The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City

Description

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, Reinhold Martin 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.

Reinhold Martin is professor of architecture at Columbia University. He cofounded the journal Grey Room and is author of Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010).

"Reinhold Martin's work productively connects debates on architectural culture to fundamental questions related to the political economy of city-building, urbanism, and urbanization. His ideas are at once philosophically grounded, historically nuanced, spatially attuned, and political."-Neil Brenner, Harvard University "The Urban Apparatus offers a brilliant meditation on the new realities and experiences of the city in a fluid and rapidly changing global situation. Reinhold Martin explores an extraordinarily diverse set of objects in ways that are illuminating, original, and often deeply moving-all of which take on special urgency in our current national and geo-political climates."-Phillip E. Wegner, University of Florida