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9780190855369

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City Living is an ambitious book that engages the reader through a phenomenological account of how people living amongst, engaging with, and navigating each other shape urban spaces, and how all that lively embodied and emplaced activity turns around to shape them. We inhabit spaces but those spaces inhabit us. Kukla's analysis gracefully weaves theories of territory and place-making, confronts the challenges of urban gentrification to deliver vital lessons about identity and disruption, all the while taking the reader on philosophical passages through Washington D.C., Berlin, and Johannesburg to face the social-spatial dynamics of how 'city dwellers make and are made by territories.' The journey concludes with an innovative view of what the 'right to the city' means. For Kukla, the expression of this aspirational right goes beyond claims to housing by extending to the right to live one's life and to shape the cities that shape us. -- Ronald R. Sundstrom, University of San Francisco Quill R Kukla's City Living opens exciting new terrain for philosophical exploration, building multi-faceted intersections among social ontology, embodied cognition, social and political philosophy, geography, and philosophy of biology. Looking ahead to disruptions from climate change, economic stratification and dislocation, and new patterns of migration, Kukla's nuanced studies of gentrification and the re-purposing of Berlin after the Wall and Johannesburg after apartheid will be invaluable guides and goads to ongoing transformation of urban spaces and ways of life. -- Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University This book consists of unmatched ethnographic writing produced through a philosopher's effort to open horizons of geographic knowledge and turn them into superb scholarship on repurposed cities. This original and mesmerizing take on Berlin and Johannesburg explains how their urban space, organized around a defunct social order (the authoritarian state and apartheid), is being used by their residents in new ways. Based on visits to numerous sites in both cities and interviews with residents and community leaders as well as through observation, photographs, and at times participant observation, Dr. Kukla imaginatively takes us to the streets while skillfully narrating how repurposed urban spaces and their inhabitants shape one another. -- Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College

City Living is an ambitious book that engages the reader through a phenomenological account of how people living amongst, engaging with, and navigating each other shape urban spaces, and how all that lively embodied and emplaced activity turns around to shape them. We inhabit spaces but those spaces inhabit us. Kukla's analysis gracefully weaves theories of territory and place-making, confronts the challenges of urban gentrification to deliver vital lessons about identity and disruption, all the while taking the reader on philosophical passages through Washington D.C., Berlin, and Johannesburg to face the social-spatial dynamics of how 'city dwellers make and are made by territories.' The journey concludes with an innovative view of what the 'right to the city' means. For Kukla, the expression of this aspirational right goes beyond claims to housing by extending to the right to live one's life and to shape the cities that shape us. -- Ronald R. Sundstrom, University of San Francisco Quill R Kukla's City Living opens exciting new terrain for philosophical exploration, building multi-faceted intersections among social ontology, embodied cognition, social and political philosophy, geography, and philosophy of biology. Looking ahead to disruptions from climate change, economic stratification and dislocation, and new patterns of migration, Kukla's nuanced studies of gentrification and the re-purposing of Berlin after the Wall and Johannesburg after apartheid will be invaluable guides and goads to ongoing transformation of urban spaces and ways of life. -- Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University This book consists of unmatched ethnographic writing produced through a philosopher's effort to open horizons of geographic knowledge and turn them into superb scholarship on repurposed cities. This original and mesmerizing take on Berlin and Johannesburg explains how their urban space, organized around a defunct social order (the authoritarian state and apartheid), is being used by their residents in new ways. Based on visits to numerous sites in both cities and interviews with residents and community leaders as well as through observation, photographs, and at times participant observation, Dr. Kukla imaginatively takes us to the streets while skillfully narrating how repurposed urban spaces and their inhabitants shape one another. -- Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College

Author Information

Quill R Kukla is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, as well as a Humboldt Scholar at Leibniz Universität Hannover. They are completing a Master's Degree in Urban and Regional Planning at Georgetown University. Their previous books include Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mother's Bodies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and, with Mark Lance, 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard University Press, 2009). They are also a competitive amateur boxer and powerlifter.

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