Overview

This innovative book applies the metaphor of Dracula to understand a highly controversial reality that marks so many cities today: how the rage of smart city development and growth proceeds, is organized, and produces benefits for some and afflicts others. It also explores how social science research into these issues may be informed by the insights of gothic literature as conceptual bonds are forged between the social sciences and the humanities. Focusing on Miami and Mexico City, the book reveals a new quiet warfare being unleashed on the poor and a “Dracula-like” development conduct being rolled out that spreads rapidly across the globe. This book will appeal to students, researchers, and informed readers interested in urban studies, city planning, urban sociology, critical geography, and literature studies. The book is lucidly written and substantively deep to enhance classroom teaching and provide important details for research on urban redevelopment, city restructuring, and societal change. On the popular front, non-academic readers will find the book enriching and compelling, as only few books clearly and provocatively link the shadows of gothic horror with contemporary realities in cities.

Full Product Details

9781032742250

Table of Contents

Reviews

""A riveting and intellectually sophisticated book that blends the analytical strength of critical urban studies with the evocative power of gothic literature. The prose is superb and Wilson and Wyly masterfully take the reader on a journey, across the Global North and South, to explore the darkest corners of smart urbanism. Dracula Urbanism and Smart City Mania will change the way you see smart cities."" - Federico Cugurullo, Trinity College, Dublin ""Wilson and Wyly’s Dracula Urbanism is a fascinating work of synthesis. In it, they excavate the intricate Stoker classic and apply it to contemporary urban processes, particularly the pursuit of smart cities. Like the classic novel, the smart cities discourse seeks to weed out the old with a moralizing tale of progress that obscures real processes of violence and exclusion. This is easily one of the most imaginative urban geography texts written in decades."" - Jason Hackworth, University of Toronto

Author Information

David Wilson is Professor of Geography, Urban Planning and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the restructuring of cities in the Global North and Global South and the urban transformation of the U.S. Rustbelt. He has published widely in many journals that span geography and the social sciences. His most recent book is Chicago’s Redevelopment Machine and Blues Clubs (Palgrave-MacMillan). Elvin Wyly is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory, Canada. He studies the spatial dynamics of market processes and public policy with a special emphasis on racial discrimination in mortgage lending, the intensification of gentrification, and the algorithmic reanimation of 19th-century social Darwinist perversions of evolutionary science. Recent essays and articles have appeared in many social science journals and books.

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