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.
Shaking Up the City Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question
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About the Book
Reviews
"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
"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"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
"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
“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