New Books in Urban Studies

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why we need to write about difficult topics. Four American towns trying to save themselves. The structural processes behind poverty. A discussion of the book The Fight to Save the Town. Today’s book is: The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader, 2022), by Michele Wilde Anderson, which examines how decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. These discarded places include big cities, small cities, rural areas, and historic suburbs. Some are diverse communities, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by the media for their poverty and their politics, ignoring how our smallest governments shape people’s safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments haven’t just reflected inequality—they have helped drive it. But Anderson argues that a new generation of local leaders are figuring out how to turn poverty traps back into gateway cities.Our guest is: Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School. Her writing has appeared in the Stanford Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, among other publications. Prior to joining Stanford, she worked as a visiting professor, assistant professor, a research fellow, and an environmental law fellow. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Housing Law Project and a board member at the East Bay Community Law Center in Oakland. She holds a joint appointment with Stanford’s new Doerr School of Sustainability, and lives with her family in San Francisco.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the co-producer of the Academic Life.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, by Daisy Pitkin Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty, by Willie Baptist and Jan Rehmann How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, by Aaron Foley Dog Whistle Politics, by Ian Henry Lopez The Miseducation of the Barrio: The School to Prison Pipeline, by Julia Mendoza You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (Stanford UP, 2022) examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment.The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change (Manchester UP, 2020) draws on a major mixed-methods research project by Dr. Alan Warde, Dr. Jessica Paddock and Dr. Jennifer Whillans about dining out in England. The book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities.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

Shinjuku Ni-chome is a nightlife district in central Tokyo filled with bars and clubs targeting the city's gay male community. Typically understood as a "safe space" where same-sex attracted men and women from across Japan's largest city can gather to find support from a relentlessly heteronormative society, Thomas Baudinette's Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (U Michigan Press, 2021) reveals that the neighborhood may not be as welcoming as previously depicted in prior literature. Through fieldwork observation and interviews with young men who regularly frequent the neighborhood's many bars, the book reveals that the district is instead a space where only certain performances of gay identity are considered desirable. In fact, the district is highly stratified, with Shinjuku Ni-chome's bar culture privileging "hard" masculine identities as the only legitimate expression of gay desire and thus excluding all those men who supposedly "fail" to live up to these hegemonic gendered ideals. Through careful analysis of media such as pornographic videos, manga comics, lifestyle magazines and online dating services, this book argues that the commercial imperatives of the Japanese gay media landscape and the bar culture of Shinjuku Ni-chome act together to limit the agency of young gay men so as to better exploit them economically. Exploring the direct impacts of media consumption on the lives of four key informants who frequent the district's gay bars in search of community, fun and romance, Regimes of Desire reveals the complexity of Tokyo's most popular "gay town" and intervenes in debates over the changing nature of masculinity in contemporary Japan.Alexandra Hambleton is an assistant professor at Tsuda University in Tokyo, Japan. I write on media, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Japan with a particular interest in pornography and sex-positive feminism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra (UNC Press, 2021) examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always associate them with the central government. Elise Massicard's Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2022) is the first book to investigate how muhtars carry out their role—not only what they are supposed to do, but how they actually operate—to provide an ethnographic study of the state as viewed from its margins. It starts from the premise that the seeming "margin" of state administration is not peripheral at all, but instructive as to how it functions.As Massicard shows, muhtars exist at the intersection of everyday life and the exercise of power. Their position offers a personalized point of contact between citizens and state institutions, enabling close oversight of the citizenry, yet simultaneously projecting the sense of an accessible state to individuals. Challenging common theories of the state, Massicard outlines how the position of the muhtar throws into question an assumed dichotomy between domination and social resistance, and suggests that considerations of circumvention and accommodation are normal attributes of state-society functioning.Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Dispossession as Delivery: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press; 2022), Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows that the government does this in the name of preserving the order they imagine is necessary to deliver housing to its citizens. Based upon a decade of participant observation in two land occupations in Cape Town, this book provides a novel, relational understanding about group formation and how collective actions interact with the state.Richard E. Ocejo is professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap between this description and the reality of everyday life. In this gap resides a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority, to some degree denied full benefits of equal urban citizenship.Much of the discourse concerning this descriptive gap focuses on attempts to preserve or contextualise the claim to social liberalism from the Israeli Jewish perspective. A new book by the anthropologist Andreas Hackl, takes a different point of view. The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv (Indiana UP, 2022) focuses on what he terms the “immersive invisibility” of Israel’s minority Palestinian population: the challenges they face, the strategies they deploy, and ultimately the consequences of acts of personal and collective self-censorship that define and circumscribe their everyday life and presence in Tel Aviv.The Invisible Palestinians documents the experiences of a diverse Palestinian population in the Jewish Israeli city: residents and commuters, professionals and day laborers, activists, artists, students. Differences of education, economic wherewithal, and social class aside, all share one central experience: circumscribed citizenship of the Jewish metropolis.Andreas Hackl is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as World Development, American Ethnologist, and Social Anthropology. He has worked as a consultant with the International Labour Organization and as a newspaper correspondent based in Jerusalem.Akin Ajayi (@AkinAjayi) is a writer and editor, based in Tel Aviv. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the United Kingdom left the European Union, during a period of international and domestic turmoil, London found itself at a turning point. This critical moment presents an opportunity to look back, with a distinctive perspective, a focus on London in its national and, perhaps even more importantly, its international contexts, rather than on the city itself in isolation.It is the interactions of London that Black considers, and he does so in order to address the question as to why London became the foremost international city, how it sustained that position, and what its future holds.A Brief History of London (Little Brown, 2022) is as much about economics and culture as it is about politics and society. It deals with migration, communications, empire and cultural energy, rather than the mechanisms of parish vestries. London's earlier period is covered, but the principal focus is on the last half millennium, the period during which London became a major trader with the trans-oceanic world, and the ruler of trans-oceanic colonies, while the English language became an increasingly important cultural medium, one centred on London.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational projects that deployed various discursive and non-discursive practices aimed at creating ideologically homogeneous and modern places. Xining or Ziling is the capital of Qinghai (Tib. mtsho sngon) province and it is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau and home to over 200, 000 Tibetans.Dr. Grant shows how specific processes complicate the rural/urban divide and allow for the emergence of a “regional modernity” where Tibetan urbanites develop tools for the “remediation of the Chinese Dream,” and subtly challenge and subvert the social and ethnic hierarchies promoted through urban development policies. Despite the idea of the city or Trungcher (grong 'khyer) as a place of moral decay and social disintegration, instead of rejecting and retreating from it, Tibetans view the city as a site of social and political possibility; where they can assert their social existence and cultural identity through creative forms of cultural expression and entrepreneurial endeavor. Palden Gyal is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Tibetan and Late Imperial Chinese history at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices