New Books in Urban Studies

La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900-52 (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the urban history of one of Latin America’s most indigenous large cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Tracing the expansion of the “extramuro,” indigenous neighborhoods beyond the center of the city in these decades, Sierra brings to life the activists who transformed the city leading up to Bolivia’s National Revolution in 1952. Sierra begins by highlighting the racialized debates about space, modernization, and popular politics among elites that dominated Bolivia’s 1925 centenary celebrations and projects for urban development. Many elites hoped to relegate visible signs of indigeneity outside an imaginary line that divided the respectable, wealthy urban core from the mixed indigenous spaces of the urban periphery. However, as Sierra demonstrates, indigenous Bolivians were crucial to the functioning of urban life from the very heart of the old Spanish city to its rapidly expanding markets and outskirts. Therefore, lower class urbanites, indigenous and not, were able to insist upon an alternative vision of the city built upon neighborhood organizations, unions, and popular use of space long before the revolutionary days of urban street battles in April 1952. This book will be of interest to urban historians and Latin American historians alike. Its careful explorations of gender, race, class and the mechanisms that build urban belonging will make this book essential reading for anyone interested in social movements and popular politics. Finally, by tracing the understudied history of neighborhood associations in the early twentieth century, La Paz’s Colonial Specters provides an essential background for scholars seeking to understand the roots of contemporary neighborhood organizations that continue to dominate Bolivia’s popular politics to this day.Luis Sierra is Associate Professor of History at Thomas More University.Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of History at Union College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As projects like Manhattan's High Line, Chicago's 606, China's eco-cities, and Ethiopia's tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (U Chicago Press, 2021), Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany's Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was "greened" with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.Richard E. Ocejo is associate 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

What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism.Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification.Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy Versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires (U Minnesota Press, 2020) is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience.Dr. Lederman is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan-Flint and his research interests span Urban sociology, development and globalization, political economy.Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s.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 Adjunct 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 early twentieth century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins of society became a key player in Urdu journalism. Published in the isolated market town of Bijnor, Madinah grew to hold influence across North India and the Punjab while navigating complex issues of religious and political identity. In Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb uses the previously unexamined perspective of the Madinah to consider Urdu print publics and urban life in South Asia. Through a discursive and material analysis of Madinah, the book explores how Muslims who had settled in ancestral qasbahs, or small towns, used newspapers to facilitate a new public consciousness. The book demonstrates how Madinah connected the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity and delineated the boundaries of a Muslim public conversation in a way that emphasized rootedness to local politics and small urban spaces. The case study of this influential but understudied newspaper reveals how a network of journalists with substantial ties to qasbahs produced a discourse self-consciously alternative to the Western-influenced, secularized cities. Megan Robb augments the analysis with evidence from contemporary Urdu, English, and Hindi papers, government records, private diaries, private library holdings, ethnographic interviews, and training materials for newspaper printers. This thoroughly researched volume recovers the erasure of qasbah voices and proclaims the importance of space and time in definitions of the public sphere in South Asia. Print and the Urdu Public demonstrates how an Urdu newspaper published from the margins became central to the Muslim public constituted in the first half of the twentieth century.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.Kristin Poling is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan—Dearborn, where she teaches modern European and global history and received the 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award.  Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of the book and its use of the glossary as a form open up exciting ways of thinking and seeing. And this is very much to the point for Lopez-Pineiro, because the urban void about which he writes is a phenomenon that resists definition. It is, in his words, "unspecified and underspecified." And that's exactly what makes it so intriguing. Join me in hearing Lopez-Pineiro show us how some of the most seemingly overlooked and neglected areas of our urban environments may end up being the most crucial for our freedoms and our possibilities. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the 2008 financial crisis, complex capital flows have ravaged everyday communities across the globe. Housing in particular has become increasingly precarious. In response, many movements now contest the long-held promises and established terms of the private ownership of housing. Immigrant activism has played an important, if understudied, role in such struggles over collective consumption. In Dispossession and Dissent: Migrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (Stanford UP, 2021), Sophie Gonick examines the intersection of homeownership and immigrant activism through an analysis of Spain's anti-evictions movement, now a hallmark for housing struggles across the globe.Madrid was the crucible for Spain's urban planning and policy, its millennial economic boom (1998–2008), and its more recent mobilizations in response to crisis. During the boom, the city also experienced rapid, unprecedented immigration. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Gonick uncovers the city's histories of homeownership and immigration to demonstrate the pivotal role of Andean immigrants within this movement, as the first to contest dispossession from mortgage-related foreclosures and evictions. Consequently, they forged a potent politics of dissent, which drew upon migratory experiences and indigenous traditions of activism to contest foreclosures and evictions.This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”Sophie L. Gonick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models by architects such as Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferriss, ultimately fell short of their ideals.Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America (Temple UP, 2020) is the first study to focus on pre-Interstate urban elevated highways within American architectural and urban history. Amy Finstein traces the idealistic roots of these superstructures, their contrasting realities once built, their impacts on successive development patterns, and the recent challenges they have posed to contemporary urban designers.Filled with more than 100 historic photographs and illustrations of beaux arts and art deco architecture, Modern Mobility Aloft provides a critical understanding of urban landscapes, transportation, and technological change as cities moved into the modern era.Amy Finstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches modern architectural and urban history.Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we develop solutions to the housing crisis? In Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives (Liverpool UP, 2020), Matthew Thompson, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool, offers a history of collective alternatives to state and market driven housing in Liverpool, drawing out the practical and theoretical lessons from the rich history of the city. The book uses detailed case studies of key developments, from the original experiments in resistance to ‘slum’ clearances to recent examples from the now famous Homebaked in Anfield and the Granby Community Land Trust, which is home to a Turner Prize winning project. The book is open access and will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for readers interested in housing, the history of Liverpool, and lessons on how to think beyond states and markets to address social issues.Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices