Urban Rhythms Sociological Review Monographs

This insightful addition to the academic literature on the contemporary cityscape explores the rhythms of urban mobilities, temporalities and interactions. It interprets the city in its full complexity; interwoven with networks, fluidities and constant movement, and at the same time defined and tempered by the processes of crisis and decay as much as by those of regeneration and renewal. The chapters selected for this volume travel to a global range of urban locations, interpreting the soundscapes of British railway stations, the carnival crowds of Rio de Janeiro, and the fluid relationship between modernity and the past in Shanghai. From the everyday movements and circulations of the pedestrian city to the urban transformations wrought by decay, rupture, and renewal, the material draws on theory and empirical research to capture not only the dominating rhythms of the city and the ways in which such cadences are constituted, negotiated, resisted, but also contemporary forms and spaces of creativity and organic polychronicity. The book confronts the myriad challenges that face urban planners and designers, citizens, and researchers alike, with research by established and emerging scholars who have adopted and extended the precepts of Henri Lefebvre in deploying the concept of rhythm as a potentially transformative mode of urban analysis. The contributors unearth the essential, organising, principle of rhythm at play in the contemporary city, a music forged by a fusion of linearity and repetition, peak and decline, past and future potential.