Book description
Global Downtowns reconsiders one of the defining features of
urban life-the energy and exuberance that characterize downtown
areas-within a framework of contemporary globalization and change. It
analyzes the iconic centers of global cities through individual case
studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United
States, considering issues of function, population, imagery, and
growth. Contributors to the volume use ethnographic and cultural
analysis to identify downtowns as products of the activities of
planners, power elites, and consumers and as zones of conflict and
competition. Whether claiming space on a world stage through
architecture, media events, or historical tourism or facing the claims
of different social groups for a place at the center, downtowns embody
the heritage of the modern city and its future.
Essays draw on extensive fieldwork and archival study in
Beijing, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dar es Salaam,
Dubai, Nashville, Lima, Philadelphia, Mumbai, Havana, Beirut, and
Paris, among other cities. They examine the visions of planners and
developers, cultural producers, governments, theoreticians,
immigrants, and outcasts. Through these perspectives, the book
explores questions of space and place, consumption, mediation, and
images as well as the processes by which urban elites learn from each
other as well as contest local hegemony.
Global Downtowns raises important questions for those who work
with issues of urban centrality in governance, planning, investment,
preservation, and social reform. The volume insists that however
important the narratives of individual spaces-theories of American
downtowns, images of global souks, or diasporic formations of ethnic
enclaves as interconnected nodes-they also must be situated within a
larger, dynamic framework of downtowns as centers of modern urban imagination.
Gary McDonogh is Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College. He
has written and edited many books, most recently Iberian Worlds. Marina
Peterson teaches performance studies at Ohio University and is author of
Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles,
also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
