Killer Cities

Nigel Thrift is a Visiting Professor in Oxford and Tsinghua Universities. He was previously Executive Director of Schwarzman Scholars, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Warwick and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Oxford University.

Chapter 1: An uncommon humanity Part I: Cities Chapter 2: The Urban World Part II: Life Chapter 3: Thinking Animals Chapter 4: Animals Thinking Part III: Death Chapter 5: The Animal City Chapter 6: The City of Surplus Death Chapter 7: Not Meat but Still Dead Chapter 8: But Some Animals Do Adapt to the City Part IV: A New Settlement Chapter 9: Dreaming More Human Cities 1 Chapter 10: Dreaming More Human Cities 2 Chapter 11: There is Another World but It Is This One References

You can't change the world without first seeing it through new lenses. Killer Cities shines a light on the ecocidal underbelly of urban life in a capitalist world. Using animals as a focus, Nigel Thrift advances concepts, arguments and evidence that might inspire us to make a very different urban future. The book is creative and hopeful in the face of formidable forces of mental and practical inertia. -- Noel Castree This epic compendium on the ravages of planetary urbanism from one of geography's most generative thinkers is above all, as the title suggests, a provocation. Whether it inspires or infuriates, it cannot fail to force thought. -- Sarah Whatmore People love cities. New York, Paris, Barcelona, London: These are the places where modern life has thrived. So much so that, by 2050, the United Nations predicts that almost 70 percent of the global population will live in cities. In the process, cities have become selfish places for humans to think only of themselves. In Killer Cities, Nigel Thrift invites us to include a broader menagerie into cities-many of which are already there anyway, but pinned under the boot of humanity. The result is liberatory-for people and creatures of all kinds, but also for cities themselves. -- Ian Bogost Killer Cities documents the long histories of violence done by cities, the killings, displacements and neglect. It also holds out the hope that cities can be reimagined as unfolding sites of experimental cohabitation. Thrift draws from a vast range of sources, celebrating those who recognize the multiple knots of obligation that human beings have to each other, to other-than-human beings and to the planet itself. It is a book for our time, as pandemics, climate change and the anthropocene increasingly unsettle the category of the human. -- Penny Harvey The breath-taking thesis of this book is that the re-cognition of cities and the future of humanity requires not only thinking about but with animals. To use a term the book itself employs, this is social theory as enjambment. In Killer Cities, thinking runs on and over - from species to species - without terminal punctuation. -- Celia Lury