Shaking Up the City - by Tom Slater

About the Book

"Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of abstract theory and concrete empirical evidence, Tom Slater strives to 'shake up' mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion, turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. In doing so, he explores the themes of 'data-driven innovation', urban 'resilience', gentrification, displacement and rent control, 'neighborhood effects', territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation. Slater analyzes how the mechanisms behind urban inequalities, material deprivation, marginality, and social suffering in cities across the world are perpetuated and made invisible. With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, planning, and public policy, and engaging closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice, Shaking Up The City offers numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of vested interest urbanism"--

Book Synopsis

Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater "shakes up" mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation.

With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.

From the Back Cover

"A powerful, sobering wake-up call that demonstrates how policy-driven approaches to urban research--supported by think tanks, philanthrocapitalists, state elites, and big business--have led urban scholarship down a perilous path for more than three decades. Essential reading for anyone interested in tackling rampant inequality, epistemic violence, and social injustice."--Tanja Winkler, Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Cape Town

"A fierce, unflinching polemic against the extraction and alienation that create both urban injustices and the damaging cultures of orthodoxy so prevalent in urban scholarship today. Tom Slater's incisive analysis demonstrates with sparkling clarity how words make worlds and silence is powerful. This brave book can steel our collective resolve to refuse the subordination of knowledge, and urban life itself, to political and economic profiteering."--Libby Porter, Professor at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University, Melbourne

"A brilliant critique of contemporary urban injustices and a powerful call for a more critically reflexive approach to urban social science. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with superseding mainstream ideologies of urban renewal and developing modes of analysis to facilitate the pursuit of more democratic, equitable urban futures."--Neil Brenner, University of Chicago

"Completes and expands the legacy of what we can consider, now, as classic research in the general field of urban studies."--Virgílio Borges Pereira, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Porto

Review Quotes

"A detailed and very well-written account of several important concepts in critical urban theory."-- "Housing Studies"

"Shaking Up the City sets a new direction of critical urban geography."-- "Antipode"

"Slater offers important insight for urban scholars and practitioners by showing how ideology, politics, and institutional arrangements interact to narrow urban policy choice sets."-- "Journal of the American Planning Association"

"Sitting down with Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question is like pulling up a chair with Tom Slater to talk about the state of play of urban studies. . . .Yet the highlight of this work is the intellectual contribution, which I see as holding the idea of epistemology - that is, the production of knowledge - and the idea of agnotology - that is, the production of ignorance - in tension with each other."

-- "Urban Studies"

"Slater's broad approach and global lens grant this book great potential to help scholars, especially younger ones, to rethink the logic behind research questions and approaches."

-- "Ethnic and Racial Studies"

About the Author

Tom Slater is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.