Remaking Birmingham: The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration

by Liam Kennedy (Editor)

Overview

The city of Birmingham offers a particularly rich case study on urban regeneration as it strives to build a new city image. Positioned between decline and regeneration, the landscape of the city and its environs collages old and new, producing dramatic contrasts - of industrial and post-industrial urbanisms of crumbling brutalism and spectacular flagship developments, of Victorian housing and diverse cultural lifestyles - that compound the aesthetic and socio-economic means of regeneration. This visually exciting book also reflects upon and extends current debates about public space, cultural zoning and the futures of cities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134442577
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	172
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Liam Kennedy is Head of Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on American Urbanism, comparative urbanism, representations of the city in film and photography. His research and publications have been in the fields of urban studies and visual culture, including monographs (Susan Sontag, Race and Urban Space in American Culture); edited books (Urban Space and Representation, City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago [2000]), plus many articles on urban culture and representation.

Table of Contents

Part I: Concrete Dreams 1. Street, Subway and Mall: Spatial Politics in the Bull Ring2. Shopping for the Future: The Re-Enchantment of Birmingham's Urban Space 3. Developing an Aesthetic for Birmingham4. Making the Ordinary Extraordinary5. Acts of Madness - An Interview Part II: Interventions6. Making Mansions7. Public Art, Civic Identity and the New Birmingham8. Off-Site 9. Intervening in Birmingham, Reinventing Ourselves 10. Merge Part III: Imagineering Birmingham 11. Birmingham, Photography and Change 12. Take Me Higher: Birmingham and Cinema13. The Altered Eye: The European Capital of Culture Bid and Visual Images of Birmingham14. Without Borders 15. Into the New, New, Old City.