New Books in Urban Studies

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of animals. In 1858, the city adopted the Greensward Plan and began the long process of reshaping the 843 acres of land into a park where everything—from the trees to the trails to the inhabitants—would be meticulously planned to benefit New Yorkers and to promote the city as a global metropolis among the likes of London and Paris. But this vision of Central Park embodied white elite European values, and disagreements about which creatures belonged in the park’s waters and green spaces have often perpetuated systems of oppression.Illuminating the multispecies story of Central Park from the 1850s to the 1970s in Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History (University of Washington Press, 2024), Dr. Dawn Day Biehler examines the vibrant and intimately connected lives of humans and nonhuman animals in the park. She reveals stories of grazing sheep, teeming fish, nesting swans, migrating warblers, and escaped bison as well as human New Yorkers’ attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Dr. Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a place where animals and humans alike have vied for power and belonging.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

Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged. In Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, Timothy Weaver argues that the intercurrent impact of these orders has created a constant battle for power.Weaver brings these clashes to the fore by showing how New York City politics has been shaped by these conflicting orders. He examines the transformation of the city's political economy in the aftermath of the 1975 fiscal crisis through neoliberal real estate development and privatization, the conservative rise of law-and-order politics in the 1970s to 1990s, and the efforts of the city's egalitarians to respond to each of these shifts through social movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter.Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City (Temple UP, 2025) belies glib assumptions about the city's liberal character. Weaver reveals the metropolis not as a homogenous political whole, but as a site in which the victories and defeats of rival political forces change the terms of local citizenship for the millions of residents who call the city home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. Chinatowns are vital political actors, places where culture, history, and community come together to form bulwarks of power as places that have historically had considerable agency in shaping their own destiny. In this close study of Los Angeles' Chinatown neighborhood in the early twenty first century, Hom argues that the neighborhood is a complex places, where urban trends such as gentrification and displacement have been at once both pushed against and, at times, encouraged, both from within and without. The Power of Chinatown puts people at the center of the story, arguing that for all its tourist appeal, it is those who live in this place who care about it the most, and thus are willing to fight the hardest to protect what makes this neighborhood truly a community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet – all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have little to no idea how these systems work. How is water treated? How do cities manage rainwater? Why do traffic jams exist? How is electricity generated and distributed? What happens to trash after it is picked up? How does the Internet work?In The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives (Prometheus Books, 2025), world-renowned urban engineering expert Sybil Derrible reveals the behind-the-scenes machinations of the foundational systems that make our societies function. Visiting sixteen cities around the world and their unique approaches to organizational challenges – from water distribution in Hong Kong to waste management in Tokyo, and from Chicago’s power grid to low Earth orbit satellites in space – this highly readable book uses fascinating case studies and historical detours to show how infrastructure works – and, sometimes, doesn’t.With large-scale infrastructure repairs looming and the need for existing infrastructure to be transformed, the book also shows how infrastructure can be more sustainable and resilient. After reading The Infrastructure Book, readers will never look at a city the same way.Sybil Derrible is a professor of urban engineering and director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a world-renowned scholar on infrastructure and a lead author on the United Nations Environmental Program’s Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) report. He received the Walter L. Huber Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers and a CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across a diverse set of locations—including a food bank with ties to the EU, a social restaurant serving low-cost meals made from supermarket surplus by an emergent immigrant labor force, and a social inclusion program in an urban market with a "zero food waste" pop-up cafe. In Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State (UNC Press, 2024), Alexander argues that these efforts, in concert with innovative policy, effectively recirculate wasted food to new publics and produce what she terms a "spectrum of edibility." According to Alexander, these models face challenges—including reproducing the very power dynamics across race, class, and citizenship status they seek to circumvent. They also mirror the challenges of the everyday operations of the European social welfare state, which is increasingly reliant on NGOs to meet provisioning promises. Yet she finds that they also move the needle forward to reduce food waste across one city, providing an example for major urban centers around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story.These old towns and their turbulent histories have been key sites in Europe’s ongoing theater of politics and war. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, the acclaimed writer Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history.Uncovering hidden stories behind these old and old-seeming façades in The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Kohn offers us a new understanding of the politics of European history-making—showing how our visits to old towns could promote belonging over exclusion, and empathy over indifference.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

The relationship between fear people experience in their lives and the government often informs key questions about the rule of law and justice. In nations where the rule of law is unevenly applied, interpreting the people involved in its enforcement allows for contextualized understanding about why that unevenness occurs and is perpetuated.Joshua Barker’s State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City published by Duke University Press (2024) examines policing in Bandung, the capital city of the province of West Java in Indonesia, to show how fear and violence are produced and reproduced. He makes analysis of the emergence of informal and formal forms of political order in Bandung based on ethnographic and historical evidence about neighborhood watch groups, street-level toughs, vigilantes, and people in the police, from clerks to officers. This book provides a compelling interpretive framework for understanding episodes of violence and different forms of authority in Indonesian state-society relations as it does for many other parts of the world where unresolved colonial legacies shape the production of policing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a major work that provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programs of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia.Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and East Asia.Miles Glendinning is a Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh and the Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies.This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, 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 to the City of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.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

Municipalities around the world have increasingly used inclusionary housing programs to address their housing shortages. Inclusionary Housing and Urban Inequality in London and New York City: Gentrification Through the Back Door (Routledge, 2024) problematizes those programs in London and New York City by offering an empirical, research-based perspective on the socio-spatial dimensions of inclusionary housing approaches in both cities. The aim of those programs is to produce affordable housing and foster greater socio-economic inclusion by mandating or incentivizing private developers to include affordable housing units within their market-rate residential developments. The starting point of this book is the so-called “poor door” practice in London and New York City, which results in mixed-income developments with separate entrances for “affordable housing” and wealthier market-rate residents. Focusing on this “poor door” practice allowed for a critical look at the housing program behind it. By exploring the relationship between inclusionary housing, new-build gentrification, and austerity urbanism, this book highlights the complexity of the planning process and the ambivalences and interdependencies of the actors involved. Thereby, it provides evidence that the provision of affordable housing or social mixing through this program has only limited success and, above all, that it promotes – in a sense through the “back door” – the very gentrification and displacement mechanisms it is supposed to counteract. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of housing studies, planning, and urban sociology, as well as planners and policymakers who are interested in the consequences of their own housing programs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices