ancient cities

xviii About the Editors
Robert A. Beauregard is a Professor of Urban
Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University.
He is director of the Urban Planning Program and
chair of the Doctoral Program Subcommittee on
Urban Planning. He teaches courses on planning
theory, urban redevelopment policy, social theory,
and research design. His PhD is in city and
regional planning from Cornell University and he
has a degree in architecture from Rhode Island
School of Design. He previously taught at The
New School, University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers
University and has been a visiting professor at
University of California, Los Angeles and at the
Helsinki University of Technology. In addition,
Beauregard is a docent professor in the Department
of Social Policy at the University of Helsinki and a
part-time visiting professor in the Department of
Geography, King’s College, London.
Beauregard’s research focuses mainly on urbanization
in the United States with particular attention to
industrial city decline after World War II—a story
told in Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S.
Cities (2003)—and to current urban growth and
decline with specific attention to resurgent and
shrinking cities. He also writes on planning theory
and urban theory. His most recent book is When
America Became Suburban (2006). Currently,
Beauregard is working on a comparative study of
anti-urbanism, an interpretation of planning using
actor–network theory, and an essay on truth and
reality in urban theory. Future projects include a
compilation of essays on urban epistemology titled
Writing Urban Theory and an investigation of the
reasons why some cities prosper while others do not,
which will appear as a book titled Why Cities
Endure.
Mike Crang is a Reader in Geography at Durham
University. He has been at Durham since 1994
when he completed his PhD on the heritage industry
at the University of Bristol, which had a concentration
on urban pictorial and oral history.
Since then his work has developed from looking at
consumers of heritage to cultural tourism, to tourism
more generally. He has written extensively on
visual consumption and photography in tourism
as well as other qualitative methods. He has edited
two collections on tourism as well as coediting the
journal Tourist Studies. He serves on the editorial
board of Environment and Planning A, Geography
Compass and for 10 years on that of Social and
Cultural Geography.
His work on social memory has led to thinking
through time and temporality in the city, and publication
of Thinking Space (2000). He is also interested
in more abstract issues regarding time–space,
action, and temporality and coedited the journal
Time & Society from 1997 to 2006. This focus on
urban rhythms, spaces, and times led him to work
on the transformations of space and time through
electronic technologies, both theoretically and
empirically, with Singapore’s “Wired City” initiative
and the “digital divide” in UK cities through
an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
project on “Multi-speed Cities and the Logistics of
Daily Life” and is now working on the notion of
a “sentient city” and the politics of new forms of
locative computing. Thinking through temporality
and his work on urban ruins has led to work on
wastescapes as part of a large ESRC project, “The
Waste of the World.” In total he has written and
edited nine books and more than 50 articles and
chapters.