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How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a "culture capital" Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture - as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool - are reshaping urban places and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are constantly negotiated in the city's central spaces - the streets, parks, shops, museums, and restaurants - which are the great public spaces of modernity.

While cultural gentrification may contribute to making our cities both safer and more civilised places to live, it has its darker side. Beneath the perceptions of "civility" and "security" nurtured by cultural strategies, Zukin shows an aggressive private-sector bid for control of public space, a relentless drive for expansion by art museums and other non-profit cultural institutions, and an increasing redesign of the built environment for the purposes of social control.

Tying these developments to a new "symbolic economy" based on tourism, media and entertainment, Zukin traces the connections between real estate development and popular expression, and between elite visions of the arts and more democratic representations. Going beyond the immigrants, artists, street peddlers, and security guards who are the key figures in the symbolic economy, Zukin asks: Who really occupies the central spaces of cities? And whose culture is imposed as public culture?

Combining cultural critique, interviews, autobiography and ethnography, The Culture of Cities is a compelling account of the public spaces of modernity as they are transformed into new, more troubling landscapes.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• 1 Whose Culture? Whose City?
• 2 Learning From Disney World
• 3 A Museum In The Bershires.with
• 4 High Culture and Wild Commerce in New York City
• 5 Artists And Immigrants In New York City Restaurants with
• 6 While The City Shops
• 7 The Mystique Of Public Culture
• References
• Index

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CHOICE Review

These interconnected essays, journalistic and autobiographical in tone, discuss diverse cultural processes now transforming contemporary metropoles and their public spaces. Despite the broad title, "city" refers primarily to the experience of Manhattan and other boroughs of New York City in the 1990s, with side expeditions to Disneyland (which Zukin examined in her Landscapes of Power, CH, Mar'92), the attempted Guggenheim museum extension in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the author's childhood memories of North Philadelphia (juxtaposed with her reading of memoirs of Walter Benjamin and others). "Cultures" are taken as material commodities in a uniquely urbane and complex symbolic economy discussed through observations of everyday experiences of tourism, entertainment, architecture, parks, art spaces, restaurants, and shopping, all copiously illustrated. Immigrants and disfranchised people appear as features of this diversity, although their own experiences and values of city life are scarcely developed. Instead, the infringements of corporate power and state manipulation more generally take center stage in the author's visions of contemporary urban problems. The whole is deeply embedded in discourses of space and power associated with Mike Davis and Michael Sorkin, developing themes of Zukin's previous works via a more informal voice and method. Upper-division undergraduates and above. G. W. McDonogh; Bryn Mawr College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and Graduate School, City University of New York. She is the author of Loft Living and, most recently, the award-winning Landscapes of Power.