A Companion to the City

At the start of the new millennium cities are firmly back on the agenda. Cities are the sites of complex global/local interconnections producing a multiplicity of social, cultural, political and economic spaces and forms. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to look at the city from one perspective. A Companion to the City sets out to think about cities in more textured ways and brings together scholars from a range of fields to create a multidisciplinary approach to the city. Academics from disciplines as diverse as film studies and economics, philosophy and geography, turn their attention to the city and generate exciting new ways of thinking. This Companion provides the reader with an indispensable and authoritative overview of the key debates, controversies, and questions concerning the city from a variety of theoretical vantage points with an international perspective. It can be used as as stand-alone text or in conjunction with The Blackwell City Reader (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), compiled by the same editors.

Gary Bridge is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Urban Studies, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, and writes on issues of rationality, time, space and the city.

Sophie Watson is Professor of Sociology at the Open University. Her recent books include Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium (with Peter Murphy, 1997) and Postmodern Cities and Spaces (co-edited with Katherine Gibson, Blackwell, 1995).