The City A-Z is a unique compendium of specially commissioned pieces of text and illustrations, with contributions from many of the leading names in urban culture, geography and sociology, to introduce students to a novel way of thinking about and understanding cities and urban life. Short entries, arranged alphabetically, capture moments of the city: these pieces evoke the city by drawing on many different kinds of evidence: from poetry to prose, from angry rhetorical writings to eulogies and from rigorous noisy analysis to quiet stories of city life. This unique approach opens the reader up to surprise, to twists of imagination, to new forms of criticism and to new ways of finding ourselves in fragments of the urban. Guides written by the editors outline the conceptual history of the book and the theoretical approaches to the city that inform the thinking behind it as well as how to use it most effectively. The book conveys a sense of the city in the way that it has been put together by placing unlike elements side by side, just as in the city. It provides surprising angles from an outstanding team of contributors on this universally studied topic.
Steve Pile is Lecturer in Social Sciences at The Open University. Nigel Thrift is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bristol.