Andy Jonas, Eugene McCann, and Society and Space editor Mary Thomas have written a fantastic introductory text on Urban Geography. The eBook version is out now, with paperback and hardback versions to follow shortly. From the publisher’s website:
An excellent textbook for urban geography courses: accessible, comprehensive and stimulating. For the student who wants to know how and why cities continue to matter, Andrew Jonas, Eugene McCann and Mary Thomas have produced a pedagogic tour-de-force.
Kevin Ward, University of ManchesterAn excellent and comprehensive introduction to cities’ uneven geographies and the diverse processes and experiences that co-produce them. Each of its empirically rich and theoretically rigorous chapters will engage, excite and extend students, while giving them a solid grounding.
Pauline McGuirk, Director, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Newcastle, Australia
At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the significance of rubble encompasses lost cities, derelict train stations, overgrown Jesuit missions and Spanish forts, stranded steamships, mass graves, and razed forests. Examining the effects of these and other forms of debris on the people living on nearby ranches and farms, and in towns, Gordillo emphasizes that for the rural poor, the rubble left in the wake of capitalist and imperialist endeavors is not romanticized ruin but the material manifestation of the violence and dislocation that created it.
