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Urbanities

Series Editor: Alan Blum, Director, Culture of Cities Centre (Toronto), University of Waterloo: blum@uwaterloo.ca

This book series' focus is upon investigations of the urbane as a regime of thinking, feeling, and action. Urban centrality has always functioned as a lure for those seeking to be near the seat of action and sensuality in any civilization, giving the city the aura of the contemporary, creating the spell of the experience of the mode and the moment, inducing any and all to address what it is to be attuned in any present.

The coexistence of participation and detachment as a sensual encounter in the midst of change that distinguishes urbanity as a means of self fashioning in any present, invites the systematic reinvention of  ideas and conduct in the marketplace of influences, including styles and scenes in consumption, fashion, arts and information, knowledge and technology, and regimes of care for self and other.

The social practices of urbanity are observable in the arts and sciences, aesthetically, ethically, and politically, in the organization  of public and private settings of everyday life, in the various projects, enterprises and initiatives that mark the institutional landscape of the contemporary in ways appealing to the authority and code of urbanity and to being up-to-date, and in the social scripts, public writings, and collective formulae that purport to  describe the present as eventful.

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