In undertaking a systematic analysis of urban materiality, this book investigates one kind of material in Melbourne: stone. In appealing to the general reader, academics and students, this book provides a highly readable account, replete with evocative examples and fascinating historical and contemporary stories about stone in Melbourne.

Cliff.- Chapter 1: Thinking about Urban Materiality.- Tomb.- Chapter 2: Stony Flows.- Quartz.- Chapter 3: Stony Entanglements: Quarrying, Demolition, Disposal and Remediation.- Foundation.- Chapter 4: The Maintenance and Repair of Stone Assemblages.- Tree.- Chapter 5: Remembering with Stone.- Grotto.- Chapter 6: Sensing Place: Living with Melbourne’s Stone.- Garden.- Chapter 7: Becoming Attuned to Stone: Skill, Craft, Making.- Temple.- Chapter 8: The Ghosts of Urban Stone.- Scholar Stone.

In undertaking a systematic analysis of urban materiality, this book investigates one kind of material in Melbourne: stone. The work draws on a range of pertinent, current theories that consider materiality, assemblages, networks, phenomenology, resource and extraction geographies, memorialisation, maintenance and repair, place identity, skill, sensation and affect, haunting and the vitalism of the non-human.  In appealing to the general reader, academics and students, this book provides a highly readable account, replete with evocative examples and fascinating historical and contemporary stories about stone in Melbourne.

​“Stone transports us into the quiet life of a mundane object that forms the backbone of our social and material lives. But stone does not stay silent for long in the pages of this captivating book. The lithic comes to life, forms networks and relationships, metabolizes with the growth of the city, coalesces into assemblages, and transports, transfixes and provokes memories and feelings. This multi-theoretical excavation reveals that Melbourne’s stone serves as a wonderfully adaptive tool with which to carve new and sophisticated theoretical understandings of urban materiality.” (Phillip Vannini, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Royal Roads University)“Stone is a fascinating, must-read for scholars of material culture, cities and society. Tim Edensor skilfully accounts of how the historical and experiential worlds of everyday urban life are tangibly and sensorially shaped by the movements, structures and feelings created by stone. This impeccably researched book delivers an important demonstration of how and why we need to engage with theoretical plurality in order to comprehend the complexity of the environments, processes and feelings that constitute our contemporary urban configurations.” (Sarah Pink, Professor of Design and Emerging Technologies, Monash University)

Provides a highly readable account, replete with evocative examples and fascinating historical and contemporary stories about stone in Melbourne.Thoroughly engages with and advances a range of pertinent, current theoretical thinking across the social sciences and humanities, including notions about materiality, value, mobility, relationality and networks, place identity, sensation and affect, and the vitality of the non-human.Politically engages with notions of sustainability, with the ways in which creative destruction and global flows can have malign effects on the built environment, and with critical questions about what is and is not valued.