Building the City elaborates new critical insights into the everyday lives of migrant workers in cities around the world.The book offers complementary blending of longstanding political-economic accounts of migration, gender, labour, and urban life alongside advances in feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, materialist, and more-than-representational theories. Drawing on these critical resources the authors explore the complexities of migrant’s everyday past, present, a...

Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives provides an introduction to innovative critical contributions to the field of urban studies. Chapters offer easily accessible and digestible reviews, and as a reference text Urban Theory is a comprehensive and integrated primer which covers topics necessary for a full understanding of recent theoretical engagements with cities.The introduction outlines the development of urban theory over the past two hundred years and discu...

This book provides a definitive overview of contemporary developments in our understanding of urban life in China. Multidisciplinary perspectives outline the most significant critical, theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in our appreciation of Chinese cities in the context of an increasingly globalized world. Each chapter includes reviews and appraisals of past and current theoretical development and embarks on innovative theoretical directions relating toMarxist, femini...

In investigating the mutual and dynamic relationship between urban development and consumption, this book asks: how are cities moulded by consumption, and how is consumption moulded by cities?Consumption stands at the intersection of different spheres of everyday life: between the public and the private, the political and the personal, the individual and the social. It is considered to be a means and motor of social change; as an active ingredient in the construction of space and p...

Until now, much research in the field of urban planning and change has focused on the economic, political, social, cultural and spatial transformations of global cities and larger metropolitan areas. In this topical new volume, David Bell and Mark Jayne redress this balance, focusing on urban change within small cities around the world.Drawing together research from a strong international team of contributors, this four part book is the first systematic overview of small cities. A ...

Drawing together international research from the fields of geography, alcohol studies, sociology, psychology and childhood studies, Jayne and Valentine explore children’s understandings and experiences of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol in family life. Chapters address both extra-familial ’norms’ about parenting and drinking cultures which are generated in wider society (through law/regulation, media/advertising and social networks etc.) and intra-familial ’norms’, including th...

In cities throughout the world, there is an increasingly ubiquitous presence of distinct social and spatial areas - urban villages, cultural and ethnic quarters. These spaces are sites where capital and culture intertwine in new ways. City of Quarters brings together some of the most prominent authors writing about urban villages to provide the first systematic and multi-disciplinary overview of this high-profile urban phenomenon. They address key questions such as 'What is the role of urb...

While disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, politics, social policy and the health and medical sciences have a tradition of exploring the centrality of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness to people's lives, geographers have only previously addressed these topics as a peripheral concern. Over the past few years, however, this view has begun to change, accelerated by an upsurge in interest in alcohol consumption relating to political and popular debate in countries throughout the world....

Since the late eighteenth century, academic engagement with political, economic, social, cultural and spatial changes in our cities has been dominated by theoretical frameworks crafted with reference to just a small number of cities. This book offers an important antidote to the continuing focus of urban studies on cities in ‘the Global North’.Urban Theory Beyond the West contains twenty chapters from leading scholars, raising important theoretical issues about cities thro...

Cultural geography is a major, vibrant subdiscipline of human geography. Cultural geographers have done some of the most important, exciting and thought-provokingly zesty work in human geography over the last half-century.This book exists to provide an introduction to the remarkably diverse, controversial, and sometimes-infuriating work of cultural geographers. The book outlines how cultural geography in its various forms provides a rich body of research about cultural practices an...

Fengshu Liu situates the lives of Chinese youth and the growth of the Internet against the backdrop of rapid and profound social transformation in China. In 2008, the total of Internet users in China had reached 253 million (in comparison with 22.5 million in 2001). Yet, despite rapid growth, the Internet in China is so far a predominantly urban-youth phenomenon, with young people under thirty (especially those under twenty-four), mostly members of the only-child generation, as the main gr...

Being socially and geographically mobile is generally seen as one of the central aspects of women's wellbeing. Alongside health, education and political participation, mobility is indispensable in order for women to reach goals such as agency and freedom. Building on new philosophical underpinnings of 'mobility', whereby society is seen to be framed by the convergence of various mobilities, this volume focuses on the intersection of mobility, social justice and gender. The authors reflect ...