Intimate City

“‘The Intimate City’ is a joyful miscellany of people seeing things in the urban landscape, the streets alive with remembrances and ideas even when those streets are relatively empty of people.”—Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times architecture critic, his celebrated walking tours of New York City, now expanded, covering four of the five boroughs and some 540 million years of history, accompanied by some of the people who know it best As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration. What began with a lighthearted trip to explore Broadway’s shuttered theater district and a stroll along Museum Mile when the museums were closed soon took on a much larger meaning and ambition. These intimate, funny, richly detailed conversations between Kimmelman and his companions became anchors for millions of Times readers during the pandemic. The walks unpacked the essence of urban life and its social fabric—the history, plans, laws, feats of structural engineering, architectural highlights, and everyday realities that make up a place Kimmelman calls “humanity’s greatest achievement.” Filled with stunning photographs documenting the city during the era of COVID, The Intimate City is the ultimate insider’s guide. The book includes new walks through LGBTQ Greenwich Village, through Forest Hills, Queens, and Mott Haven, in the Bronx. All the walks can be walked, or just be read for pleasure, by know-it-all New Yorkers or anyone else. They take readers back to an age when Times Square was still a beaver pond and Yankee Stadium a salt marsh; across the Brooklyn Bridge, for green tea ice cream in Chinatown, for momos and samosas in Jackson Heights, to explore historic Black churches in Harlem and midcentury Mad Men skyscrapers on Park Avenue. A kaleidoscopic portrait of an enduring metropolis, The Intimate City reveals why New York, despite COVID and a long history of other calamities, continues to inspire and to mean so much to those who call it home and to countless others.

A profile of the history of sex work and the sexual economy in Mumbai, India's cultural and financial capital. In Intimate City, Manjima Bhattacharjya examines how globalization and technology have changed where and how sexual commerce is transacted. She maps offline and online geographies of sex work and unearths new perspectives: from changing red-light areas to the world of escort services; from the experiences of massage boys to men in search of casual encounters cruising the internet highways. Through these fascinating narratives, Bhattacharjya analyzes how the internet has reconfigured intimacies in the digital age. In doing so, she offers a new lens to look at long-held feminist understandings of sex work, choice, consent, and agency against the backdrop of the "maximum city" of Mumbai.

Intimate Metropolis explores connections between the modern city, its architecture, and its citizens, by questioning traditional conceptualizations of public and private. Rather than focusing purely on public spaces—such as streets, cafés, gardens, or department stores—or on the domestic sphere, the book investigates those spaces and practices that engage both the urban and the domestic, the public and the private. The legal, political and administrative frameworks of urban life are seen as constituting private individuals’ sense of self, in a wide range of European and world cities from Amsterdam and Barcelona to London and Chicago. Providing authoritative new perspectives on individual citizenship as it relates to both public and private space, in-depth case studies of major European, American and other world cities and written by an international set of contributors, this volume is key reading for all students of architecture.

Cape Town is a place between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and west. The majority of its citizens: a people between black and white, native and settler, African and European. How can we understand a city that is most assuredly in Africa, though not””seemingly””of it? By exploring this city’s tween-ness, we can begin to understand the soul of this town””haunted by its past, unsure of its future. A short book just over 100 pages, it allows readers to quickly identify the unique pulse of the city, its throbbing historical, social, cultural and political beat that underlies the transactions between all Capetonians. This is not a substitute for a traditional guidebook, but a perfect companion to one, filling in the intimate details that other books leave out.

• Fully revised updated and expanded edition of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winner that sold more than 10,000 copies • Cultural history plus celebrity anecdotes • Up-to-the-minute look at the current New York cabaret scene Intimate Nightsis the definitive history of cabaret as it evolved in New York City in the years after World War II. But that doesn’t mean it's dry and academic. Good heavens, no! Settle in for racy tales of nightlife, revealed in interviews with dozens of the people who lived it: Bobby Short, Eartha Kitt, Mabel Mercer, Bette Midler, and many more. Author James Gavin has tracked down rare, early stories about the legends who came out of New York nightclubs—and that means Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Nichols and May, Johnny Mathis, Carol Burnett, Lenny Bruce, among others. Part cultural history, part celebrity gossip,Intimate Nightsoffers an intimate look at the creatures of the nightclubs.

Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

Intimate Geopolitics is the story of love and territory in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in India's Jammu and Kashmir State. This book takes on global processes of "demographic fever dreams," which animate political movements, by understanding them in a deeply rooted local context and through the lives of ordinary people making decisions about love, babies, and the future.

Bangkok has been at the frontier of capitalism's drive into the global south for three decades. Rapid development has profoundly altered public and private life in Thailand. In her provocative study of contemporary commerce in Bangkok, Ara Wilson captures the intimate effects of the global economy in this vibrant city. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok is a multifaceted portrait of the intertwining of identities, relationships, and economics during Bangkok's boom years. Using innovative case studies of women's and men's participation in a range of modern markets—department stores, go-go bars, a popular downtown mall, a telecommunications company, and the direct sales corporations Amway and Avon—Wilson chronicles the powerful expansion of capitalist exchange into further reaches of Thai society. She shows how global economies have interacted with local systems to create new kinds of lifestyles, ranging from "tomboys" to corporate tycoons to sex workers. Combining feminist theory with classic anthropological understandings of exchange, this historically grounded ethnography maps the reverberations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity at the hub of Bangkok's modern economy.

A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast