New Books in Urban Studies

To many the city might seem simply a large urban area to live within, but it actually forms an important political concept and community that has been influential throughout European history. From the polis of Ancient Greece, to the Roman Republic, to the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, and down to the present day. Modern concepts of democracy and citizenship that have shaped European thou...

In this timely book, award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger, Louisa Lim, weaves together Hong Kong's fraught political and social history with her own first hand account of the spirit of an indelible city. In her latest book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, published by Riverhead Books in April 2022, Lim reflects on attempts at the erosion of Hong Kong identity,...

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) uses three Black electronic musics – footwork, grime, and the work of the producer Actress – to provide a theory of how Black musical experimentation has disrupted the circuits of racialized domination and exclusion in the 21st Century city. The book carefully attends to the unique ‘so...

Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin (Peter Lang, 2022), the first book in the new series “Imagining Black Europe,” explores what Afropolitanism does. Mobile people of African descent use this term to address their own lived realities creatively, which often includes countering stereotypical notions of being African. Afropolitan practices are enormously heterogeneou...

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment.  In Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (U Chicago Press, 2019), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the expl...

Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsul...

The poet Walt Whitman wrote in his 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass that New York was a “City of the world! (for all races are here, All lands of the earth make contributions here…”) How that city came to be on the island of Manhattan, and what it has meant for the United States and the world over the centuries, is the subject of Marc Aronson’s new book Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manha...

In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed...

Cambodia is home to Angkor, one of the most important archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. Greater Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, was a low-density city covered about a 1000 sq km and was the home of between 750,000 to 900,000 people in the 12th century CE. The urban complex was largely abandoned in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its central 300 sq km is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and...

Hong Kong is almost impossible to explain to those not from the city. Too often, the city has had to struggle with shorthand used by those writing about the city from afar—for audiences with little understanding of what the place is actually like. The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (Random House: 2022) by Karen Cheung is a deep dive into the things that make Hong Kong different, diverse and d...

In Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (University of Texas Press, 2022), Anadelia Romo argues that visual images were central to the shift from emulating Europe to valuing Brazil’s own local culture, which took place from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The book focuses on Salvador, Bahia, a city in the northeast of Brazil known for its rich Black cu...

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and...

The continuing crisis in Xinjiang has, thanks to the work of many scholars and reporters, led to greatly increased awareness of the region's history and Uyghur population among publics outside China. But so far less appreciated have been the specific ways in which the targeted regime of Uyghur imprisonment operates, and its creeping emergence over the course of the 2010s. Darren Byler’s Terror Cap...

In The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State's History (2nd Edition; SUNY Press, 2022), Bruce W. Dearstyne presents New York State history through an exploration of nineteen dramatic events. From the launch of the state government in April 1777 through the debut of the musical play Hamilton in 2015, Dearstyne puts the fascinating people who made history at the center of the story...

Housing in the Margins: Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin's Allotment Gardens (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) offers a theoretically informed and empirically detailed exploration of unruly housing practices and their governance at the periphery of Berlin. An original empirical contribution to understanding housing precarity in the context of the German housing crisis A novel approach to theorizing...

In How to Build a Global City: Recognizing the Symbolic Power of a Global Urban Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2022), Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities - Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai - and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyse the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice...

Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading ventur...

In In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022), Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, aims to make the case for the value of spaces devoted to books and the value of the time spent browsing their stacks. It is a defense of serious bookstores, but more importantly, it is a paean to the spaces that support them; the experience of readers as they...

“An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are the greatest climate risks for the region and where are we in terms of adapting to them? And...

On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across four lanes of traffic, then scurrying through a narrow underpass as cars whizzed by within inches. The man was William “Holly” Whyte, a pioneer of people-centered urban design. Decades before this perilous trek to a meeting in the suburbs, h...

In The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020), historian Jessica Clark takes the reader on a tour through the shifting commercial and cultural landscape of London in the second half of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th. The business of beatification––aimed at both men and women, and conducted by both men and women­––was influenced by and reflec...

In the United States, the national debate over public monuments often frames the removal of statutes as a revision of history. But Dr. Thompson suggests that we need to interrogate both the creation and removal of monuments to understand the essential role they play in creating national narratives and determining who is seen as an American. Using a set of remarkable case studies, Dr. Thompson demo...

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City (Doubleday, 2021) takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City. It brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape. With clarity and verve, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler reveals how their pursuit has not only defined the conflict over modern Jerusalem, but c...

As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the worke...

Follies in America: A History of Garden and Park Architecture (Cornell UP, 2021) examines historicized garden buildings, known as "follies," from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876.  In a period of increasing nationalism, follies―such as temples, summerhouses, towers, and ruins―brought a range of European architectural styles to the United States. By imprinti...