This work aims to provide readers with an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world, and to overturn many common assumptions about urban structure. Dear's analysis combines concepts of postmodernism, space and the urban to trace the genesis of a postmodern urban condition.
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our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. 5 - Page 208
The altered spaces of postmodernity are evident in many sectors. For instance, in the saturated space of multinational capitalism, place no longer exists except at a “much feebler level,” drowned by other more powerful abstract spaces such as communications networks. The truth of an experience “no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place, - Page 55
of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. - Page 55
This explains how we can celebrate capitalism at the same time as human misery engulfs us. Jameson again points to cognitive mapping as a way of more fully sketching the lineaments of an emergent postmodern politics, enabling “the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of geographic totality. - Page 61
accumulation, and a new round of “time-space compression” in the organization of capitalism. But these changes, when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new post-capitalist or even post-industrial society. - Page 75
as anyone else, but when I am tempted to regret my complicity with it, to deplore its misuses and its notoriety, and to conclude with some reluctance that it raises more problems than it solves, I find myself pausing to wonder whether any other concept can dramatize the issues in quite so effective and economical a - Page 62
Jameson, however, is in no doubt that postmodernism is about politics: every position on postmodernism in culture — whether apologia or stigmatization — is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today. - Page 60
We are at the ending of what is called The Modern Age. Just as Antiquity was followed by several centuries of Oriental ascendancy, which Westerners provincially called The Dark Ages, so now The Modern Age is being succeeded by a post-modern period. - Page 140
postmodernism is: A periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order. - Page 34
This latest mutation in space — postmodern hyperspace — has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and - Page 143
Cover:
+ By Michael J. Dear
+ Published 2000 Blackwell Publishing
+ 337 pages
+ ISBN 0631209883