Cities of Power

In this brilliant, very original survey of the politics and meanings of urban landscapes, leading sociologist Göran Therborn offers a tour of the world's major capital cities, and the forces that have shaped them. Through a global, historical lens, and with a thematic range extending from the mutations of modernist architecture to the contemporary return of urban revolutions, Therborn questions received assumptions about the source, manifestations and reach of urban power, combining perspectives on politics, sociology, urban planning, architecture, and urban iconography. With its unique systematic overview, from Washington DC and revolutionary Paris to the flamboyant twenty-first century capital of Kazakhstan, its wealth of urban observations from all the populated continents, and its sharp and multi-faceted analyses, Cities of Power forces us to rethink our urban future, as well as our historically shaped present.

Göran Therborn analyses urban life with sweeping historical and global range. As he shows in tremendous detail, urban history is baked into a place by its streets, its institutions and the cultural outlook of its inhabitants, Should become an early port of call for anyone looking to know more about how urban and national power functions around the world, One of the world's most engaging and intriguing sociologists. Cities of Power helps us understand the current tensions between states and people, capitals and peripheries, populism and elitism, nationalism and globalism, Cities of Power is explicitly a riposte to the idea of the Global City, and the peculiar Monocle-magazine vision of trans-national, interconnected, intangible capitalism that it serves to alternately describe and vindicate. Few thinkers display such a genuinely global range, One more publication in a sparkling list of career accomplishments, Cities of Power might function as an important resource for many a sociology doctoral student

Göran Therborn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and the author of, most recently, Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy, also published by Verso. His works have appeared in at least twenty-four languages.