Realising the City: Urban Ethnography in Manchester

Description

What is a city? How does it come into being? Who are the people involved? How are decisions made and what happens next? Realising the city provides multiple insider perspectives on this northern English city. Drawing on extensive fieldwork into the city's football clubs, annual civic parade and Gay Village, airport and infrastructure, parks and housing estates, these ethnographic accounts trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city. This book provides essential reading for researchers interested in contemporary urban dynamics. Its accessible style and material will also interest community activists, city administrators, political analysts and elected officials. The book is suitable for undergraduate reading lists for courses teaching ethnographic methods and on urban studies courses within sociology, anthropology, geography and the built environment. -- .

Camilla Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in Ageing and Urban Studies; Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University Jessica Symons is an Urban Anthropologist at the University of Manchester -- .

The city always reinvents itself. Manchester's contemporary playbook of this script is famously shaped by a new mayoral governance of the city region. But in the shadow of the grand plans, in the interstices of political drivers and economic imperatives, social invention driven by necessity and creativity generates alternative cities. Through vivid ethnographic snapshots that range from the new city commons to the emergent urbanism of the twenty-first century lounge this volume provides unique insights into the new Manchester and a vindication of the ongoing value of contemporary ethnographic scholarship.' Professor Michael Keith is Director of COMPAS, Co-ordinator of Urban Transformations (The ESRC portfolio of investments and research on cities), and Co-Director of the University of Oxford Future of Cities programme