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Other Cities, Other Worlds brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities. The contributors focus on urban imaginaries, the ways that city dwellers perceive or imagine their own cities. Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of urban life, they bring to their essays deep knowledge of the cities they are bound to in their lives and their work. Taken together, these essays allow us to compare metropolises from the so-called periphery and gauge processes of cultural globalization, illuminating the complexities at stake as we try to imagine other cities and other worlds under the spell of globalization.
The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul.
Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang
E-Book Content
O t h e r O t h e r
C i t i e s ,
W O r l d s
O t h e r O t h e r
C i t i e s ,
W O r l d s
U r b a n I m a g I n a r I e s I n a g lo b a l I z I n g a g e
e D ite D by an D r eas H Uys s e n
Duke University Press
Durham and London 200 8
© 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Conte nts
vii Acknowledgments
1 Andreas Huyssen
Introduction: World Cultures, World Cities
L at i n A m e r i c a
27 Beatriz Sarlo
Cultural Landscapes: Buenos Aires from Integration to Fracture
51 Teresa P. R. Caldeira
From Modernism to Neoliberalism in São Paulo: Reconfiguring the City and Its Citizens
79 Néstor García Canclini
Mexico City, 2010: Improvising Globalization
Af r ica
99 AbdouMaliq Simone
The Last Shall Be First: African Urbanities and the Larger Urban World
121 Hilton Judin
Unsettling Johannesburg: The Country in the City
147 Okwui Enwezor
Mega-exhibitions: The Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form
As ia
181 Gyan Prakash
Mumbai: The Modern City in Ruins
205 Rahul Mehrotra
Negotiating the Static and Kinetic Cities: The Emergent Urbanism of Mumbai
219 Yingjin Zhang
Remapping Beijing: Polylocality, Globaliza