The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Thinking Cities from the Ground / Ash Amin and Michele Lancione  1
1. Social Junk / Natalie Oswin  27
2. Grammars of Dispossession: Racial Banishment in the American Metropolis / Ananya Roy  41
3. Future Densities: Knowledge, Politics, and Remaking the City / Colin McFarlane  58
4. Big: Rethinking the Cultural Imprint of Mass Urbanization / Nigel Thrift  82
5. Urban Legal Forms and Practices of Citizenship / Mariana Valverde  108
6. Transitoriness: Emergent Time/Space Formations of Urban Collective Life / Teresa P. R. Caldeira  126
7. Suturing the (W)hole: Vitalities of Everyday Urban Living in Congo  150
8. Infrastructures of Plutocratic London / Caroline Knowles  164
9. Affirmative Vocabularies from and for the Street / Edgar Pieterse and Tatiana Thieme  180
10. Deformation: Remaking Urban Peripheries through Lateral Comparison / AbdouMaliq Simone  199
11. Edge Syntax: Vocabularies for Violent Times / Suzanne M. Hall  221
Contributors  241
Index
 

Ash Amin is 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge and author, coauthor, and editor of many books, including Seeing Like a City and Land of Strangers.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Economic and Political Geography, DIST, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, coeditor of Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power, and the City, and editor of Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects, and Politics.