Urban Constellations

Today home to over half of the world's population, cities determine the shape of our culture and our politics, and generate new relationships between nature, technology and the human body. This collection brings together a series of short essays on cities, urbanization and urban culture in the spirit of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. A range of leading international scholars, artists and filmmakers explores urban ruins and disruptions--from the bedbug infestations of London to the phantom spaces of west Berlin--and looks at new forms of political mobilization, the effects of economic instability, the political ecology of urban nature and the ways in which collective memory can take form. The scope of the collection is truly global, and takes the reader from London, Berlin and Los Angeles to such less extensively studied cities as Buenos Aires, Lagos and Seoul.