'Race', Culture and the Right to the City - by Gareth Millington (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Adopting a perspective inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this book considers the spread of multiculture from the central city to the periphery and considers the role that 'race' continues to play in structuring the metropolis, taking London, New York and Paris as examples.

Review Quotes

'Gareth Millington brings a desperately needed international perspective to American concepts of 'race' in urban sociology. Comparing New York, London, and Paris, he argues that the inner city has been replaced by the 'outer-inner city.' Still a zone of racial stigma and economic exploitation, the outer-inner city replaces industrial jobs with a casual workforce, the flâneur with the migrant, black/white dichotomies with intense immigrant diversity, racial tension with anti-immigrant xenophobia. The edge of the twenty-first century city presents its residents with pernicious new problems. 'Race' identifies those problems and the possibility of building a more just city from the periphery inward.'

- Gregory Smithsimon, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA and author of September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero

'A valuable and inviting geohistorical exploration of our new urban landscapes of exclusion and diversity. Millington is an insightful and original guide to the sociological past and present of the ''multicultural'' city.'

- Alastair Bonnett, Professor of Social Geography, Newcastle University, UK

'This is a very engaging socio-cultural history of London, Paris and New York. It provides a fresh and enriching gaze on the way racialised urban space is transformed in each of those cities. It is important reading for all those who want to know something about thevery latest in urban and spatial theory, but it is perhaps even more important for those who want to see it deployed in a very meaningful way in particular empirical settings.'

- Ghassan Hage, Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, University of Melbourne, Australia

'In analysing the past and present of London, Paris and New York, 'Race', Culture and the Right to the City weaves together a coherent set of narratives about the city and it's suburban marginalia that is both empirically insightful and theoretically adroit. It represents a significant contribution to contemporary urban scholarship.'

- Paul Watt, Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

'From New York to Paris, via London, Millington takes the reader on a journey through the cities' classed and racialised histories. The focus on contemporary 'outer-inner cities'; Southend, La Corneuve and Long Island, demonstrates the jagged, fragmentary, sometimes transcendent but often grindingly oppressive systems of urban life in which the past emerges in the present: not as a 'spectre' but as intrinsic to the type of spaces that people and processes produce.'

- Steve Garner, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Aston University, UK

About the Author

GARETH MILLINGTON is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Roehampton University, London, UK.