New Cultural Capitals: Urban Pop Cultures in Focus

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. The modern city, the locus of contemporary popular cultural production, is also the site where marginal if not marginalised individuals and groups invariably coalesce and develop their distinctive practices, representations, and identities in the interstices of established culture. The chapters in this volume explore the urban pop cultural imagination in the modern metropolis in three sections. ‘Visible Cities,’ analyses those visual phenomena in the modern city that attest to the complicating presence of otherwise marginalised agents and spaces. ‘Recreations,’ considers those leisure-time practices that nonetheless demarcate the parameters of resistance and identity for their participants. Finally, ‘Urban Planning,’ examines the ways by which cities are evoked, used, and reconceptualised by the pop cultural imagination. Whether verbal or written, physical or virtual, produced or received by individuals or groups, the representations and practices examined in this volume attest to the dynamic nature of urban popular cultures, a presence that has ultimately transformed the ways by which we understand and appreciate urban existence.