New Books in Urban Studies

Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app form, the map remains a long-standing icon of British design and ingenuity. Hailed by the art and design community as a cultural artefact, it has also inspired other culturally important pieces of artwork, and in 2006 was voted second in BBC 2’s Great British Design Test.But it almost didn’t make it out of the notepad it was designed in.The story of how the Underground map evolved is almost as troubled and fraught with complexities as the transport network it represents. Mapping the Underground was not for the faint-hearted – it rapidly became a source of frustration, and in some cases obsession – often driving its custodians to the point of distraction. The solution, when eventually found, would not only revolutionise the movement of people around the city but change the way we visualise London forever.Caroline Roope’s wonderfully researched book The History of the London Underground Map (Pen & Sword, 2022) casts the Underground in a new light, placing the world’s most famous transit network and its even more famous map in its wider historical and cultural context, revealing the people not just behind the iconic map, but behind the Underground’s artistic and architectural heritage. From pioneers to visionaries, disruptors to dissenters – the Underground has had them all – as well as a constant stream of (often disgruntled) passengers. It is thanks to the legacy of a host of reformers that the Tube and the diagram that finally provided the key to understanding it, have endured as masterpieces of both engineering and design.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise Ashley, Associate Professor and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Business and Management, explores the history and practice of social mobility into one of Britain’s key professions. The book offers a history of the City and its evolution from a closed world of gentlemen to a seemingly open meritocracy. At the same time, the book destroys the myth of merit, demonstrating how where people went to school, the place they did a degree, who they know, and how they present themselves still determine who is a success. Offering a critique of the City’s superficial attempts to increase its class, race, and gender diversity, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone wishing to understand how inequalities continue in contemporary society.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark D. Calder's Bethlehem's Syriac Christians: Self, Nation and Church in Dialogue and Practice (Gorgias Press, 2017) is anthropological study of Syriac Orthodox Christian identity in a time of displacement, upheaval, and conflict. For some Syriac Orthodox Christians in Bethlehem, their self-articulation - the means by which they connect themselves to others, things, places and symbols - is decisively influenced by their eucharistic ritual. This ritual connects being siryāni to a redeemed community or 'body', and derives its identity in large part from the Incarnation of God as an Aramaic-speaking Bethlehemite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (U Washington Press, 2022), that image had to be built on bulldozed neighborhoods of migrant workers. Asaka argues it was these individuals, from Japan, Europe, and Indigenous to the Puget Sound, who worked in the extractive industries that built Seattle, and whose presence was threatening to elites who wished for Seattle to reflect their own genteel visions of America's future. In the twenty first century, evidence of these workers lives and neighborhoods is hard to find in the city's urban geography, and Asaka's work excavates what has been a purposefully hidden history of Seattle's complex founding.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is rare to see colleges and universities achieve major and rapid changes in their national rankings. Richard Freeland, the president emeritus of Northeastern University, discusses how they were able to achieve this at Northeastern during his decade leading one of the nation’s largest private universities by doubling down and improving their historic strength in co-operative education. In parallel, Northeastern was able to achieve dramatic improvements in retention and graduation rates, from just 44% to over 70%. He also shares insights from his tenure leading the Massachusetts public higher education system.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do authoritarian political leaders use the built environment to shape understandings of national identity and history? How do major urban development projects affect the political fortunes of authoritarian governments? Why do so many people routinely experience social control and the threat of violence in nominally democratic regimes? These are some of the questions that the contributors to the new edited volume Spatializing Authoritarianism (Syracuse UP, 2022) hope to answer. My guest today, the volume’s editor Natalie Koch, will discuss what geographers can contribute to the study of authoritarianism.Natalie Koch is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. Her previous works include a solo-authored book, The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia (Cornell UP, 2018) and articles on a range of topics related to nationalism and nation-building, the politics of natural resources, urban politics, and the geopolitics of Central Asia and the Middle East. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago's Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy "queens" owned stakes in lucrative operations while women writers and clerks canvased the neighborhood, passed out winnings, and kept the books. In Dream Books and Gamblers: Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game (University of Illinois Press, 2022). Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach examines the complexities of policy and gender politics in Chicago. Policy provided Black women with a livelihood for themselves and their families. At the same time, navigating gender expectations, aggressive policing, and other hazards of the infromal economy led them to refashion ideas about Black womanhood and respectability. Policy earnings also funded above-board enterprises ranging from neighborhood businesses to philanthropic institutions, and Schlabach delves into the various ways Black women straddled the illegal policy business and reputable community involvement.Vivid and revealing, Dream Books and Gamblers tells the stories of Black women in the underground economy and how they used their work to balance the demands of living and laboring in Black Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed metropolis on the south-western hinterlands of New Delhi, that has long been touted as India's flagship neoliberal city. Thomas G. Cowan's book Subaltern Frontiers: Property and Labour in the Neoliberal Indian City (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells a story of India's remarkable urban transformation by examining the politics of land and labour that have shaped the city of Gurgaon. The book examines how the country's flagship post-liberalisation urban project has been shaped and filtered through agrarian and subaltern histories, logics, and subjects. In doing so, the book explores how the production of globalised property and labour in contemporary urban India is filtered through colonial instruments of land governance, living histories of uneven agrarian development, material geographies of labour migration, and the worldly aspirations of peasant-agriculturalists.Garima Jaju is currently a post-doc at Cambridge University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma (Duke UP, 2022), Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma’s moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied movement that determine survival. In reflecting on the centrality of traffic to life, Lifelines explores a fundamental question: How does medicine move us?This book is available open access. Please follow this link to access this book free completely of cost. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence.Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly?From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya’s generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present).This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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