Preface
1. Introduction, Jacobs and Fincher
2. Grids of Difference: Place and Identity Formation, Pratt
3. In the Right Place at the Right Time?: Life Stages and Urban
Spaces, Fincher
4. Suburban Stories, Gendered Lives: Thinking through Difference,
Dowling
5. Justice and the Disabling City, Gleeson
6. Community Responses to Human Service Delivery in U.S. Cities,
Takahashi
7. Sexuality and Urban Space: Gay Male Identity Politics in the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, Knopp
8. Sexing the City, Bondi
9. Sites of Difference: Beyond a Cultural Politics of Race
Polarity, Anderson
10. Contesting Social Relations in Communal Places: Identity
Politics among Asian Communities in Dar es Salaam, Nagar and
Leitner
11. Staging Difference: Aestheticization and the Politics of
Difference in Contemporary Cities, Jacobs
12. Whose City?: Gender, Class, and Immigrants in Globalizing
European Cities, Kofman
13. Social Polarization and the Politics of Difference: Discourses
in Collision or Collusion?, Gibson
Ruth Fincher is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of
Melbourne, Australia, where she has lectured since 1986. She
received her doctorate in Geography from Clark University,
Worcester, Massachusetts, and has been on the faculty at McGill
University and McMaster University in Canada. Her research,
teaching, and publications focus primarily on critical urban
studies, feminist theories of the state, multiculturalism and
immigration, and sociospatial polarization.
Jane M. Jacobs is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of
Melbourne. Since earning her PhD from University College London,
she has published widely in the area of cultural geography. Her
specific interests include racialized identity politics, urban
studies, and postcolonialism. She is author of Edge of Empire:
Postcolonialism and the City and coauthor of Uncanny Australia:
Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation.
This exciting and important book takes a critical approach to the
concept of difference, examining its role in the constitution of
urban life and the structuring of urban space. Informed by recent
developments in feminism and postcolonial theory, the book
illustrates the complexity of contemporary identity politics,
encompassing issues of homelessness, disability, youth,
aboriginality, single parents, and people with AIDS besides the
more familiar differences associated with gender and sexuality,
race, and class. In exploring questions of representation,
signification and performativity, the book insists on grounding
these processes in the material world. Drawing on a wide range of
empirical work, the authors demonstrate how struggles over identity
and difference are always locally articulated. Going beyond the
mapping of difference, the book explores the social and spatial
constitution of difference in processes of embodiment,
aestheticization, and commodification. In place of shrill readings
of globalization or postmodernity, Cities of Difference provides a
carefully nuanced cultural politics of the city, decentering,
destabilizing, and radically unsettling much of the received wisdom
of urban analysis. --Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography,
University of Sheffield, UK
Cities of Difference sets out bold new directions for the study of
urban and metropolitan regions. Refusing to reduce the 'urban
question' to either political economy or culture, the contributors
show how their interpenetration shapes the uneven material
circumstances, social context, and subjective identities of urban
residents. Richly textured, nuanced chapters throw into high relief
questions of social and spatial justice, and provide insightful
ways to confront dilemmas of fairness and access. Readers will
never be able to see the city or urban space in the same way again.
--Jennifer Wolch, Professor of Geography, University of Southern
California
This volume features some of the best contemporary work by a new
generation of urban geographers. Crossing over existing boundaries
and interrogating conventional categories, contributors destabilize
existing conceptual structures. The city emerges as a place where
difference reigns--difference that is constantly reworked by
individuals and groups through engagement with economic, social and
political contexts. Theoretically astute and empirically alert, the
book provides a distinctive fin-de-siecle synthesis of issues of
urban subjectivity, identity, social and economic restructuring,
and globalization. --David Ley, Professor of Geography, University
of British Columbia
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