Emancipatory City
Zero Tolerance, Maximum Surveillance? Deviance, Difference and Crime Control in the Late Modern City - Nicholas Fyfe
Impurity and the Emancipatory City - Les Back and Michael Keith
Young People, Community Safety and Racial Danger
The Emancipatory Community? Place, Politics and Collective Action in Cities - James DeFilippis and Peter North
PART TWO: EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES
Sites of Public (Homo)Sex and the Carnivalesque Spaces of Reclaim the Streets - Gavin Brown
Inventing New Games - David Pinder
Unitary Urbanism and the Politics of Space
Everyday Rationality and the Emancipatory City - Gary Bridge
Urban Escapades - Quentin Stevens
Play in Melbourne's Public Spaces
PART THREE: UTOPIC TRAJECTORIES
The Urban Basis of Emancipation - Jennifer Robinson
Spatial Theory and the City in South African Politics
Water, Modernity and Emancipatory Urbanism - Matthew Gandy
In Search of the Horizon - Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San Juan
Utopia in The Truman Show and The Matrix
Ghosts and the City of Hope - Steve Pile
REFLECTIONS
The `Emancipatory' City? - Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
The Right to the City - David Harvey
