The volume is multi-disciplinary in content, including contributions from specialists in architecture, public and community arts, photography and urban studies - their critical perspectives linked by interest in urban visual culture.

The city of Birmingham offers a particularly rich case study on urban regeneration as it strives to build a new city image. Positioned between decline and regeneration, the landscape of the city and its environs collages old and new, producing dramatic contrasts - of industrial and post-industrial urbanisms of crumbling brutalism and spectacular flagship developments, of Victorian housing and diverse cultural lifestyles - that compound the aesthetic and socio-economic means of regeneration. This visually exciting book also reflects upon and extends current debates about public space, cultural zoning and the futures of cities.