Culture of Cities ...Under Construction

The Culture of Cities Project is an international interdisciplinary five-year research project studying the lived experience of place in urban life. This book is like the city itself, a collective effort where each place shows itself at different stages of planning and construction. These essays examine the particularities of the cultures of Montreal, Toronto, Dublin and Berlin and include local uses of cinema and the arts, public space and global economies. Areas of research focus on building and rebuilding, the circulation of objects and artifacts, representations of locality, the arts, and citizenship. The purpose is to sustain the dialogue on the good city and the good of the city that is implicit or a tacit feature of research and commentary on urban life. This collection of papers, The Culture of Cities...under construction, emerges from The Project's first graduate colloquium, held in Toronto in November 2000, and involves participants from the universities of Montreal, Concordia, Quebec at Montreal, McGill, Calgary, Waterloo and York. The Culture of Cities Project is funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as part of their Major Collaborative Initiatives Program. The project director is Alan Blum of York University in Toronto.