New Books in Urban Studies

Folklorist David J. Puglia is an assistant professor at the City University of New York and in his latest book - Tradition, Urban Identity, and the Baltimore “Hon": The Folk in the City (Lexington Books, 2018) – he considers the term “hon” and its significance to residents of Baltimore. In that city, the word has a particular salience and is often associated a certain type of blue-collar woman who sports a beehive hairdo and cat-eye glasses. More generally “hon” invokes “a place-based notion of authenticity and community for which Baltimore was supposedly once renowned” (xii).Following chapters which look at the history of the folkloristic study urban traditions and the history and sociocultural landscape of contemporary Baltimore, Puglia presents a series of case studies that all involve the word “hon”. The first involves “Hon Man” who created placards featuring the word that he then affixed to “Welcome to Baltimore” signs – to the approval of some residents and the dismay of others. The second concerns “Honfest” – an annual event which Puglia likens to a “battleground where city dwellers could negotiate what Baltimore was and what it meant to be a Baltimorean” (91). The last revolves around the outcry – aka the “Hontroversy” - which erupted when the public caught wind Denise Whiting - owner of a popular local diner called Café Hon and a founder of Honfest - appeared to claim ownership of the term as part of a branding campaign; as Puglia details, an intervention by the famously hot-tempered celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay eventually led to peace. Overall Puglia argues that “the folklorist’s challenge in the new century is to address cities as contested social spaces in which folklore, or the creation of practices that appear folkloric, services residents across ethnic lines” (xv).As noted by Lisa Gabbert, “Puglia expertly traces how in Baltimore, the word 'hon' moved from a stigmatized to an esteemed vernacular for purposes of collective civic representation and the controversies such a move engendered. In doing so he adeptly explores important issues of class, identity, representation, commodification and the privatization of folklore”. In sum, Gabbert states, Tradition, Urban Identity, and the Baltimore “Hon" is “an excellent case study of the processes of the selection and invention of tradition in a city that deserves more attention to its folk traditions”.Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) Dr. Rosalind Fredericks illuminates the history of state-citizen relations and economic and political restructuring in Dakar by focusing on the city’s complex history of garbage collection in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from activist clean-up movements to NGO-led development projects to massive sanitation worker strikes. She pays particular attention to the themes of generation, gender, and religion in her analysis of the ways in which people become integrated into the infrastructural life of the city; in so doing, she invites us to expand our understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. This fascinating book will be useful not only for anthropologists, cultural geographers, and scholars of West Africa, but also for anyone interested in the emerging interdisciplinary fields of new materialism and discard studies.Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, City Life: The New Urban Australia (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), Seamus O’Hanlon, an Associate Professor at Monash University, explores the economic, social, cultural, and demographic changes in Australian cities over the last four decades. Globalization, de-industrialization and mass immigration have changed the makeup of major cities like Sydney and Melbourne as well as smaller, regional cities, and in turn, how the nation sees itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2018 has been a great year for books about sub-national government in the United States. The year ends with another to add to the list. Jessica Trounstine has written Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Trounstine is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced.Segregation by Design draws on a century of data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments design policies that create race and class segregation. Trounstine maps the historical development of segregation and the ways that suburbanization has fit with patterns of residential segregation. Zoning laws and public goods have been used to advance the goal of some residents for racially segregated neighborhoods. She argues that local governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I don’t mean to make a scene, but please open your eyes and look around. There are complex scenes everywhere and we have all served witness to them. A scene is an experience in which we feel connected to other people. Scenes also cultivate skills, create ambiances, and nourish communities.In Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life(University of Chicago Press, 2016), Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark examine the patterns and consequences of amenities that shape our daily lives. They articulate the core dimensions of the theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy of local and global scenes (e.g., churches, cafes, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more). The scenes that make up a city are reciprocally part of shaping (and reshaping) the economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions of its people. Silver and Clark challenge reimagine the city in cultural terms and to think about the influences of place.Dr. Daniel Aaron Silver is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He conducts research in the areas of social theory, cities, culture, and cultural policy. Silver is co-editor of The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy and for Theory (the Newsletter of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Sociological Theory). He was the recipient of the 2013 Theory Prize and received an honorable mention for the 2015 Junior Theorist Award, both from the American Sociological Association Theory Section. Silver is currently researching the role of arts and culture in city politics, economics, and residential patterns; the enduring political orders of cities; the use of diagrams and figures in social theory; and international variations in how sociological theory is taught.Dr. Terry Nichols Clark is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the International Coordinator of the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project, which is surveying city officials across the United States and in thirty-five other countries. Clark also serves as a board member for the Cultural Policy Center at University of Chicago; he is a Task Force Member for Advancing Chicago’s Civic Agenda Through the Arts; and serves as Co-Chair for the Cultural Institutions Committee, Task Force on Quality of Life in Bronzeville, Chicago. Clarks research interest is in the use of decision-making theory to approach urban politics and other social phenomena.Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the continuous process that occurs with placemaking at farmers’ market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is housing so expensive in so many cities, and what can be done about it? Join us as we speak with long-time San Francisco housing activist Randy Shaw about his book Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America? (University of California Press, 2018). In it, he lays out the causes and consequences of the affordability crisis in San Francisco, Oakland, LA, Austin, New York, Denver, Seattle, and elsewhere.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history, global history, and comparative history to produce a monograph on the similar effects urban change had on Cairo and Berlin: ordinary citizens, between 1860 and 1910, negotiated between how the city was changing and how that affected how they saw love, honor, and trust. We talk about what we can gain from urban history, how to talk about gender in histories of emotion, what role modernity has in Middle Eastern studies, and the body in Middle Eastern history. As always, we also check in with the field of Middle Eastern history and talk about what the archives look like and what the next generation of scholars needs to be thinking of as they head into the changing landscape of Middle Eastern archives.Joseph Ben Prestel is assistant professor of history at the Free University (FU) of Berlin, where he teaches global, European, and Middle Eastern history. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut for the 2017-2018 academic year winter term and will be a Fung Global fellow at Princeton University for the 2018-19 academic year. He received his PhD in modern history from FU Berlin in April 2015. Before joining FU’s history department, he held a position as pre-doctoral researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions within Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He is a co-founder and editor of the Global Urban History Blog.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage.  Adolphe Alphand, as director of the newly established park service, brought his own democratic and egalitarian vision to urban planning.  In Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), Dr. Richard S. Hopkins examines the urban landscape of Paris from the Second Empire through the Third Republic as an expression of France’s revolutionary past in which disparate groups—from planners, reformers, and engineers to neighborhood residents and park visitors—came together to create, define, and negotiate this new public space.Richard S. Hopkins is an Assistant Professor of History at Widener University. He teaches courses in European, urban, environmental, and gender history. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of modern France, urban space, and the relationship between the individual and state authority. He is co-editor of the book Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, University of Nebraska Press (forthcoming January, 2019).Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Urban politics scholars have long studied what makes cities interesting. Rarely, however, have these unique qualities of cities been studied in the national context. How do representatives of cities advocate for urban interests in Washington? Do they work together for cities, as a whole, or individually, for district needs within each city?Thomas Ogorzalek’s new book, The Cities on the Hill: How Urban Institutions Transformed National Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) takes on these questions. Ogorzalek is assistant professor of political science and urban studies at Northwestern University.Studying the “long” New Deal, Ogorzalek finds that on certain issues, especially the provision of public goods and redistribution, city representatives stick together. Members of Congress who represent districts based in cities vote as one, even controlling for other factors, such as partisanship, and diversity of ideology. Supporting this consensus are institutions working to advocate for cities, including local political parties and newly formed interest groups, such as the US Conference of Mayors.This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In cities ravaged by years of bloodshed and warfare, how did black populations, many formerly enslaved, help shape the new world that the Civil War left open for them to mold? In Dr. Hilary Green’s book Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools In The Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), she answers that question and more. Dr. Green chronicles the history of the black educational struggles in the urban centers of Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama during the Reconstruction period. During Reconstruction, African Americans fought vigorously on behalf of their race to have educational opportunities to better themselves in the postbellum South. Weathering the storms of physical violence, arson, political strife, and overall incivility in Richmond and Mobile, Dr. Green recovers the important history of how African Americans saw the interconnectedness of educational attainment to democracy and citizenship.Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices