Cities of Difference [Paperback]

How can contemporary theories of difference enhance our understanding of traditional urban studies concerns such as housing, labor markets, and structures of state entitlement? What are the connections between urban space and identity politics? This provocative text provides fresh perspectives on the fragmented city within a cultural political economy framework. Contributors explore the role of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, able-bodiedness, and other axes of difference in the geography of postmodern cities. Using a range of cutting-edge theoretical and methodological approaches, the book probes the relationship of the broader realities of urban life--economic polarization, gentrification, and the proliferation of sites of consumption to the everyday life and political power of different communities.

This exciting and important book takes a critical approach to the concept of difference, examining its role in the constitution of urban life and the structuring of urban space. Informed by recent developments in feminism and postcolonial theory, the book illustrates the complexity of contemporary identity politics, encompassing issues of homelessness, disability, youth, aboriginality, single parents, and people with AIDS besides the more familiar differences associated with gender and sexuality, race, and class. In exploring questions of representation, signification and performativity, the book insists on grounding these processes in the material world. Drawing on a wide range of empirical work, the authors demonstrate how struggles over identity and difference are always locally articulated. Going beyond the mapping of difference, the book explores the social and spatial constitution of difference in processes of embodiment, aestheticization, and commodification. In place of shrill readings of globalization or postmodernity,Cities of Differenceprovides a carefully nuanced cultural politics of the city, decentering, destabill3!