ENGLISH

Urban Awakenings: Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City

By Brendan Gleeson , Samuel Alexander

Book information

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Year
2021
ISBN
9811578605, 9789811578601
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
10 MB (10973849 bytes)
Pages
255\246
Time added
2020-11-22 01:03:38

Description

This book presents a series of urban investigations undertaken in the metropolis of Melbourne. It is based on the idea that ‘enchantment’ as an affective state is important to ethical and political engagement. Alexander and Gleeson argue that a sense of enchantment can give people the impulse to care and engage in an increasingly troubled world, whereas disenchantment can lead to resignation. Applying and extending this theory to the urban landscape, the authors walk their home city with eyes open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing the industrial city in different ways. This unique methodology, described as ‘urban tramping’, positions the authors as freethinking freewalkers of the city, encumbered only with the duty to look through the delusions of industrial capitalism towards its troubled, contradictory soul. These urban investigations were disrupted midway by COVID-19, a plague that ended up confirming the book’s central thesis of a fractured modernity vulnerable to various internal contradictions.

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