Below are links to and brief descriptions of three books which, in different ways, explore the importance of roots, creativity, and proximity within a place-based meaning.
A study of the contemporary restructuring of the city, with a particular focus upon regeneration in Manchester. Restructuring is set within the context of transformations in the global political economy, with dominant players imposing priorities in increasing abstraction from the urban form.
The book is motivated by a concern that the city is in danger of losing its traditional functions as a place of human interaction and reciprocity, and will cease to exist as both meeting place and associational space. The aim of this book is therefore to recover the city as an anthropological living space, as expressed through the conceptual formulation of the urban public sphere. Examining the philosophical, social, and ecological conditions enabling the recovery of the grand narrative of ‘the good city,’ the book challenges postmodernist celebrations of otherness, difference and conflict as expressions of the urban diremption of late, corporate, and globalised capitalism rather than as a coherent response to it.
Lewis Mumford and the Recovery of Place, Person, and Proximity. 2023 205,475 words
This book recovers Lewis Mumford as a pioneer environmental thinker by underscoring the civic dimensions of his thought. The argument traces the evolution of Mumford's thought on technics, the city, and regional planning, and examines the various methods he proposed in order to bring his ideas to practical fruition. Most of all, the book is concerned to underline the cogency of Mumford's idea of a civic environmentalism that is in tune with the insurgency of life and the planetary ecology.
Revaluing Labour, Rebuilding Jerusalem: Change and Continuity in working class culture, politics, and experience. 2023 98,741 words
This book traces the often fraught relations between the working class and its traditional forms of representation and socialisation. The failure to resolve the crisis in the agencies of labour that has characterised the past half century (and longer) will lead not only to the continued failure of leftist politics but also to the ever-deepening disappointment and continued drift away of the working class. This book locates the causes of this crisis in the growing disconnect between leftist politics and the working class as flesh-and-blood subject, a disconnect which itself arises from the failure to understand the nature of the working class as it actually exists rather than as how theory says it ought to exist. In the process, the book looks at issues of wider concern to the working class, identifying areas of solidarity that tend to be either missed on account of having no place in socialist theory or politics or dismissed as false consciousness. Revaluing labour means revaluing those areas of solidarity, loyalty, and connection by which the working class seeks to stabilize its existence and defend its way of life in face of the constant confrontation with the exigencies of the economic system.
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