Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds - Paperback

by Colin McFarlane (Author)

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice. In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world's major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.

Back Jacket

At a moment when a certain style of theoretical performativity has become too commonplace in urban studies, along comes a brilliant gush of fresh air. Fragments of the City is a meticulously crafted and ambitious work that brings great insight to a field distorted by theoretical overreach. Colin McFarlane is a gifted writer and generative thinker. This book successfully unveils a method and sensibility to properly pay attention to all the shards and connections hiding in plain sight.--Edgar Pieterse, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town

"Colin McFarlane challenges the projected coherence of much city visioning by fossicking through cities and urban experiences often cast to the margins. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, he trades systematic evidence for illuminating impressions, sustained argument for surgically sharp critique. The whole is the sum of its parts. Read these fragments as you need, when you will, in any order: use them not as a road map of urbanism today, but as inspirational tools for making different urban futures."--Jane M. Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

"This book by one of the most original urban scholars of his generation invites us to think with the 'fragment' to productively engage with contemporary urban theory. Richly layered and generous in its propositions, it shows us what an innovative grammar for grasping the complexity of our city worlds could look like."--Filip De Boeck, Department of Anthropology, University of Leuven

"Fragments of the City is a richly evocative book that attends to the urgency of rampaging inequalities and relegations of people and places. Colin McFarlane crafts a vital experiment, working with a composition of fragments to suggest alternative forms for researching, writing, and imagining life in the urban margins."--Suzanne Hall, author of The Migrant's Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain

"In a book that manages to both dance among the bountiful and frayed strands of contemporary urban thinking and pick up the pieces of what's left of battered, emergent, and intensely contested urban worlds, Colin McFarlane--ever urbanism's preeminent bricoleur--shows that circulating among us are manifold propositions. They are continuously throwing matters off guard, darting in and out of shifting arrangements, pressing to be accompanied, and for better or worse, reassuring us that to inhabit the urban means not having to always live with the way things are. Not only does the book call upon us to pay attention to how we engage urbanities through blueprints and sheer life, but it provides an entire compendium of fragments through which artists, activists, academics, and, indeed, all of us, might gather anew."--AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow, the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield

Author Biography

Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University, UK. His work focuses on the experience and politics of urban life. He is author of Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage.