Urban Studies

The children we meet through the deepening friendships that evolve between Janathan Kozol and their families defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented on TV and in newspapers. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with painful clarity about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. "It's not like being in a jail," says 15-year-old Isabel. "It's more like being hidden."

A well respected urban writer who has focused on New York's transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro's landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, New York's re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city.

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don’t realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. P. E. Moskowitz’s How to Kill a City takes listeners from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised.

Through over ten years of research, interviewing activists along with unprecedented access to their personal archives, Tracy and Sonnie tell a crucial, untold story of the New Left. Their deeply sourced narrative history shows how poor and working-class individuals from diverse ethnic, rural and urban backgrounds cooperated and drew strength from one another. The groups they founded redefined community organizing, and transformed the lives and communities they touched.

In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.

Conceived in the Gilded Age, the Ferry Building opened in 1898 as San Francisco's portal to the world—the terminus of the transcontinental railway and a showcase of civic ambition. In silent films and World's Fair postcards, nothing said "San Francisco" more than its soaring clock tower. But as acclaimed architectural critic John King recounts, the rise of the automobile and double-deck freeways severed the city from its beloved structure. King's narrative spans the rise and fall and rebirth of the Ferry Building, introducing colorful figures who fought to preserve its character.

On June 24, 2022, Gianno Caldwell’s eighteen-year-old brother, Christian, was murdered. He was standing with friends on a street in the Southside of Chicago when a black SUV pulled up and several unidentified men opened fire. Fifty shell casings were later found at the scene. Three in the crowd were rushed to the hospital; only two survived. His family was shattered, and Caldwell was devastated. Tragically, he is not alone.

Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city’s worst crisis yet (and that’s saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists―all have been drawn to Detroit’s baroquely decaying frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence.

A vividly written and timely polemic tackling the burning injustices shaping British society today, Fortress London argues that to address Britain’s manifold problems, we need first to end the hegemony of its capital. Enriched by a vast array of interviews and statistics, it will examine how our individual destinies, from childhood to death, are determined by the disproportionate power of London.

Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, whom to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites.

Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to build.

In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces listeners to two social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.

Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie’s particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It’s through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city’s seasons.

For Black Americans, the food system is broken. When it comes to nutrition, Black consumers experience an unjust and inequitable distribution of resources. Black Food Matters examines these issues through in-depth essays that analyze how Blackness is contested through food, differing ideas of what makes our sustenance "healthy", and Black individuals' own beliefs about what their cuisine should be.

Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live. Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization.

Multiple times a day, in cities across the US and beyond, a simple yet powerful message is repeated by the well-meaning, the ignorant, and the bigoted: “don’t go”—avoid at all costs those Black and Brown disinvested neighborhoods that have become bywords for social disorder and urban decay. This book is a collection of intimate stories that uncover the hidden influence of both subtle and overt “don’t go” messages and the segregation they perpetuate in Chicago.

Winner of France's 2004 Prix de Flore for his memoir The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, Bruce Benderson has gained international respect for his controversial opinions and original take on contemporary society. In this collection of essays, Benderson directs his exceptional powers of observation toward some of the most debated, as well as some of the most neglected, issues of our day.

This is the story of how a crude French settlement along the Detroit River in 1701 became the birthplace of the automotive industry in 1900.

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo - a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century - uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.

Bestseller-Autor Harald Welzer stellt fest, dass unsere Kultur kein Konzept vom Aufhören hat. Deshalb baut sie Autobahnen und Flughäfen für Zukünfte, in denen es keine Autos und Flughäfen mehr geben wird. Und sie versucht, unsere Zukunftsprobleme durch Optimierung zu lösen, obwohl ein optimiertes Falsches immer noch falsch ist. Damit verbaut sie viele Möglichkeiten, das Leben durch Weglassen und Aufhören besser zu machen. Diese Kultur hat den Tod genauso zur Privatangelegenheit gemacht, wie sie die Begrenztheit der Erde verbissen ignoriert.