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In this self-proclaimed Urban Age, the city is touted as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer or social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. Its fertile ground gives rise to innovations that speed society along a path of progress. Without cities, human civilization, we are led to believe, will falter and decay. Not just hyperbolic, this is celebratory by half. While Cities in an Urban Age recognizes the value and wonder of cities, it rejects this view through rose-colored glasses. Instead, it argues that the city is a cauldron for the contradictions that haunt life on planet Earth. In this real place, we find wealth juxtaposed with poverty, environmental destructiveness in tension with environmental sustainability, oligarchy pushing against democracy, and tolerance fighting defensively against the onslaught of intolerance. Taking the U.S. city as its empirical ground, this book explores the ways in which these contradictions shape daily life for those who reside there.

Sidewalk City re-maps public space in order to unveil contemporary spatial practices and to explore future possibilities. In the midst of historic migration and urbanization, our limited public spaces are being contested and re-conceptualized in cities around the world with innovative experiments in some places and bloody battles in others. This book uses the case of sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where a vibrant everyday urbanism takes place in flexible patterns that defy conventional conceptions of public space. The book makes three contributions to the literature: 1) It develops methods of spatial ethnography for collecting data about the spatial practices of overlooked members of the public who are embedded in local institutions in order to overcome assumptions about how space is used and conceived. 2) The book also develops visual arguments with a critical cartography primer, a progression of original maps to show how our ontology and cartographic conventions illuminate and foreclose knowledge about space. 3) The book’s spatial ethnography and critical cartography is based on applying a property rights theory framework to public space in order to integrate our understanding of both the social and physical aspects of how space is constructed and regulated in society. Using the example of a pilot pedestrian project that was developed for the city from the study’s findings, Sidewalk City discusses the potential of using maps to engage social discourse and urban planning and design institutions with new visual narratives in order to shape the social reconstruction of public space.