About the Book
Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities’ inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies, political resistance, friction between human and non-human worlds, and the confluence of art, policy, and identity formation in placemaking. With essays by scholars working in a variety of fields—from architecture to literature to music to sociology—this collection maintains that any hope for achieving urban sustainability will require taking seriously the ways in which cities are imagined. Efforts to make cities sustainable must fully incorporate the humanities because critical endeavors and creative expressions that fall within the purview of the humanities are vital to closing the conceptual gulf, as well as the practical gap, between human and non-human conservation. Even if the environmental humanities embrace cities, critics must ask whether coalescing the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘city’ may actually obstruct human action to combat climate change—which, from some angles, seems impending, self-imposed apocalypse.
To examine the urban turn, Sustainability and the City attends to culture. Essays in the first part of the collection approach urban sustainability from various disciplinary vantage points to emphasize history, ideology, pedagogy, and critical theory. The second part of the collection analyzes urban commons on four different continents. Finally, the collection moves from a diverse set of interpretations of on-the-ground urban phenomena to a compilation of readings of sustainability in different media and genres—sound art, drama, fiction, and film—set in, or evocative of, cities. The collection carves out a place for artists and critics to help realize social justice in cities, which generate remarkable power, but power that is too often and too easily used destructively, unfairly, and wastefully despite cities’ unique capacities to inspire and sustain humanity.
Table of Contents:
Lauren Curtright, “Introduction: The Role of the Humanities in Urban Sustainability”
Part I: Conceptualizing Urban Sustainability
Christopher Schliephake, “The Imaginative Fabrics of Urban Sustainability: From Metaphor to Matter and from Management to Culture in Eco(logical) City (Re-)Design”Anirban Adhya and Philip D. Plowright, “Wilderness as City: Conflicting Values in Framing Sustainable Urbanism”Karim Wagih Fawzi Youssef, “Unraveling the Poles of Suburb and City”Iuliu Ratiu, “The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Teaching Writing to (Mostly) Engineering Students in an Urban Setting”Part II: In Situ Sustainable Urbanism
Lea Rekow, “In a Fragile Context: Exploring the Challenges of Informal Sector Urban Gardening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil”Heide Imai, “Back to the City: Creativity and Sustainability as a New Approach to Revive the City from the Inside”Claudia Mantovan, “Coexistence, Conflict, and Governance in Multi-Ethnic Districts: Two Case Studies in the Municipalities of Padua and Venice, Italy”Joseph Donica, “The Erosion of the Cultural Commons and the Possibilities of Participatory Urbanism: Public Art in New Orleans, Detroit, and Port-au-Prince”Part III: Representations of Sustainability and the City
Alexander Kleinschrodt, “The Ambivalence of Noise: Requiem for Fossil Fuels by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger”Lisa FitzGerald, “Urban Ecology: Envisioning and Aestheticizing Modernity in Samuel Beckett’s Not I”Katarzyna Szalewska, “Sustainable Urban Development and Literature: A Central-European View”Mehdi Kochbati, “Exploring the American City’s Environment: Friction between Fluctuating Urban Sustainability, Modern Myths of Space, and Memory Places in the Works of Paul Auster”Caitlin Yocco-Locascio, “Trash That Connects: The Everyday Rhizome of Cédric Klapisch’s Paris”
About the Author :
Lauren Curtright is assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, Perimeter College.
Doris Bremm is area coordinator for culture and literature at the Familienbildungsstätte, Bonn.
Review :
Cities do not arise from the sole will and skill of architects, planners, surveyors, and politicians. They have to be nurtured by their inhabitants. Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics aims at understanding urban sustainability by deciphering the eternal game between what the authorities, whatever their form, try to impose on the social fabric, and what the social fabric impose on the authorities, through deception or force, through confrontation or bargaining. It is a book of great interest to anyone thinking about cities and sustainability.
This fascinating volume thinks through the complexities of environmental issues in urban space. The interdisciplinary breadth and accessibility of its essays is unmatched.
