APS 341 Urban Sociology

The Digital City advocates for the need to rethink our everyday interactions with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Halegoua shows how urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives turn urban spaces into places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Halegoua argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media.

Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace.

Filming the City brings together the work of filmmakers, architects, designers, video artists, and media specialists to provide three distinct prisms through which to examine the medium of film in the context of the city. The book presents commentaries on particular films and their social and urban relevance, offering contemporary criticisms of both film and urbanism from conflicting perspectives, and documenting examples of how to actively use the medium of film in the design of our cities, spaces and buildings.

Imaging the City brings together the work of designers, artists, dancers, and media specialists who cross the borders of design and artistic practices to investigate how we perceive the city; how we imagine it; how we experience it; and how we might better design it. Breaking disciplinary boundaries, editors Steve Hawley, Edward Clift, and Kevin O'Brien provocatively open up the field of urban analysis and thought to the perspectives of creative professionals from non-urban disciplines.

In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe illuminate this infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography. Contributors to the book, including those with lived experience of homelessness in Toronto, report on the realities of the situation and how people responded: by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, and by rising up against encampment evictions.