Vast interior spaces have become ubiquitous in the contemporary city‎.‎ The soaring atriums and concourses of mega‎-hotels‎,‎ shopping malls and transport interchanges define an increasingly normal experience of being ‎'‎inside‎'‎ in a city‎.‎ Yet such spaces are also subject to intense criticism and claims that they can destroy the quality of a city‎'‎s authentic life ‎'‎on the outside‎'‎‎.‎ Interior Urbanism explores the roots of this contemporary tension between inside and outside‎,‎ identifying and analysing the concept of interior urbanism and tracing its history back to the works of John Portman and Associates in 1960s and 70s America‎.‎ Portman ‎- increasingly recognised as an influential yet understudied figure ‎- was responsible for projects such as Peachtree Center in Atlanta and the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel‎,‎ developments that employed vast internal atriums to define a world of possibilities not just for hotels and commercial spaces‎,‎ but for the future of the American downtown amid the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s‎.‎ The book analyses Portman‎'‎s architecture in order to reconsider major contexts of debate in architecture and urbanism in this period‎,‎ including the massive expansion of a commercial imperative in architecture‎,‎ shifts in the governance and development of cities amid social and economic instability‎,‎ the rise of postmodernism and critical urban studies‎,‎ and the defence of the street and public space amid the continual upheavals of urban development‎.‎ In this way the book reconsiders the American city at a crucial time in its development‎,‎ identifying lessons for how we consider the forces at work‎,‎ and the spaces produced‎,‎ in cities in the present‎.‎