This interdisciplinary and critical collection of essays examines recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major cities in relation to issues of ethnicity, capital and culture. Innovative and wide-raning, the essays move between interpretative representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the larger theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of representation itself. Contributors reflect on the construction of both the real and unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.