The City: Modernity

Alan Latham is another Professor of Human Geography at University College London. His research focuses on sociality, social infrastructure, and the public life of cities more generally. He's studied those themes in all sorts of places around the world too. In undertaking this work, he's explored a range of research approaches - including the use of photo-diaries, diary-interviews, social contact logs, and video recording and analysis. He's interested in doing whatever works to get as close as possible to the realities of people's experience. Originally from New Zealand, he's also been in London, and UCL, for quite a long time too.

VOLUME ONE: THE MODERN CITY: EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT Part One: Historical Development of Cities and Urbanisation The Urban Revolution - V.G. Childe The Origin and Growth of Urbanization in the World - K. Davis Urbanization and the Economy in Preindustrial Societies: The Findings of Two Decades of Research - P. Bairoch The Talk of the Town: Human Capital, Information, and the Growth of English Cities, 1861 to 1961 - C.J. Simon and C. Nardinelli Part Two: Spatial Science and the Economic Dynamics of Urbanisation City Hierarchies and the Distribution of City Size - M.J. Beckmann Megalopolis: Or the Urbanization of the North Eastern Seaboard - J. Gottman Urbanization and Counterurbanization in the United States - B. Berry Industrialization, Initial Advantage, and American Metropolitan Growth - A. Pred The Valuable Inefficiencies and Impracticalities of Cities - J. Jacobs Part Three: New Economic Accounts of Contemporary Urbanisation On the Number and Location of Cities - P. Krugman Diversity and Specialisation in Cities: Why, Where and When Does It Matter? - G. Duranton and D. Puga Consumer City - E.L. Glaeser, J. Kolko and A. Saiz Knowledge Networks as Channels and Conduits: The Effects of Spillovers in the Boston Biotechnology Community - J. Owen-Smith and W.W. Powell Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy - M. Storper and A.J. Venables VOLUME TWO: PLANNING, GOVERNING AND DESIGNING THE MODERN CITY Part One: Planning the Modern City: Infrastructure, Populations and Biopolitics Constructing a City: The Cerda Plan for the Extension of Barcelona - E. Aibar and W.E. Bijker Technology and the City - J.W. Konvitz, M.H. Rose and J.A. Tarr City Building - S. Collier Maps, Blood and the City - P. Joyce The 'Swinish Multitude': Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City - C. McNeur Part Two: Critiquing Modern Planning The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique - J.C. Scott Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880-1990 - E. Swyngedouw The Bacteriological City and Its Discontents - M. Gandy Part Three: Planning, Architecture and Order American Suburbs/English Suburbs: A Transatlantic Comparison - R. Fishman Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance - M. Valverde A Geography of Big Things - J.M. Jacobs Part Four: New Directions in Urban Planning and Governance Bringing Power to Planning Research One Researcher's Praxis Story - B. Flyvbjerg Close Encounters with Buildings - J. Gehl, L.J. Kaefer and S. Reigstad New Directions in Planning Theory - S.S. Fainstein VOLUME THREE: CONSUMPTION, POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE IN THE MODERN CITY Part One: The Emergence of Popular Urban Culture Take It to the Streets - M. Berman Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London - P. Burke The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering - S. Buck-Morss Modernity, Urbanism, and Modern Consumption - P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift Part Two: The Birth of Mass Communication and the Urban Crowd Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces - S. Kracauer and T.Y. Levin Museums and Mass Spectacle: The Musee Grevin as a Monument to Modern Life - V.R. Schwartz Nightlife - W. Schivelbusch Part Three: Urban Leisure, Fashion, and Consumption Middle-Class Parks and Working-Class Play: The Struggle over Recreational Space in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1870-1910 - R. Rosenzweig 'The Women of New York': A Fashionable Moral Geography - M. Domosh 'The Halls of Temptation': Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late-Victorian London - E. Rappaport Part Four: Department Store, Shopping Malls and New Consumption Spaces Is There an Urban History of Consumption? - L. Cohen Cityscapes: Consumption, Masculinities and the Mapping of London since 1950 - F. Mort Once-upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America - J. Goss Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and the Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt - M. Abaza VOLUME FOUR: MODERNITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE CITY Part One: The Street, Crowd, and the Urban Gaze Agoraphobia: Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer - A. Vidler Mapping the Self: Gender, Space, and Modernity in Mid-Victorian London - L. Nead The World as Exhibition - T. Mitchell Part Two: Literature and the Urban Imagination The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity - J. Wolff Vagabond in the Fugitive City: Hans Ostwald, Imperial Berlin and the Grossstadt-Dokumente - P. Fritzsche Writing the Asphalt Jungle: Berlin and the Performance of Classical Modernity 1900-33 - A. Vasudevan Part Three: Cinema, Movement, Technology Picturing American Modernity - K. Whissel Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s - M.C. Boyer Urban Mobility and Cinematic Visuality: The Screens of Los Angeles-Endless Cinema or Private Telematics - A. Friedberg Part Four: Maps, Memory, Imaginaries Imagining the Modern City - J. Donald The Power of Place: "Claiming Urban Landscapes as People's History" - D. Hayden Part Five: Utopias A Lineal City in the Pampas: Politics, Materialization and Revolution in Wladimiro Acosta's Vision for Buenos Aires - L. Minuhin Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre, Utopia and the Urban Question - D. Pinder