News & Events

Now Accepting Manuscripts for New Book Series: URBANITIES

This new book series continues interdisciplinary research and theorizing inaugurated by the Culture of Cities Centre in Toronto and its projects on the arts, material culture, and everyday life in cities.

Keeping Up - Conference Program

Thursday, June 23 8:00pm - 9:30pm Welcoming Reception and Registration at the Culture of Cities Centre. Opening remarks by Alan Blum, Director: "Keeping Up with Keeping Up".

Friday, June 24 10:00am-12:00pm Influences of Medical Science,12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch, 1:00pm-2:45pm Keeping Up and Against Keeping Up,3:00pm-5:00pm Towards a Critical Ethics of Health: Biocultures, Biopolitics and Resistance.

Saturday, June 25 10:00am-12:00pm Subjectivity and Anxiety, 12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch, 1:00pm-2:30pm Social Types, 3:00pm-5:00pm Public Health and the Imaginary of Adversity. 7:30pm - Book Launch and Barbecue

Sunday, June 26 9:30am-10:30am Breakfast, 10:30am-12:00pm Discussant Roundtable and Final Reflections.

Welcome

Welcome to the new Culture of Cities Centre website! We're launching just in time to celebrate our ten-year anniversary, an anniversary we were able to reach thanks to the generous assistance provided to us by the University of Waterloo. This site features all of the publications and events that the members of the Centre have been up to over the past decade – both as the Culture of Cities and as the Grey Zone of Health and Illness – and it highlights what we're up to now and where we're going in the future. In particular, we're pleased to announce our upcoming conference, Keeping Up: Enthusiasm, Anxiety and the Culture of Wellbeing, set to take place here in Toronto in June, 2011. We are also looking forward to the publication of our Grey Zone of Health and Illness book series (with Intellect Press), three volumes of which are due out this year. Please visit our About Us section and our Blog to learn more about who we are and what kind of work we do.

The Grey Zone of Health and Illness

Alan Blum

Featured Publications

Spectacular Death

Edited by Tristanne Connolly

An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death, this anthology considers to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all, we can perceive it only in life —...

Circulation and the City

Edited by Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw

The lived experience of cities has long been defined by motion. As urban dwellers travel to work, home, and play they carve random or predictable pathways across neighbourhoods and districts. Circulation and the City investigates the...

Urban Enigmas

Edited by Johanne Sloan

The practice of comparison is implicit in every act of imagining, representing, and studying urban experience. Urban Enigmas contributes to recent interdisciplinary interest in cities by introducing comparison as a key methodology for...

The Imaginative Structure of the City

Alan Blum

In The Imaginative Structure of the City Alan Blum explores the symbolic and imaginative nature of the city as a vital part of everyday life in modern civilization.

Conflicting Prescriptions

Stephen Svenson

Hurricane Katrina evolved from disaster to catastrophe, a catastrophe that has grave implications for the health and well-being of the City of New Orleans and its citizens. The impact of Katrina on the health of the city and its citizens...

Material Losses

Elke Grenzer

The growing proliferation of images, memorials, and exhibitions devoted to visualizing the Nazi destruction of European Jewry in Berlin and the controversies surrounding their materialization can be understood within the context of the...

Blog

Hannah Arendt Goes to Zuccotti Park: Part 2

Hannah Arendt Goes to Zuccotti Park: Part 1

Notes from Indoors: Urban Life and the Hospital

One element of urban life deserving but not often thought of when all is well, is the hospital as an actual place, enterprise and kind of experience for those who run it and those who need it....

The Problem with Bicycling in the City

The recent arrival of Bixi, the bicycle sharing service, in Toronto has given me occasion to reflect on the practice of bicycling in the city and the conflicts that surround it.

Peter McHugh

My friend and collaborator Peter McHugh (d. January 29, 2010) is the subject of a special issue of Human Studies devoted to discussions of his work and influences by friends, collaborators, and...

Giving Back to New Orleans

Given the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan this past Friday, we may all be in a more reflective mood. In this age of global media, disaster never seems very far away. This...

For the Wandering Urban Mind . . .

Our interest in body and mind and the vagaries of mentalities leads us to suggest a link to this interesting new journal on the Wandering Urban Mind: Dérivateur Magazine.

The Grey Zone of Alcohol Consumption

Since the late nineteenth century, alcohol consumption has also raised the phenomenon of addiction. While up to then, moderation was understood to be a concern of character development, the idea of...

Midwifery and Representations of the Collective Body

In my work on midwifery and representations of the reproductive body, I was beginning from an established point of complexity: the traditional historiography, whether the medical view of progress or...

The City, the Grey Zone of Alcohol Consumption

My initial work on this project was focused on researching the relation between the Grey Zone of health and illness as pointing to a fundamental ambiguity between the part (e.g., illness) and the...