This book examines the dynamic relationship between cinema, the most important cultural form, and the city, the most important form of social organization, since World War Two, in an exciting new way.

Bringing together such disciplines as Film studies, Sociology, Urban Studies and Geography, the book focuses on:

the active role of film production, distribution and exhibition in the physical growth and identity formation of cities worldwide

the integral role of cinema in the contemporary global economy

the relationship between the uneven development of cities and their film cultures

the ways in which different forms of power and resistance, social organization and urban structure may be imagined and articulated in film and its political economy

The case-studies presented range from postmodern cities such as Los Angeles to the colonial and post-colonial. Specific attention is devoted to the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Africa and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Mark Shiel is Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and was formerly Faculty of Arts Fellow at the Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and completed his PhD, "Radical Agendas and the Politics of Space in American Cinema, 1968-1974" at the British Film Institute in London in 1999.

Tony Fitzmaurice is College Lecturer at the Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin. As well as writing regularly on the arts, Tony Fitzmaurice is a member of the Film Institute of Ireland, and is currently preparing an anthology of Irish Film Studies readings.