Cities, Citizens, and Technologies Urban Life and Postmodernity [Hardcover]

This book is about the contemporary city and those who live in it. It is thus also about the urban world of the era (extending roughly from the 1960s to the present) that we see as postmodern, and specifically about how the postmodern city is changing under the impact of globalization and new information and communication technologies. In particular, Geyh explores how the urban spaces of postmodernity (parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks) and postmodern urban subjectivities and communities respond to and create each other  how they become mutually constructing. While there is much in this book about what makes a city postmodern, its primary focus is on how the postmodern city is experienced by its inhabitants, and in this respect the book is also a study of everyday life in the postmodern era. As such, it deals not only with the ways in which the postmodern city has developed out of economic, technological, political, and cultural structures that are different from those of the modern city, but also with how the postmodern city changes our ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves as postmodern urban subjects, as citizens of postmodernity.

Introduction  1. Legible Cities: Urban Spaces and Subjects  2. Urban Grids and Urban Imaginary: City to Cyberspace, Cyberspace to City  3. The City of Control and the Polis  4. City Moves: Urban Spaces and Motion  5. Global Cities and Citizens

Paula Geyh is an associate professor of English at Yeshiva University and a co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.