Beyond The Metropolis

In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted centers of their respective regions. All four grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades, much as the metropolitan giants did. In spite of their commonalities, local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle affected individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.

Beyond the Metropolis is an attempt to mend the lacuna that exists between large and small city studies in urban geography, especially in North America. It covers a wide range of topics organized around some of the most common themes that urban geographers have addressed in their study of large cities. In addition to a general introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the evolution and growth of small cities.

Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in “Middletown,” Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.

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 comprehensive and integrated primer with coverage of all key topics, it takes a multi-disciplinary approach to an important contemporary urban phenomenon. The book addresses: political and economic decision making urban economic development and competitive advantage cultural infrastructure and planning in the regeneration of small cities identities, lifestyles and ways in which different groups interact in small cities. Centering on urban change as opposed to pure ethnographic description, the book’s focus on informed empirical research raises many important issues. Its blend of conceptual chapters and theoretically directed case studies provides an excellent resource for a broad spectrum of undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as providing a rich resource for academics and researchers.

Beyond Metropolis builds on studies conducted during the 1990s under the Centre for Human Settlements at the University of British Columbia.

Over the past thirty years, transnational investment, trade, and government policies have encouraged the decentralization of national economies, disrupting traditional patterns of urban and regional growth. Many smaller cities -- such as Seattle, Washington; Campinas, Brazil; Oita, Japan; and Kumi, Korea -- have grown markedly faster than the largest metropolises. Dubbed here "second tier cities, " they are home to specialized industrial complexes that have taken root, provided significant job growth, and attracted mobile capital and labor. The culmination of an ambitious five-year, fourteen-city research project conducted by an international team of economics and geographers, Second Tier Cities examines the potential of these new regions to balance uneven regional development, create good, stable jobs, and moderate hyper-urbanization. Comparing across national borders, the contributors describe four types of second tier cities: Marshallian industrial districts, hub-and-spoke cities, satellite platforms, and government-anchored complexes. They find that both industrial and regional policies have been important contributors to the rise of second tier cities, though the former often trump the latter. Lessons for local, national, and international policymakers are drawn. The authors are critical of devolution and argue that it must be accompanied by strong labor and environmental standards and mechanisms to overcome differential regional resource endowments.

This book gives insights on youth, masculinity and place by exploring spatially marginalized masculinities in stigmatized and romanticized out-of-the-way places in 'developed' Western countries. It shows the impact of globalization on place and identity through global ethnographic studies and media representations of young men in peripheral places.

A polemical history of municipal socialism in London - and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. A polemical history of municipal socialism in London -- and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. London is conventionally seen as merely a combination of the financial centre in the City and the centre of governmental power in Westminster, a uniquely capitalist capital city. This book is about the third London - a social democratic twentieth-century metropolis, a pioneer in council housing, public enterprise, socialist design, radical local democracy and multiculturalism. This book charts the development of this municipal power base under leaders from Herbert Morrison to Ken Livingstone, and its destruction in 1986, leaving a gap which has been only very inadequately filled by the Greater London Authority under Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan. Opposing currently fashionable bullshit about an imaginary "metropolitan elite", this book makes a case for London pride on the left, and makes an argument for using that pride as a weapon against a government of suburban landlords that ruthlessly exploits Londoners.