3 Review(s)

What do our cities mean to us? How do we experience them? Some of the answers (and many more questions) are to be found in the unexpected spaces of the metropolis. Urban living - the ways we use and inhabit places and the ways our lives are shaped by those places - is illuminated in the series of provocative views presented here. Shopping in London to squatting in Amsterdam. Spatial cleansing in New York to modernising Venice. Suffragettes to working women of colour. Bohemian Berlin cafes to Naples street markets. Prostitution to surveillance. Downtown Sao Paolo to suburban Manchester. Berthold Lubetkin to Jules Dassin. Skateboarding in Los Angeles to speeding on the Westway. Strangely Familiar is a book about the unexpected, about the vitality and complexity of the everyday. From the curious to the popular, from the virtuous to the terrifying, the architectures of modern life are here laid bare. Contributors: Elisabetta Andreoli, Iain Borden, M. Christine Boyer, Iain Chambers, Jonathan Charley, Barry Curtis, Dolores Hayden, Joe Kerr, Sandy McCreery, Doreen Massey, William Menking, Jane Rendell, Edward W. Soja, Lynne Walker, Elizabeth Wilson