Böcker av Frans-Willem Korsten

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between humanities and urban studies. It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making.Focusing on urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 global cities, the book shows that urban environments are thematized in literature and art, but are also entities that are shaped, perceived, interpreted, and experienced through sense-making techniques that have long been central to the humanities. These techniques activate a dialectic between urban imaginations and cancellations because tropes, media, and genres are aesthetically and politically powerful: they propel imaginations and open up multiplicities of urban possibilities, they naturalize actualized orders and cancel alternatives. This book moves between close readings of city spaces and more systemic and infrastructural approaches to urban environments, providing tools and strategies that can be adapted and extended to understand urban complexity in different cultural and historical contexts. The book speaks to global audiences from a continental philosophical tradition. It is aimed for scholars and researchers in the field of the Humanities, Social Sciences, Urban Studies, urban complexity, aesthetics, and politics. It is relevant to graduate or postgraduate students in critical urban studies, urban design, comparative literature, art history, cultural studies, cultural analysis, ecocriticism, citizenship, political theory, and ethics.

The common saying is that people have a culture. This book argues that people live a culture ‿ which may explain why they are so affectively attached to it. By considering cultural interactions on a global scale, this book investigates how cultures can be understood in terms of conflict and cooperation, in relation to the nation-state, a multiplicity of worlds, society, civilization and community. It considers how culture is at the basis of the construction of individual and collective selves; how they can come to be alienated; are defined in relation to others; are perhaps in-comparable; when they are considered to be dis-abled; and whether we can speak of animal cultural selves and mechanical cultural selves. Its twelve chapters consists of two parts each that both start with a piece of music. The pieces are taken from different cultures and all connote that getting to understand cultures depends on listening, first and foremost.

This study offers a new and systematic approach towards the interactions among the notions of theatricality, dramatisation, moment, and event.