Under the laconic title of the book is an attempt to problematise and systematise contemporary urban reflection. What is a city? How to read it, how to watch it, how to experience it? Intuitively, we know the answers, but the author verbalises and organises them, showing at the same time that depending on the perspective adopted, these answers can - and have the right - to be different. She brings the city closer to the everyday, the night-time, the emotional; she looks at its globality from the economic and social side. It shows as a space for the flow of cultural codes.
Describing various aspects of urban space, Stevenson explores the categories of memory, gentrification, displacement, nightlife, inequality and the role of local communities in shaping it.
Stevenson’s work is aimed at both professionals and students working on the city, urban space and urban sociology, as well as amateurs interested in these topics. The publication contains illustrative material, which in the Polish edition has been confronted with images of Polish cities. It is significant that the work of an Australian researcher, originally published in a British publication, corresponds so closely with the processes we can observe in Polish cities.
Deborah Stevenson works at Western Sydney University (Australia). She works in sociology and urban cultural studies, among other fields, and her research focuses on arts and cultural policy, cities and urban life, and place and identity.
