Imagining Urban Complexity

<p><i>Imagining Urban Complexity </i>introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between the humanities and urban studies. It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making.</p><p>Focusing on urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 global cities, the book shows that urban environments are thematized in literature and art, but are also entities that are shaped, perceived, interpreted, and experienced through sense-making techniques that have long been central concerns of the humanities. These techniques, the book argues, activate a dialectic between urban <i>imaginations </i>and <i>cancellations</i>. Tropes, media, and genres are aesthetically and politically powerful: they propel imaginations and open up multiplicities of urban possibilities, they naturalize actualized orders, and they cancel alternatives. The book moves between close rea