New Books in Urban Studies

Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession.Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtness in Mexico (Stanford UP, 2020) examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The poet Walt Whitman wrote in his 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass that New York was a “City of the world! (for all races are here, All lands of the earth make contributions here…”)How that city came to be on the island of Manhattan, and what it has meant for the United States and the world over the centuries, is the subject of Marc Aronson’s new book Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea (Candlewick Press, 2021).Aronson argues that the density of Manhattan has put different kinds of people close to each other--fostering curiosity, conflict and new cultural hybrids ranging from blackface minstrelsy to musical theater to street photography To give a focus and structure to his story, Aronson organizes his material around streets and squares that have, in different times, framed formative encounters between New Yorkers: Wall Street, Union Square, Forty Second Street, 125th Street, and West Fourth Street. Aronson’s narrative reaches from the days of Munsee villages to the recent past, but he devotes special attention to Manhattan since 1900, when the island at the center of New York City matured into a global capital of culture, media, and finance. While well aware of the inequalities and injustice present in Manhattan and New York City, and the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, Aronson keeps with faith with the idea of Manhattan as an inclusive home and a site of great cultural energy. Four Streets and a Square is accompanied by a rich array of digital sources and resources at https://marcaronson.com/four-streets-and-a-square/.Aronson, an author, editor and historian, is on the graduate faculty at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. He was born in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey.Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York (Cornell, paperback, 2019) and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia, 2019). He can be reached at rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013).Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hong Kong is almost impossible to explain to those not from the city. Too often, the city has had to struggle with shorthand used by those writing about the city from afar—for audiences with little understanding of what the place is actually like.The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (Random House: 2022) by Karen Cheung is a deep dive into the things that make Hong Kong different, diverse and difficult.In this interview, Karen and I talk about Hong Kong—the home city for both of us—and what it means to grow up in such a dense, unsure and misunderstood place.Karen Cheung (karen-cheung.com) is a writer and journalist from Hong Kong. Her essays, cultural criticism, and reported features have appeared on This American Life and in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She was formerly a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press and was co–founding editor of Still / Loud, an indie magazine about culture and music in Hong Kong.Karen can be followed on Twitter at @karenklcheung.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Impossible City. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cambodia is home to Angkor, one of the most important archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. Greater Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, was a low-density city covered about a 1000 sq km and was the home of between 750,000 to 900,000 people in the 12th century CE. The urban complex was largely abandoned in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its central 300 sq km is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and includes the world-famous temple of Angkor Wat, one of humankind’s largest religious monuments which has continued in use to the present day.In this episode, world-renowned archaeologist Professor Roland Fletcher joins Dr Natali Pearson to examine the structure of Angkor’s social and spatial organisation; the way the urban complex operated in its environment. Reflecting on the metropolis’ demise, Roland argues that archaeological study of Angkor can teach us lessons about the vulnerability of modern-day urbanism in a time of increasing climate risk.About Roland Fletcher:Roland Fletcher is Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Roland is also Director of the Greater Angkor Project – a collaboration between the University of Sydney, the Authority for the Protection of the Site and Management of the Region of Angkor (APSARA) in Cambodia, and the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), that has been ongoing since 1998. He is the author of The Limits of Settlement Growth, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, and has published extensively on urbanism.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (University of Texas Press, 2022), Anadelia Romo argues that visual images were central to the shift from emulating Europe to valuing Brazil’s own local culture, which took place from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The book focuses on Salvador, Bahia, a city in the northeast of Brazil known for its rich Black culture, history of slavery, and tourism industry. Using print culture associated with tourism, Romo shows how representations of Afro-Brazilians engaged ideas of race and nation at the time. The book is filled with photographs and illustrations from Pierre Verger, Carybe, and other visual culture producers, which evidences how the city was rendered. These images featured Afro-Brazilians as central urban figures as well as the festive and religious culture of the city. Yet, in giving less attention to racism, these images masked deeply entrenched racial inequality.Anadelia A. Romo is an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. She is the author of Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.Restoration has been a touchstone of United States environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? In Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022), Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for Scientific American, Slate, Environmental History, Environmental Humanities, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and other publications.Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. She is also the creator and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The continuing crisis in Xinjiang has, thanks to the work of many scholars and reporters, led to greatly increased awareness of the region's history and Uyghur population among publics outside China. But so far less appreciated have been the specific ways in which the targeted regime of Uyghur imprisonment operates, and its creeping emergence over the course of the 2010s.Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022) is therefore a vital addition to our understanding of this emergency. Based on long-term fieldwork in Urumqi and elsewhere, this is a chilling and deeply moving portrait of processes of dispossession and ‘reeducation’ whose advance has intensified since the 2014 onset of what the Chinese government calls the ‘People’s War on Terror’. Combining ethnographic nuance with piercing insight into grand colonial processes, Byler both offers an encompassing theory of the technological, economic and political forces which have brought this situation about, and demonstrates its horrifying effects on ordinary people who face an unassailable edifice of state and corporate violence.Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State's History (2nd Edition; SUNY Press, 2022), Bruce W. Dearstyne presents New York State history through an exploration of nineteen dramatic events. From the launch of the state government in April 1777 through the debut of the musical play Hamilton in 2015, Dearstyne puts the fascinating people who made history at the center of the story: John Jay, the lead writer of the first state constitution; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the irrepressible crusader for women's rights; Glenn Curtiss, New York's aviation pioneer; Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers; and Lois Gibbs, an environmental activist. This new edition is updated with four recent significant events, including the stories of New Yorkers who joined the Occupy protests and those who struggled through Superstorm Sandy. The stories in this book illustrate the spirit of New York--the elusive traits that make New York State unique--and the complexity of its history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Housing in the Margins: Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin's Allotment Gardens (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) offers a theoretically informed and empirically detailed exploration of unruly housing practices and their governance at the periphery of Berlin. An original empirical contribution to understanding housing precarity in the context of the German housing crisis A novel approach to theorizing the nexus of informality and the state in ways that bridge analytical divides between debates about Northern and Southern states An innovative account of urban development in Berlin that contributes to the limited discussions of urban informality in Euro-American cities A theoretical understanding of the ways in which negotiations and transgressions are embedded in the making of urban order A historically informed narrative of the development of allotment gardens in Berlin with a particular focus on housing practices at these sites.Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit https://annazhelnina.com/ or follow Anna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnnaZhelnina Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices