Remaking Birmingham: The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration

The city of Birmingham offers a particularly rich case study on urban regeneration as it strives to build a new city image. Positioned between decline and regeneration, the landscape of the city and its environs collages old and new, producing dramatic contrasts - of industrial and post-industrial urbanisms of crumbling brutalism and spectacular flagship developments, of Victorian housing and diverse cultural lifestyles - that compound the aesthetic and socio-economic means of regeneration. This visually exciting book also reflects upon and extends current debates about public space, cultural zoning and the futures of cities.

About the Author

Liam Kennedy is Head of Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on American Urbanism, comparative urbanism, representations of the city in film and photography. His research and publications have been in the fields of urban studies and visual culture, including monographs (Susan Sontag, Race and Urban Space in American Culture); edited books (Urban Space and Representation, City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago [2000]), plus many articles on urban culture and representation.