An Electronic Book
forms the centrepiece of the
3Cities collaborative research project.
www.citysites.org.uk

City Sites Reviews
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‘An interpretive tour-de-force, brimming with fresh insights. Each author works from deep familiarity with a set of texts and a bracing command of divergent disciplinary scholarship and theoretical perspectives. The result is a collective conversation informed by intelligence and frequently passion. Although many theorists have called for attention to the spatial dimensions of urban life, City Sites is the most persuasive application yet of a spatial analysis of particular, historical literary and cultural representations. The potential of its innovative format informs both the authors' conceptual approach to their subjects and the way that the book communicates their insights to readers.’

Rebecca Zurier, Professor of Art History, University of Michigan

‘This text introduces a new representation of the city through a sophisticated, interactive use of space, vision, navigation and multimedia. In its electronic format it makes an important step 'beyond theory' in making the imaginary totality of urban life figurable, but also in making the cultural work of electronic representation itself transparent and legible.’

Berndt Ostendorf, Professor of American Studies and Director of the America Institute, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich

‘Technologically dazzling and theoretically sophisticated, City Sites enacts the best kinds of interdisciplinary thinking about urban cultures and histories in forms commensurate to the ideas they present. It uses current ideas about visual culture and urban spatiality to create a layered and linked presentation that richly rewards both the experienced researcher and the engaged undergraduate.’

Professor Maren Stange, Cooper Union, New York City

‘Let me start by praising this project in its broadest outlines and in its particulars … the team from Nottingham and Birmingham have succeeded in this bold venture, and they've done it across continents as well. The entire body of material represented affords the opportunity for a new school of urban analysis to come to the fore … The sample essay by Douglas Tallack is exemplary. Tallack's subject is the photography of Jacob Riis … the essay exemplifies the disturbing but remarkable events that can occur when hypertext is actually applied as a theoretical model and a rhetorical model simultaneously. Tallack's essay is brimming with often disruptive hotbuttons, arrow-keys and hypertext cues; these lead in inconsistent but always fruitful directions … More important is the way that this methodology encourages the sort of complex, non-hierarchical, anti-narrative, reader-controlled analysis and study that has always been advertised for the web but has only rarely been manufactured. The real innovative nature of the work, and the ways it intersects with research quality, must be emphasized. This is by far the most innovative and promising ebook I've seen … a remarkable and essential project; the ebook will serve as a model for such projects in the future.’

Professor Peter Hales, University of Illinois at Chicago

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City Sites, an electronic book, is an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the iconography, spatial forms and visual and literary cultures of New York and Chicago in the period 1870s to 1930s. City Sites is the result of collaborative research by scholars from Europe and the U.S.A and presents a pioneering approach to American urbanism utilising analytical possibilities offered by new multimedia technologies. The electronic book consists of the following elements:

• a welcome page, which provides initial navigational guidance for the user
• a short introduction to the project and the governing methodological principles of the  work
• ten essays, written by academics from the U.K., Europe and the U.S.A.
• a set of nominated pathways to facilitate non-linear navigation of the electronic book
• hyperlinks that allow movement across essays following individual topics and hyperlinks to external sites dealing with American urbanism
• interactive annotated maps of New York and Chicago
• an annotated bibliography.

The electronic book has been published by the University of Birmingham Press in December 2000 as a dedicated web site. If you would like to view City Sites go to www.citysites.org.uk

City Sites Essays
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