Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge; and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus; Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic; socioeconomic; and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional; aesthetic; and cognitive order to a contradictory; doubly bound neoliberal regime.Blending critical philosophy; political theory; and media theory; The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays; with a detailed theoretical introduction; Martin explores questions related to urban life; drawn from a wide range of global topics—from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars; from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular “mediator†(or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices; each answering the question “What is a city; today?†The Urban Apparatus serves as an “urban†bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia’s Ghost; and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.
#3147310 in eBooks 2013-06-17 2013-06-17File Name: B01M0MPQZ0
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