Product Description: Creativity has become part of the language of regeneration experts, urban planners and government policy makers attempting to revive the economic and cultural life of cities in the 21st century. Concepts such as the creative class, the creative industries and bohemian cultural clusters have come to dominate thinking about how creativity can contribute to urban renewal...read more

Product Description: Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces are the neglected sites of industrial ruins, places on the margin which accommodate transgressive and playful activities. Providing a different aesthetic to the over-designed spaces of the city, ruins evoke an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality, offering ghostly glimpses into the past and a tactile encounter with space and materiality...read more

Product Description: The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture? This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Clearly written and fascinatingly illustrated, Tourists at the Taj describes the conflicting narratives which surround the site. For some the Taj is an evocative symbol of the colonial past. For others it is a symbolic centre of Islamic power. For many of the thousands of tourists that visit it each year it is simply a monument of love.The author shows how tourism can be seen as a performance and the tourist site as a stage on which tourists are directed and rehearsed but also able to improvise their own cultural rituals.