The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (Posthumanities)

The Urban Apparatus analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. Its main argument is that understanding the city as infrastructure (i.e. hardware in all senses) reveals the category of the urban, and of urbanization, to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly-bound neoliberal regime, rather than an empirical or properly theoretical description of that regime. The “urban” is, in short, an apparatus of power and of knowledge. The book’s detailed theoretical introduction elaborates this thesis. It is followed by ten shorter essays, each of which explores questions related to urban life through specific examples from around the world. "Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today's city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime. Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics--from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular "mediator" (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question "What is a city, today?". The Urban Apparatus serves as an "urban" bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia's Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization" -- Amazon Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Preface Introduction: The Urban Apparatus 1. City, Country, World 2. Financial Imaginaries 3. The Thing about Cities 4. Public and Common(s) 5. Horizons of Thought 6. Polis = Oikos 7. Notes on the Housing Question 8. Broken Windows 9. Beijing in Detroit 10. Infrastructure and Mediapolitics Notes Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z City, Country, World -- Financial Imaginaries -- The Thing About Cities -- Public And Common(s) -- Horizons Of Thought -- Polis = Oikos -- Notes On The Housing Question -- Broken Windows -- Beijing In Detroit -- Infrastructure And Mediapolitics. Reinhold Martin. Portions Previously Published In Various Sources. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 155-177) And Index.