Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength.  Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Loren D. Lybarger's book Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (U California Press, 2020) charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects they have had on identity across religious, political, class, gender, and generational lines. The perspectives that emerge through this rich ethnography challenge prevailing understandings of secularity and religion, offering critical insight into current debates about immigration and national belonging. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle (Manchester UP, 2024) challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia’s post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is a ‘drink map’? It may sound like a pub guide, yet it actually refers to a type of late nineteenth-century British map designed specifically to shock and shame people into drinking less. Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024) by Kris Butler explores how drink maps of particular cities were published in an attempt to fight increasingly rampant alcohol consumption, from Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield to Oxford, London and Norwich. Featuring red symbols to indicate where alcohol was sold, these special street maps were posted prominently in public places, submitted as evidence, sent to Members of Parliament and published in newspapers to show just how inebriated a neighbourhood could be. They promoted the message that having fewer places to buy alcohol was the answer to reducing widespread crime, poverty and sickness. And they worked – at first. After consulting a drink map in one town, judges decided to close half the licensed shops because even then no one had to walk more than two minutes to buy a beer. Illustrated with original maps, advertisements and temperance propaganda, the story of their brief history is told amidst a tangle of licensing laws, rogue magistrates, irate brewers, ardent temperance organisers and accounts of the complex role alcohol played across all levels of Victorian society. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose recent book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How is India tackling its persistent wage management problems? And, are new infrastructural solutions the way forward? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pamela Das about the new infrastructures that are increasingly being put in place to help Indian cities confront the problem of waste and how to handle it. Estimate suggests that by 2025, India will generate 1.3 billion metric tonnes of municipal solid waste every year. With a recycling rate at below 20 percent, the negative consequences for the environment and for public health are clear and visible in both urban and rural contexts. In policy discussions, the solution is often deemed to be infrastructural – that if only India could get the infrastructure right, the problem of waste would disappear. But infrastructures sometimes produce new and unanticipated social consequences that compound rather than solve existing problems. Pamela Das is an interdisciplinary researcher trained in anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between. In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologist Neil M. Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment, two drastically different forms of community psychiatric services have developed: public safety-net clinics focused on keeping patients housed and out of jail, and elite private care trying to push clients toward respectable futures. In Downtown Los Angeles, many people in psychiatric crisis only receive help after experiencing homelessness or arrests. Public providers engage in guerrilla social work to secure them housing and safety, but these programs are rarely able to deliver true rehabilitation for psychological distress and addiction. Patients are free to refuse treatment or use illegal drugs—so long as they do so away from public view. Across town in West LA or Malibu, wealthy people diagnosed with serious mental illness attend luxurious treatment centers. Programs may offer yoga and organic meals alongside personalized therapeutic treatments, but patients can feel trapped, as their families pay exorbitantly to surveil and “fix” them. Meanwhile, middle-class families—stymied by private insurers, unable to afford elite providers, and yet not poor enough to qualify for social services—struggle to find care at all. Gong’s findings raise uncomfortable questions about urban policy, family dynamics, and what it means to respect individual freedom. His comparative approach reminds us that every “sidewalk psychotic” is also a beloved relative and that the kinds of policies we support likely depend on whether we see those with mental illness as a public social problem or as somebody’s kin. At a time when many voters merely want streets cleared of “problem people,” Gong’s book helps us imagine a fundamentally different psychiatric system—one that will meet the needs of patients, families, and society at large. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyday Life in the Spectacular City is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and longtime residents of Dubai interact with the city's so-called superficial spaces to create meaningful social lives. Rana AlMutawa shows that inhabitants adapt themselves to top-down development projects, from big malls to megaprojects. These structures serve residents' evolving social needs, transforming Dubai's spectacular spaces into personally important cultural sites. These practices are significant because they expand our understanding of agency as not only subversive but also adaptive. Through extensive fieldwork, AlMutawa, herself an Emirati native to Dubai, finds a more nuanced story of belonging. This story does not seek to uncover the "real" city that lies beneath the veneer of the spectacle, but rather to demonstrate that social meanings and forms of belonging take place within the spectacle itself. By offering an alternative to the discourse of authenticity and elucidating the dynamics of ambivalent belonging, AlMutawa belies stereotypes that portray Dubai's developments as alienating and inherently disempowering. Everyday Life in the Spectacular City speaks beyond the Middle East to a globalized phenomenon, for Dubai's spectacles are unexceptional in today's changing world. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture—from the modern industrial labour movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives. The book draws on a diverse range of sources—from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music—to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalisation, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest—bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present. The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke UP, 2024), Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do art schools influence music? In No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (Duke UP, 2022), Gavin Butt, a Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle, tells the story of art, music and higher education in Leeds in the mid-1970s. Using archives and interviews, as well as analysis of the music and art of the era, the book shows the importance of art and art theory to a huge range of bands, including Gang of Four, Scritti Politti and Soft Cell. The analysis also takes a critical perspective on art, music and the era, thinking through the importance of class, gender, and racial inequalities to punk and post-punk. A rich and detailed defence of the importance of arts education, the book will be of interest across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone wanting to know more about why Leeds matters! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This instalment of the Object Lessons series focuses on the Swimming Pool (Bloomsbury, 2024). The book explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalisation and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures (Manchester UP, 2023) asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the impact of memory. The analytical categories of space and time must be thought as inextricably linked with each other. Expanding this fundamental conceptual idea offers fresh perspectives on urban violence. The book unites case studies on different world regions and historical periods , and thus challenges assumed binaries of cities the global North and South, the past and present. Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Originally published in 2019, Benjamin Pauli’s book, Flint Fights Back offers lasting insights into one of the most important drinking water-caused public health crises of American history. In this 2024 interview Pauli shares some explanations from the book but also offers his insights, in this year of the 10th anniversary of the Flint Water Crisis, on what is happening in Flint today and what, after all, we have learned from the fight for clean water in Flint, Michigan. -Patricia Houser, New Books in Environmental Studies Host. An account of the Flint water crisis shows that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water is part of a broader struggle for democracy. When Flint, Michigan, changed its source of municipal water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Flint residents were repeatedly assured that the water was of the highest quality. At the switchover ceremony, the mayor and other officials performed a celebratory toast, declaring “Here's to Flint!” and downing glasses of freshly treated water. But as we now know, the water coming out of residents' taps harbored a variety of contaminants, including high levels of lead. In Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis (MIT Press, 2019), Benjamin Pauli examines the water crisis and the political activism that it inspired, arguing that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water was part of a broader struggle for democracy. Pauli connects Flint's water activism with the ongoing movement protesting the state of Michigan's policy of replacing elected officials in financially troubled cities like Flint and Detroit with appointed “emergency managers.” Currently available for free online: “The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.” Patricia Houser, Ph.D., AICP, is former professor of geography and urban planning, now focused on writing and environmental research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Alexander Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country’s history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future in his book To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul (Pegasus Books, 2024). Caught between two seas and two continents, Istanbul lies at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. With environmental decay, rapacious development and tightening authoritarianism straining its social fabric to breaking point, it represents the precipitous moment civilizations around the world are currently facing. In and around its crumbling Byzantine-era fortifications, Alexander Christie-Miller meets people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the story of Turkey’s tumultuous recent past told through the lives of those who live around the walls, and the story of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II’s siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform the country in an echo of its imperial past. This is a meditation on the soul of Istanbul, a paean to its resilience and fortitude. Walk with Christie-Miller and see the danger, beauty and hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.  Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York (Columbia UP, 2024) explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore. The heart and soul of this community is English Language rock and roll music pioneered in Singapore by several members of the 1960s legendary "beats and blues" band, The Straydogs, who continue to engage this community in a sonic way of life. In Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore (NUS Press, 2021), Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour's ideas of the social--continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, "associations of heterogeneous elements" of human and non-human "mediators and intermediaries"--to portray a community entangled in the confounding relations between vernacular and national heritage projects. Music shops, music gear, music genres, sound, urban space, neighborhoods, State presence, performance venues, practice spaces, regional travel, local, national, regional, and sonic histories afford expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning, in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this deep sound is fiercely cosmopolitan, yet entirely Singaporean. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore's unique place in Southeast Asian and world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. Alessandro Gerosa's The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024) analyses this complex set of related phenomena to argue that the quest for authenticity has been a driver of Western societies from the emersion of capitalism and industrial society to today. From this premise, the book advances multiple original contributions. First, it explains why and how authenticity has become a fundamental value orienting consumers' taste in late modern capitalism; second, it proposes a novel conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of consumption; third, the book constitutes the first detailed analysis of the resurgence of the neo-craft industries, their entrepreneurs, and the economic imaginary of consumption underpinning them, and fourth, it analyses how the hipster economy is impacting the urban space, favouring new logic of urban development with contrasting outcomes. Open-source PDF version found at this link!  Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class and modestly middle class New Yorkers of European ancestry, with few great luxuries in their lives, could enjoy a taste of culinary abundance. Under demographic changes, economic decay and high crime in the 1970s and 1980s, the world that produced Dubrow’s came apart. The Brooklyn branch of Dubrow’s closed in 1978, the Manhattan branch in 1985. But before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press (2023) and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, is editing an anthology of New Yorkers’ memories of the COVID-19 pandemic for Cornell University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boston is today one of the world's greatest cities, first in higher education, hospitals, life science companies, and sports teams. It was the home of the Great Puritan Migration, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the first civil rights movement, the abolition movement, and the women's rights movement. But the city that gave us the first use of ether as anesthesia, the telephone, technicolor film, and the mutual fund--the city where Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott founded their world-changing partnership--was also the hub of the anti-immigration movement, the divisive busing era, and decades of self-inflicted decay. Boston has the most important history of any American city. Yet its history has never been given a comprehensive treatment until now.  Join Dan Dain in A History of Boston (Peter E. Randall, 2023) as he acts as your tour guide from the arrival of First Peoples up to the election of Boston's first woman and person of color as mayor. Dain's masterful work explores the policies and practices that took Boston from its highest heights to its lowest lows and back again, and examines the central role that density, diversity, and good urban design play in the success of cities like Boston. Daniel Dain is the founder and president of the law firm Dain Torpy, where he chairs the firm's real estate litigation practice. He writes and lectures widely on land-use law and urban planning. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hanna Torsh speaks with Alexandra Grey about good governance in linguistically diverse cities. Linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it's perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments. However, it doesn’t have to be that way and shouldn’t be that way in a participatory democracy. This conversation addresses 3 questions: Why does governance in a multilingual urban environment such as Sydney matter? How do you investigate good governance in multilingual urban environments? How did public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic fail some linguistic communities and how can it be improved? “Chats in Linguistic Diversity” is a podcast about linguistic diversity in social life brought to you by the Language on the Move team. We explore multilingualism, language learning, and intercultural communication in the contexts of globalization and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way. Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him (Grand Central Publishing, 2024) is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace. Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the Director for the Center on Transnational Policing. Before that, he was a tenured professor at Harvard University for eight years. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014) and The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence (2020), both published by University of Chicago Press. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; he has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions. Focusing on three urban hospitals—Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital, the flagship of the Hartford Healthcare system; the Cleveland Clinic, which coordinates with other providers for routine care while its main campus provides specialty care; and the University of Colorado Hospital, a rare example of an urban institution that relocated to a new community—the authors analyze the complicated relationship between a hospital and its neighborhoods. On the one hand, hospitals anchor the communities that surround them, often staying in a neighborhood for decades. Hospitals also craft strategies to engage with the surrounding community, many of those focused on buying locally and hiring staff from their surrounding area. On the other hand, hospitals will often only provide care to the neighboring community through emergency departments, reserving advanced medical care and long-term treatment for those who can pay a premium for it. In addition, the authors show, hospitals frequently buy neighborhood real estate and advocate for development programs that drive gentrification and displacement. To understand how urban healthcare institutions work with their communities, the authors address power, history, race, and urbanity as much as the workings of the medical industry. These varied initiatives and effects mean that understanding urban hospitals requires seeing them in a new light—not only as medical centers but as complicated urban forces. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers. A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977 (U Illinois Press, 2022) reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home. Mirelsie Velázquez, PhD, is an associate professor of Latina/o Studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work centers history of education, women's history, Puerto Rican studies, gender and sexuality, and teacher education. Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities. Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including: Comparative Studies in Society and History, and City and Society. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mumbai is generally recognized as an environment of extraordinary religious diversity. The city is known at one and the same time for a habitual cosmopolitanism and a series of violent religion-related conflicts and clashes.  While there is much academic scholarship on various aspects of urban history and realities, Michael Stausberg's edited volume Religions, Mumbai Style: Events-Media-Spaces (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first international academic publication focusing on religion(s) in Mumbai. An extended introductory essay provides a scenario of the religious history of the city from the earliest colonial periods to the present; it also discusses such topics as public celebration and landmark religious places. By taking a thematic approach, the contributions highlight the dynamics of religious life in the city. Chapters discuss spatial settings such as so-called slums (Dharavi) and ghettos (Mumbra), but also roadside shrines and taxis. Other chapters focus on class and civil society organizations. Contributions discuss the crossing of religious boundaries, e.g., in dealing with intermarriage and conversion, and challenges faced by religious groups as to how to reconcile the religious diversity of the city with their own desire for recognition. Lines of tension and conflict often run within, and not so much between, communities.The two final chapters of the volume address the reflection of religion in fiction set in Mumbai and in the work of the Bombay poet Arun Kolatkar. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb (U Chicago Press, 2023) tells us there's more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation--and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality. Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote landlord efforts to cram poor families into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. Keogh explores how policymakers ignored suburban inequality, addressing housing segregation between cities and suburbs rather than suburbanites' demands for decent jobs, housing, and schools. By turning our attention to the suburban poor, Keogh reveals poverty wasn't just an urban problem but a suburban one, too. In Levittown's Shadow deepens our understanding of suburbia's history--and points us toward more effective ways to combat poverty today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities. An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate: The Great Migration through Small-Town America (U Illinois Press, 2023) reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighborhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighborhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided.  In Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Steven High challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality. Drawing extensive interviews, a massive and varied archive of imagery, and original photography by David Lewis into a complex chorus, Steven High brings the two communities to life, tracing their history from their earliest years to their decline and their current reality. He extends the analysis of deindustrialization, often focused on single-industry towns, to cities that have seemingly made the post-industrial transition. Steven High is an interdisciplinary oral and public historian with a strong interest in transnational approaches to working-class studies, forced migration, community-engaged research, oral history methodology and ethics, and living archives. He is a professor of History and founding member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every driver in North America shares one miserable, soul-sucking universal experience—being stuck in traffic. But things weren’t always like this. Why is it that the mass transit systems of most cities in the United States and Canada are now utterly inadequate? The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Jake Berman offers a new way to consider this eternal question, with a strikingly visual—and fun—journey through past, present, and unbuilt urban transit. Using meticulous archival research, cartographer and artist Jake Berman has successfully plotted maps of old train networks covering twenty-three North American metropolises, ranging from New York City’s Civil War–era plan for a steam-powered subway under Fifth Avenue to the ultramodern automated Vancouver SkyTrain and the thousand-mile electric railway system of pre–World War II Los Angeles. He takes us through colourful maps of old, often forgotten streetcar lines, lost ideas for never-built transit, and modern rail systems—drawing us into the captivating transit histories of US and Canadian cities. Berman combines vintage styling with modern printing technology to create a sweeping visual history of North American public transit and urban development. With more than one hundred original maps, accompanied by essays on each city’s urban development, this book presents a fascinating look at North American rapid transit systems. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes. In Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival (U Chicago Press, 2023), veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago's influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest's biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance--broadcast from the city's South Loop starting in 1924--flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like "Hillbilly Heaven" in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions. Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City--celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today. Mark Guarino covers national news and culture from Chicago for the Washington Post, ABC News, the New York Times, and other outlets. He was the Midwest bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor for seven years. Mark on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sabina Andron's book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City (Routledge, 2024) focuses on urban surfaces, on exploring their authorship and management, and on their role in struggles for the right to the city. Graffiti, pristine walls, advertising posters, and municipal signage all compete on city surfaces to establish and imprint their values on our environments. It is the first time that the surfacescapes of our cities are granted the entire attention of a book as material, visual, and legal territories. The book includes a critical history of graffiti and street art as contested surface discourses and argues for surfaces as sites of resistance against private property, neoliberal creativity, and the imposition of urban order. It also proposes a seven-point manual for a semiotics of urban surfaces, laying the ground for a new discipline: surface studies. Page after page and layer after layer, surfaces become porous and political and emerge as key spatial conditions for rethinking and re-practicing urban dwelling and spatial justice. They become what the author terms the surface commons. The book will appeal to a wide readership across the disciplines of urban studies, architectural theory and design, graffiti, street art and public art, criminology, semiotics, visual culture, and urban and legal geography. It will also serve as a tool for city scholars, policy makers, artists, and vandals to disrupt existing imaginaries of order, justice, and visibility in cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United States soon after the Civil War was over and eventually joined the Chicago Police Department. He rose through the ranks and became Chief of Police in 1901. But in his spare time and after his retirement in 1905, O’Neill devoted himself to collecting Irish traditional music, ultimately publishing several important large collections of the repertory as well as a book that documents Ireland’s musical landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. O’Malley tells O’Neill’s story within multiple, interwoven contexts including British colonialism, Irish nationalism in the United States, American race relations, the standardization in American institutions, and the internal politics of the Chicago Police Department and the city it protected. O’Malley also reveals fascinating connections between O’Neill’s policework and his approach to Irish music. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the closing years of the nineteenth century, women received subtle--and not so subtle--messages that they shouldn't be in public. Or, if they were, that they were not safe. Breaking the Gender Code: Women and Urban Public Space in the Twentieth-Century United States (U Texas Press, 2023) tells the story of both this danger narrative and the resistance to it. Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts. In doing so, Hickey explores how gender segregation intertwined with other systems of social control, as well as how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and women's experiences of urban space.  Drawing connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence, Hickey unveils both the strikingly successful and the incomplete initiatives of activists who worked to open up public space to women. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consumption opportunities that normalized games of chance and created emotional atmospheres that supported the hedonistic aspects of gambling. Urban spaces and architecture were carefully designed to enable a rapid growth of the casino industry and produce experiences on previous unimaginable scale.  Feeling Lucky: The Production of Gambling Experiences in Monte Carlo and Las Vegas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is a "making of" story about cities which acquired a strange and captivating allure of mystery around them. It is more than a mere descriptive account, however. Combining urban history, the history of consumption, and sociological approaches it presents a compelling comparative history of Monte Carlo and the Las Vegas Strip between the 1860s and 1970s. Paul Franke takes the reader on a journey from arriving at the cities, through the carefully planned urban environments and into the famous casinos. The analysis follows the paths contemporary gamblers would have taken, right to the gambling tables and to the shifting gambling practices across a century. Franke shows that casino entrepreneurs succeeded in producing and selling gambling experiences by controlling spaces, adapt leisure practices and appeal to specific markets. Gamblers on the other hand regarded Monte Carlo and Las Vegas as places to engage in games of chance that would allow them to preserve their political, cultural, and moral identities. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political Scientists Patricia Strach (The University at Albany, State University of New York) and Kathleen S. Sullivan (Ohio University) have written a fascinating and important exploration of trash. More precisely, this is a complex examination and analysis of the development of our municipal sanitation processes and structures, highlighting intersecting policy areas, urban and local politics, and racial, gender, and class politics. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (Cornell UP, 2023) has it all: corruption, gender and racial hierarchies, blame defection, rejection of expertise, case studies across a host of different cities around the country, and the collection of, the disposal of, and the innovations of garbage. Strach and Sullivan examine this multidimensional policy issue from an American political development perspective when the issue really took root in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century. At this point, urban areas saw demographic growth from migration from rural areas as well as the waves of immigrants who came to the U.S. Most U.S. cities found themselves facing the same problem: unsanitary living situations. The initial research found that there were three different forms of trash collection, and they highlighted the processes in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. San Francisco had no formal municipal collection process; instead, the citizens of San Francisco contracted directly with scavengers themselves to remove the garbage. Pittsburgh, as a municipality, contracted out the responsibility—but the process there was one that fed fees back to the municipal leadership. New Orleans, awash in local government corruption, ultimately had a municipal collection program, which was generally far from effective. While these three cities were the basis for the initial research, St. Louis and Charleston were also added to the case studies, with Birmingham and Louisville as secondary examples within the study. The Politics of Trash also explores the way in which citizens need to engage with and comply with the sanitation programs. In order to urge compliance, cities often called on women’s civic organizations to model and advocate for participation in the garbage process. Obviously, these were white women’s civic organizations and while they had been advocates for sanitation processes, they were generally cut out of the development process since women were not to be too close to politics itself. Strach and Sullivan spent time with the Good Housekeeping magazine archives in order to flesh out this dimension of the analysis. The research also highlights how blame was put on immigrants and people of color when the sanitation programs failed—often because of corruption and lack of sufficient resources. The authors note throughout the text that the form that we remove and dispose of waste/garbage/trash now is the same as it was 100 years ago. And while we often separate compostables from recyclables from trash, this is not all that different than the ways that people disposed of their garbage in Pittsburgh, and Charleston, and San Francisco a century ago. And many of the same forms of removal remain in place. The Politics of Trash is a lively and fascinating analysis of a part of our lives that we often don’t consider to be political, but it is political, and has been for quite some time. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the "disorderly" establishments that officials believed housed these activities. This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself.  In Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City (UNC Press, 2023), Emily M. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war. Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991 (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) Kateryna Malaia examines the transformation of domestic spaces and architecture during the period of perestroika (1985-1991) and the first post-Soviet decades. In analysing how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers altered their homes amidst a period of profound socio-cultural change, Malaia provides unique insight into the relationship between the transformation of domestic spaces and the transition of Soviet urbanites into post-Soviet citizens. Kateryna Malaia is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the evolution of residential architecture, the politics of monument construction and demolition, how the collapse of the USSR has transformed urban dwellings, and housing insecurity. Malaia’s writing has been published in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, PLATFORM, Architectural Histories, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented in form and extent, and new socioeconomic structures, including slavery, coinage, and market-exchange. These physical and historical developments were closely linked: building the Republican city was expensive, and meeting such costs had significant implications for urban society. Building Mid-Republican Rome brings both architectural and socioeconomic developments into a single account of urban change. Seth Bernard, an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, assembles a wide array of evidence, from literary sources to coins, epigraphy, and especially archaeological remains, revealing the period's importance for the decline of the Roman state's reliance on obligation and dependency and the rise of slavery and an urban labor market. This narrative is told through an investigation of the evolving institutional frameworks shaping the organization of public construction. A quantitative model of the costs of the Republican city walls reconstructs their economic impact. A new account of building technology in the period allows for a better understanding of the social and demographic profile of the city's builders. Building Mid-Republican Rome thus provides an innovative synthesis of a major Western city's spatial and historical aspects, shedding much-needed light on a seminal period in Rome's development. Ryan Tripp teaches history in California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles’s burgeoning definition as the global city of the twenty-first century. Pairing particular works of art with specific innovations in real estate development, The Speculative City reveals the connections between real estate and contemporary art as they constructed Los Angeles’s present-day cityscape. From banal parking lots to Frank Gehry’s designs for artists’ studios and museums, Newbury examines pivotal interventions by artists and architects, city officials and cultural philanthropists, concluding with an examination of how, in the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, contemporary art emerged as a financial asset to fuel private wealth and urban gentrification. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fashioned a postwar municipal identity through their promotion of what Oda calls transpacific urbanism. Though the Japanese American presence in prewar San Francisco had been minor, it boomed as Japan came into vogue during the early Cold War. The Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was the apotheosis of urban redevelopment to attract Japanese capital and sell Japanese culture. Oda traces the conflicts and collaborations between a diverse set of stakeholders, including municipal planning officials, local merchant-planners, Japanese American professionals, Japanese-Hawaiian bankers, and African American neighborhood organizers. San Francisco’s rise as a major business and cultural hub in the postwar Pacific World benefited the Japanese Americans who called the city home even as it reinscribed their status as perpetual foreigners in American life. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A pioneering Detroit automobile factory. A legendary iron mill at the edge of Pittsburgh. A campus of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. Two monumental train stations, one in Buffalo, the other in Detroit. These once noble sites have since fallen from their towering grace. As local elected leaders did everything they could to destroy what was left of these places, citizens saw beauty and utility in these industrial ruins and felt compelled to act. Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons (Fordham UP, 2023) tells their story.  The culmination of over a dozen years of on-the-ground investigation, ethnography, and historical analysis, author and urbanist Daniel Campo immerses the reader into this postindustrial landscape, weaving the perspectives of dozens of DIY protagonists as well as architects, planners, and preservationists. Working without capital, expertise, and sometimes permission in a milieu dominated by powerful political and economic interests, these do-it-yourself actors are driven by passion and a sense of civic duty rather than profit or political expediency. They have craftily remade these sites into collective preservation projects and democratic grounds for arts and culture, environmental engagement, regional celebrations, itinerant play, and in-the-moment constructions. Their projects are generating excitement about the prospect of Rust belt life, even as they often remain invisible to the uninformed passerby and fall short of professional preservation or environmental reclamation standards. Demonstrating that there is no such thing as a site that is "too far gone" to save or reuse,  Postindustrial DIY is rich with case studies that demonstrate how great architecture is not simply for the elites or wealthy. The citizen preservationists and urbanists described in this book offer looser, more playful, and often more publicly satisfying alternatives to the development practices that have transformed iconic sites into expensive real estate or a clean slate for the next profitable endeavor. Transcending the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, historic preservation, city planning and landscape architecture, Postindustrial DIY suggests new ways to engage, adapt and preserve architecturally compelling sites and bottom-up strategies for Rustbelt revival. Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Environmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jean Yen-chun Lin demonstrates how a rising middle class acquires the capacity for organising in an authoritarian context. Dr. Lin examines how urban residents create civic life through everyday associational activities—learning to defend property rights, fostering participation, and mobilising to address housing-related grievances. She shows that homeowners cultivated petitioning skills, informational networks, and community leadership, which they would later deploy against incinerator projects. To interact with government agencies, they developed citizen science–based tactics, a middle-class alternative to disruptive protests. Homeowners drew on their professional connections, expertise, and fundraising capabilities to produce reports that boosted their legitimacy in city-level dialogue. Although only one of the three incinerator projects Dr. Lin follows was ultimately cancelled, some communities established durable organisations that went on to tackle other environmental problems. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, A Spark in the Smokestacks casts urban Chinese communities as “schools of democracy,” in which residents learn civic skills and build capacity for collective organising. Through compelling case studies of local activism, this book sheds new light on the formation of civil society and social movements more broadly. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Food is increasingly a subject of interest in social sciences: how we cook, consume, and share food is relevant to our social lives. In Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry (Lexington Books, 2022), Jesse Dart draws on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the ways in which free food has become ubiquitous and even compulsory within the tech industry. Packed lunches have nearly disappeared as more companies provide free food with the stated objectives of attracting and retaining employees, increasing productivity, and creating a sense of community through commensality. Dart demonstrates how these food programs alter the relationship between employer and employee, support a flexible type of workforce, and reveal a commensality that is both exclusionary and inclusionary. Through detailed descriptions and insightful analysis, the book illustrates the tension embedded in food perks in the workplace, between food as a kind of gift and as a part of everyday entitlement. Jesse Dart is a social anthropologist and writer whose origins are in southern Illinois. He has spent many years living, researching and studying overseas, most recently in Italy. His academic interests are in the anthropology of work, food, and care. He is currently the senior UX research at Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do Tulsa, Santa Fe, and New Orleans have in common? When viewed from the perspective of Indigenous arts and culture, the answer is quite a bit. In Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma (U Nebraska, 2023), Oklahoma State University professor of English Lindsey Claire Smith draws connections between Indigenous art, particularly writing, and these two cities to the east and west. By focusing on mobility between urban Native spaces, Smith shows how the vibrant arts scene in Tulsa has influenced artists in Indigenous homelands far removed from Oklahoma. By telling stories through fiction, visual art, and other media, Native artists claim these cities as urban homelands, linking together disparate places through the shared link of Indigeneity.  Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived?  In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period. Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, The Keys to Bread and Wine shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia. Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chhaya Kolavalli's book Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City (U Georgia Press, 2023) documents how whiteness can take up space in U.S. cities and policies through well-intentioned progressive policy agendas that support green urbanism. Through in-depth ethnographic research in Kansas City, Kolavalli explores how urban food projects--central to the city's approach to green urbanism--are conceived and implemented and how they are perceived by residents of "food deserts," those intended to benefit from these projects. Through her analysis, Kolavalli examines the narratives and histories that mostly white local food advocates are guided by and offers an alternative urban history of Kansas City--one that centers the contributions of Black and brown residents to urban prosperity. She also highlights how displacement of communities of color, through green development, has historically been a key urban development strategy in the city. Well-Intentioned Whiteness shows how a myopic focus on green urbanism, as a solution to myriad urban "problems," ends up reinforcing racial inequity and uplifting structural whiteness. In this context, fine-grained analysis of how whiteness takes up space in our cities--even through progressive policy agendas--is more important. Kolavalli examines this process intimately and, in so doing, fleshes out our understanding of how racial inequities can be (re)created by everyday urban actors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Dr. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window. Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape?  In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator. Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.   This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices