Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories

The city has always been a locus of research and discussion within the debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. This volume brings together some of the most recent and exciting work on the city from within sociology and cultural studies. Scripts, Sign's and Memoriesis organized around four major themes: urban theory; ethnic diversity and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the image of the city in film, literature and the media. In each section the contributors explore ideas of past and present within the imagined space of the city. The final section, on the virtual city, pushes this to its logical conclusion in a lively discussion of the city of the future as we begin to imagine it now through the dystopia of cyberpunk and the imagined utopia of the community of the internet.