City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another

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Quill R Kukla (Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University)

City Living

How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another

Quill R Kukla (Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
24 February 2022

Social & political philosophy; Cultural studies; Rural communities; Perception; Geography

City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense civil unrest. During such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective.

Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

By: Quill R Kukla (Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 163mm, Width: 237mm, Spine: 29mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780190855369
ISBN 10: 0190855363
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 24 February 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface Guide for Readers Chapter 1: Inhabiting Space Chapter 2: Urban Space and City Living Chapter 3: Living with Gentrification Chapter 4: Introduction to Repurposed Cities Chapter 5: The Repurposed City of Berlin Chapter 6: The Repurposed City of Johannesburg

Quill R Kukla is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, as well as a Humboldt Scholar at Leibniz Universität Hannover. They are completing a Master's Degree in Urban and Regional Planning at Georgetown University. Their previous books include Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mother's Bodies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and, with Mark Lance, 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard University Press, 2009). They are also a competitive amateur boxer and powerlifter.

Reviews for City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another

City Living is an ambitious book that engages the reader through a phenomenological account of how people living amongst, engaging with, and navigating each other shape urban spaces, and how all that lively embodied and emplaced activity turns around to shape them. We inhabit spaces but those spaces inhabit us. Kukla's analysis gracefully weaves theories of territory and place-making, confronts the challenges of urban gentrification to deliver vital lessons about identity and disruption, all the while taking the reader on philosophical passages through Washington D.C., Berlin, and Johannesburg to face the social-spatial dynamics of how 'city dwellers make and are made by territories.' The journey concludes with an innovative view of what the 'right to the city' means. For Kukla, the expression of this aspirational right goes beyond claims to housing by extending to the right to live one's life and to shape the cities that shape us. -- Ronald R. Sundstrom, University of San Francisco Quill R Kukla's City Living opens exciting new terrain for philosophical exploration, building multi-faceted intersections among social ontology, embodied cognition, social and political philosophy, geography, and philosophy of biology. Looking ahead to disruptions from climate change, economic stratification and dislocation, and new patterns of migration, Kukla's nuanced studies of gentrification and the re-purposing of Berlin after the Wall and Johannesburg after apartheid will be invaluable guides and goads to ongoing transformation of urban spaces and ways of life. -- Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University This book consists of unmatched ethnographic writing produced through a philosopher's effort to open horizons of geographic knowledge and turn them into superb scholarship on repurposed cities. This original and mesmerizing take on Berlin and Johannesburg explains how their urban space, organized around a defunct social order (the authoritarian state and apartheid), is being used by their residents in new ways. Based on visits to numerous sites in both cities and interviews with residents and community leaders as well as through observation, photographs, and at times participant observation, Dr. Kukla imaginatively takes us to the streets while skillfully narrating how repurposed urban spaces and their inhabitants shape one another. -- Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College