New Books in Urban Studies

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System (U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how disabled people navigate a transportation system that is far from accessible. Velho finds disabled passengers constantly hacking and finding workarounds, including lots of fix-y maintenance tasks, to get from one place to another. While these workarounds involve obvious creativity, they are also the products of an unequal system and the failure to enact a more-thoroughgoing and radically-transformative redesigning of public transportation systems in the name of accessibility. Vinsel and Velho also touch on a wide range of other topics, including issues of theory and method, and they talk about what Velho is up to next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) is unique in focusing on just one band from one city – but the story of Tat Ming Pair, in so many ways, is the story of Hong Kong's recent decades, from the Handover to the Umbrella Movement to 2019's standoff. A comprehensive, theoretically informed study of the sonic history and present of Hong Kong through the prism of Tat Ming Pair, this book will be of interest to cultural studies scholars, scholars of Hong Kong, and those who study the arts in East Asia. The is an open access book. You can download the book here  Yiu Fai Chow is Professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing of Hong Kong Baptist University.Jeroen de Kloet is Professor of Globalisation Studies at the University of Amsterdam.Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order.Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. The members of PCRG are Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta. Imperial Policing analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.Andy Clarno is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research examines racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire in the early 21st century, with a focus on racialized policing and struggles for social justice in contexts of extreme inequality.Michael De Anda Muñiz is an Assistant Professor in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at San Francisco State University. His research interests include culture, art, community engagement, space, and resistance.Ilā Ravichandran is an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Dr. Ravichandran’s research interests include science, knowledge, technology, biopolitics, policing, surveillance, counterinsurgency, state, queerness & Black studies.Timi Koyejo is a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor for the City of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who choose to cycle for recreation, Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility (U Washington Press, 2024) offers an alternative to the thinking that dominates mainstream sustainable transportation discussions. The book's insights come from bicycle activists, commuters, food delivery workers, event organizers, planners, technicians, shop owners, transportation planners, architects, and manufacturers. Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, it shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places.In the episode, we make a reference to an essay Jonathan Anjaria wrote for Ethnographic Marginalia. You can read the essay here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America’s enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller, Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, argues in Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century(The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph Heathcott discusses his latest book, Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic (Fordham University Press, 2023), an engaging hybrid of text and visual that features a trove of his personal photography of urban spaces throughout NYC's most diverse borough. Including: airports, overgrown yards, possibly the last living speakers of indigenous languages, the Queens Public Library, racial covenants and civil resistance in early real estate development, and much more that, like the borough itself, is centerless, mundane, surprising, vibrant, challenging, and beautifully contradictory.Joseph Heathcott is Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School. His work has appeared in a wide range of venues, including books, academic journals, magazines, exhibits, and juried art shows. His most recent books include Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World; The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design: Global Perspectives from Architectural History; and Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900-1930.Tyler Thier is a writing administrator, adjunct professor, and freelance critic. His research is concerned with violent writings and controversial media -- namely, content produced by hate groups and other extremists. He writes a lot about visuals (specifically "bad" or otherwise maligned pieces of pop culture) and how they shape our social realities. For better and worse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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

A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city.Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshid Emami expands our understanding of Isfahan in a global context. He takes the reader on an evocative journey through the city’s markets, promenades, and coffeehouses, bringing to life the social landscapes that animated the lives of urban dwellers and shaped their perceptions of themselves and the world. In doing so, Emami reveals seventeenth-century Isfahan as more than a cluster of beautiful monuments and gardens. It was a cosmopolitan city, where senses and materials, nature and artifice, and ritual and sociability acted in unison, engendering urban experiences that became paramount across the globe during the early modern period.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities.The contours of mediaeval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Dr. Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s mediaeval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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

White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space (Policy Press, 2024) examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies.Dr. Miguel Montalva Barba focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialism and critical race theory to explore how self-identified progressive White residents perceive their gentrifying neighborhood and how they make sense of their positionality.Using the extended case method, as well as in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis and visual/media analysis, the author reveals how systemic racialized inequality persists even in a politically progressive borough.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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