Today, the majority of people worldwide live in cities or metropolitan areas. This volume responds with a transdisciplinary approach to growing urbanisation and globalisation - climate change, energy change, secure jobs, affordable living, sustainable mobility, migration or demographic change. It brings together recent research in the areas of Urban and Media Studies, 19th- and 20th-century urban fiction and Victorian and neo-Victorian Studies. The contributors endeavor to compare various discourses of urban transformation - expansion, corruption, renewal, dereliction, adaptation - that have emerged in situations of rapid, uncontrolled change. Fields covered include the London Green Belt and ecocritical flânerie in New York, neo-Victorian streetwalking in novels by Peter Ackroyd and Michel Faber, the global impact of urban transformations on Dublin or Hong Kong, slumming in the TV series Maison Close , Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful as well as Amsterdam s Red Light District and urban geographies of entertainment in London, from the Crystal Palace to the Millennium Dome.
