Cities with magic and demons and not modernity and maybe flows

The title of Matt Jones' Webstock presentation, "The Demon-Haunted City," reminds me irresistibly of my favorite journal article title of all-time: Nigel Thrift's "Cities Without Modernity, Cities With Magic."

Unfortunately, the two have very little to do with each other. I might even argue that they are in complete opposition. C'est la magic vie, I guess. Never the less, I do recommend taking a look at both.

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Update: Actually, I take that whole point back. They do have something to do with each other. On the one hand, Matt on the one hand is entirely interested in technological novelty and Thrift is really pushing for a look at banal and mundane experiences of flows and mobility. On the other hand, both of them never doubt for a second that cities are coherent, meaningful units of analysis -- not nodes in a space of information flows, not densities in regions of sprawl, but "spatially fixed" (as Thrift writes) centers.