Urban Worlds

We live in an era of techno-monopoly power in which technocapitalism - through ubiquitous digital platforms - has colonized both the internet and key aspects of our everyday lives. Cities and larger urban and metropolitan environments have provided a fertile ground for the rise and rapid growth of this power. In The Urban Field, Moisio and Rossi reveal an urban monopoly capitalism supported by the "corporatized state". They critically examine the relationship between capital and the state, and the generation of an urban governmentality centred on the economization of knowledge and technology in four key sites: labour, human capital, startups and forms of life. Moisio and Rossi contend that, ultimately, the urban field is a constitutively political construct that can be enacted in a different way, no longer as a value-extraction machine but as a collective endeavour aiming at redefining established modes of economic value creation.

Cities are synonymous with the production and consumption of culture. It is their material and human cultural infrastructure that also makes them archives and works of art. The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities critically re-examines the relationship between the urban and its cultures. It expands our understanding of the concept of urban cultural infrastructure and highlights the foundational role of culture to the materiality and sociality of urban life and the governance of cities. The book begins with a theoretical overview of the cultural and infrastructural turns in urban studies scholarship. It then explores definitions of cultural infrastructure and its "hard" and "soft" dimensions before critically considering the vulnerabilities generated in the cultural sector by the Covid-19 pandemic. Chapters are organised in four thematic sections focusing on aspects of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, which feature detailed case studies from 17 cities across the global North and South. This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of urban studies, but also to policy-makers planning and creating cultural infrastructures as well as those working in cultural institutions and creative industries.