Cities Interrupted

Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of 'interruption' in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments. The idea of 'interruption' addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities. Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.

'Cities Interrupted' explores the potential of visual culture - in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media - to strategically interrupt processes of globalisation in contemporary urban spaces. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, it brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of 'interruption' in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments.

Bringing together leading researchers from geography, political science, sociology, public policy and technology studies, Disrupted Cities exposes the politics of well-known disruptions such as devastation of New Orleans in 2005, the global SARS outbreak in 2002-3, and the great power collapse in the North Eastern US in 2003. But the book also excavates the politics of more hidden disruptions: the clogging of city sewers with fat; the day-to-day infrastructural collapses which dominate urban life in much of the global south; the deliberate devastation of urban infrastructure by state militaries; and the ways in which alleged threats of infrastructural disruption have been used to radically reorganize cities as part of the ‘war on terror’. Accessible, topical and state-of-the art, Disrupted Cities will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, security and urban life as we plunge headlong into this quintessentially urban century. The book’s blend of cutting-edge theory with visceral events means that it will be particularly useful for illuminating urban courses within geography, sociology, planning, anthropology, political science, public policy, architecture and technology studies.