Chapter One

John Eade and Christopher Mele

The beginning of the twenty-first century is an exciting time for those wanting to understand the city. There is a growing realization that the "cultural turn," through its emphasis on meaning, identity and the politics of difference, for example, provides the cutting edge of urban research. At the same time the cultural turn has contributed to the fragmentation of urban studies and has had little impact on traditional urban investigations. When culturalist analyses of cities have directly engaged with political economy or the older urban ecology approaches, they have usually sought to move beyond those perspectives. Here we resist this tendency and explore the dynamic interplay between the cultural turn and political economy. We want to contribute to closing this gap through explorations of a middle ground where the traditional concerns within urban studies – restructuring, globalization, North/South urbanization, for instance – may intersect with culturalist approaches. In Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives, we aim to provide the first concerted effort at addressing this emergent middle ground.

What, then, does "understanding the city" entail? In our opinion it does not mean a descriptive survey of contemporary epistemological and theoretical approaches to the city. Furthermore, we do not want to place ourselves within a unified body (school or paradigm) of scholarship frozen in a particular moment of time or based exclusively upon a limited range (i.e., Western) of cases. We pr