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The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities

By: Alison L. Bain (Editor), Julie A. Podmore (Editor)

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Paperback | 7 August 2023

At a Glance

Paperback
304 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 16 x 3

Paperback

$100.75

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Cities are synonymous with the production and consumption of culture. It is their material and human cultural infrastructure that also makes them archives and works of art. The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities critically re-examines the relationship between the urban and its cultures. It expands our understanding of the concept of urban cultural infrastructure and highlights the foundational role of culture to the materiality and sociality of urban life and the governance of cities.

The book begins with a theoretical overview of the cultural and infrastructural turns in urban studies scholarship. It then explores definitions of cultural infrastructure and its “hard” and “soft” dimensions before critically considering the vulnerabilities generated in the cultural sector by the Covid-19 pandemic. Chapters are organised in four thematic sections focusing on aspects of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, which feature detailed case studies from 17 cities across the global North and South.

This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of urban studies, but also to policy-makers planning and creating cultural infrastructures as well as those working in cultural institutions and creative industries.

About the Editors

Alison L. Bain is Professor of Geography in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Ontario. She is co-editor of Urbanization in a Global Context (second edition 2022) and author of Creative Margins: Cultural Production in Canadian Suburbs (2013).

Julie A. Podmore is Affiliate Assistant Professor in Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal and Professor in Geosciences at John Abbott College, Montreal. She is the coeditor of Lesbian Feminism: Essays Opposing Global Heteropatriarchies (2019).

Industry Reviews

Examining the diverse forms of infrastructure that facilitate cultural practice and make cities distinctive, this interdisciplinary collection eschews currently dominant but limited explanations of cultural infrastructure grounded in economics and the creative industries by introducing broader insights from across the arts and social sciences. In so doing, it provides policymakers, researchers, and students alike with wide-ranging opportunities to engage with fresh perspectives and to probe the complexities of urban cultural infrastructure as it is lived, made and governed.

-- Deborah Stevenson, Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research, Western Sydney University

What does it mean to look at the culture of cities through an infrastructure lens? This book's perspective is a powerful antidote against the instrumentalisation of culture to power urban economies and markets. The book maps a landscape of cultural production in cities making visible the complex and often contingent arrangements that make urban cultures alongside the many ways in which spaces of cultural production are reinvented and appropriated. Short, illuminating section introductions and four illustrations of architectural inspiration from Chan Arun-Pina bring together a carefully curated collection of essays. Cultural infrastructures become dynamic, changing, performed, alive. The deliberate engagement with the challenges of cultural production through the pandemic and in the post-pandemic period reemphasises the ever-changing language of cultural production. This book will appeal to artists, performers, curators, planners, entrepreneurs, infrastructure managers, and students and scholars of urban cultures, to look at their city anew and recognise urban culture in-the-making, full of hope and potentiality.

-- Vanesa Castan Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism, University of Sheffield

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