Urban Heartbeats

Cities are sometimes twinned with the most unexpected and surprising places. Bucharest, for example, is twinned with a number of cities that include Beijing in China, Atlanta in the USA, Kyiv in Ukraine and Tbiliisi in Georgia. Wolverhampton is twinned with Subotica in Serbia, Klagenfurt in Austria and Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. The raison d'être for these connections is often only apparent to those who are in the know. Such connections create opportunities for citizens and town and city officials to experience another culture and to learn from one another. They aim to foster social and economic links by promoting exchanges in education and the arts.

In Urban Heartbeats Monica Manolachi and Neil Leadbeater explore five cities in Romania and six cities in the United Kingdom. This, too, may appear as an unlikely and surprising juxtaposition but for the authors the unifying factor is that these are places that one or other of them have either lived and worked in or know very well. In them, they expand upon their economic and industrial heritage, their cultural and environmental landscapes and, inevitably, their own personal experiences of living in such places. This collection, which comprises their third collaboration, may be viewed as yet another kind of cultural exchange.