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The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities Professor Alison L. Bain (York University, Ontario)

The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities By Professor Alison L. Bain (York University, Ontario)

The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities by Professor Alison L. Bain (York University, Ontario)


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Summary

This collection of essays offers a fresh perspective on infrastructure, inviting readers to (re)consider the ways that culture is produced and expressed within cities by examining the geographies of its spaces, venues, performances and embodiments.

The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities Summary

The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities by Professor Alison L. Bain (York University, Ontario)

Cities are synonymous with the production and consumption of culture. It is their material and human cultural infrastructure that also makes them archives and works of art. The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities critically re-examines the relationship between the urban and its cultures. It expands our understanding of the concept of urban cultural infrastructure and highlights the foundational role of culture to the materiality and sociality of urban life and the governance of cities.

The book begins with a theoretical overview of the cultural and infrastructural turns in urban studies scholarship. It then explores definitions of cultural infrastructure and its hard and soft dimensions before critically considering the vulnerabilities generated in the cultural sector by the Covid-19 pandemic. Chapters are organised in four thematic sections focusing on aspects of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, which feature detailed case studies from 17 cities across the global North and South.

This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of urban studies, but also to policy-makers planning and creating cultural infrastructures as well as those working in cultural institutions and creative industries.

The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities Reviews

Examining the diverse forms of infrastructure that facilitate cultural practice and make cities distinctive, this interdisciplinary collection eschews currently dominant but limited explanations of cultural infrastructure grounded in economics and the creative industries by introducing broader insights from across the arts and social sciences. In so doing, it provides policymakers, researchers, and students alike with wide-ranging opportunities to engage with fresh perspectives and to probe the complexities of urban cultural infrastructure as it is lived, made and governed.

-- Deborah Stevenson, Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research, Western Sydney University

What does it mean to look at the culture of cities through an infrastructure lens? This book's perspective is a powerful antidote against the instrumentalisation of culture to power urban economies and markets. The book maps a landscape of cultural production in cities making visible the complex and often contingent arrangements that make urban cultures alongside the many ways in which spaces of cultural production are reinvented and appropriated. Short, illuminating section introductions and four illustrations of architectural inspiration from Chan Arun-Pina bring together a carefully curated collection of essays. Cultural infrastructures become dynamic, changing, performed, alive. The deliberate engagement with the challenges of cultural production through the pandemic and in the post-pandemic period reemphasises the ever-changing language of cultural production. This book will appeal to artists, performers, curators, planners, entrepreneurs, infrastructure managers, and students and scholars of urban cultures, to look at their city anew and recognise urban culture in-the-making, full of hope and potentiality.

-- Vanesa Castan Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism, University of Sheffield

About Professor Alison L. Bain (York University, Ontario)

Alison L. Bain is Professor of Geography in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Ontario. She is co-editor of Urbanization in a Global Context (second edition 2022) and author of Creative Margins: Cultural Production in Canadian Suburbs (2013).

Julie A. Podmore is Affiliate Assistant Professor in Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal and Professor in Geosciences at John Abbott College, Montreal. She is the coeditor of Lesbian Feminism: Essays Opposing Global Heteropatriarchies (2019).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: configuring urban cultural infrastructure
Alison Bain and Julie Podmore

Part I: Producing culture
2. Clustering cultural infrastructure in districts
Alison Bain

3. The relational infrastructure of Open Creative Labs
Suntje Schmidt

4. Affordable studio space as cultural infrastructure: land trusts and the future of creative cities
Rhian Scott, Luke Dickens and Phil Hubbard

Part II: Performing culture
5. The infrastructural politics of post-pandemic theatrical performance
Megan A. Johnson and Marlis Schweitzer

6. The performative contingency of cultural infrastructure
Jessie Stein

7. Embodying cultural infrastructure in Carnival
Martha Radice

8. Youthful city-making through peripheral cultural infrastructure
Antonio Moya-Latorre

Part III: Consuming culture
9. Hawker culture and its infrastructure: experiences and contestations in everyday life
Lily Kong and Aidan Wong

10. Aestheticizing hipster retail infrastructure: from Neapolitan to cosmopolitan
Bryan Mark

11. Crafting alternative urban fashion infrastructure in a digital and pandemic age
Taylor Brydges, Deborah Leslie and Norma Rantisi

12. Embodying arts festivals as infrastructural transformation of places
Bernadette Quinn

Part IV: Collecting culture
13. Infrastructuring museums
Friederike Landau-Donnelly

14. Becoming socio-cultural infrastructure: librarizing practices in public libraries
Rianne van Melik

15. Queer counter-topographies: LGBTQ+ community archives as urban cultural infrastructure
Julie Podmore

16. Conclusion: Reconfiguring urban cultural infrastructure
Alison Bain, Julie Podmore and Chan Arun-Pina

Additional information

NGR9781788214926
9781788214926
1788214927
The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities by Professor Alison L. Bain (York University, Ontario)
New
Paperback
Agenda Publishing
2023-08-07
304
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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