Böcker av Andy Merrifield

A passionate attack on the tyranny of experts

With the advent of AIDS, the proliferation of gangs and drugs, and the uneasy sensation that Big Brother is actually watching us, the dark side of urban living seems to be overshadowing the brighter side of pleasure, liberation, and opportunity. The Urbanization of Injustice chronicles these bleak urban images, while taking to task exclusivist politics, globalization theory, and superficial environmentalism. Exploring the links between urbanism, power, and justice, The Urbanization of Injustice presents the thoughts and theories of Edward Soja, David Harvey, Marshall Bermann, Doreen Masey, Sharon Zukin, Susan Fainstein, Ira Katznelson, Nell Smith, and Michael Keith in one cohesive volume, bringing us one step closer to genuinely humane and socially just urban practices.

Our cities have been plagued by economic injustices and inequalities long before COVID-19 upended urban life everywhere. Beyond Plague Urbanism delves into this zone of urban pathology and asks what successive lockdowns and exoduses, remote work and small-business collapse, redundant office space and unaffordable living space portend for our society in cities? Andy Merrifield journeys intercontinentally as he reflects on these questions, in a narrative that moves imaginatively between plague and populist politics, the U.S. Main Street and the British High Street, overcrowding and undercrowding, the right to the city today and eco-cities of tomorrow. Blending jazz with French Surrealism, Thomas Pynchon's rocket science with the odyssey of James Joyce, Henri Lefebvre's Marxism with the street ballets of Jane Jacobs, this challenging book appears at a timely moment in our fraught political history and opens up an urgent humanist conversation about the future of city life.

Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights