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Urban Awakenings

Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City

Samuel Alexander author Brendan Gleeson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Springer Verlag, Singapore

Published:22nd Nov '20

Should be back in stock very soon

Urban Awakenings cover

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.

ISBN: 9789811578601

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

255 pages

1st ed. 2020