BOOKS: URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Helping Us Understand Our Context

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
Richard Florida
Basic Books; Reprint edition (January, 2004)

In a book that weaves storytelling with a massive amount of research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy. Florida describes today’s society as one in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant and in which millions of people are beginning to work and live as creative types (like artists and scientists) always have. With more than 30 million people comprising this new class, changes are occurring in our values and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of time. The Rise of the Creative Class chronicles the ongoing sea change in people's choices and attitudes, and shows not only what's happening but also how it stems from a fundamental economic change. The “creative class” now comprises more than thirty percent of the entire workforce, and the choices this group makes are having a huge economic impact, and in the future will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither.

The City Cultures Reader
Malcolm Miles (Editor), Tim Hall (Editor), Iain Borden (Editor)
Roultledge; 2nd edition (December, 2003)

The new millennium is marked by the fact that for the first time the majority of human inhabitants of the Earth dwell in cities. Thus, it is an appropriate time to reconsider what cities are and how they are experienced and represented. This reader is a collection of 60 texts on cultural aspects, frameworks and perceptions of cities; topics include city form, city cultures in relation to politics and economics, everyday life, cultural representation, ecology and social justice among others.

Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader
Setha M. Low (Editor)
Rutgers University Press (December, 1999)

From the Back Cover: Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthropology, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Five images of the city—the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city and the postmodern city—serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production of urban spaces.