Captured by the City

Book excerpt: Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies is a collection of eighteen essays on urban places, people, and phenomena. In it, cities in North America, Europe, and Asia offer themselves as dynamic encounters to those who study them and to those who live in them on a daily basis. Different disciplines-Sociology, Anthropology, Performance Studies, Architectural History, Linguistics, Media Studies, Documentary Poetics, to name just a few-intersect here to help shape a unique field of inquiry-that of Urban Culture Studies. This multi-perspectival approach grants us a more wholesome understanding of how we inscribe cities and how cities inscribe us in return: as we plan, inhabit, remember them-in reality or in dreams.