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New Books in Urban Studies

New Books Network

Interviews with scholars of urban studies about their new books

arts books

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45:25

Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/10/10

For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became therapeutic destinations for the sick and weary. Doctors in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities began prescribing time at the beach as a remedy for ailments such as tuberculosis, rickets, and exhaustion. In the decades that followed, seaside towns became health havens complete with hospitals that served urban families and children.Dr

37:23

Carlotta Daro, "The Architecture of the Wire:...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/10/05

The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age—from poles, wires, and cables, to “micro-architectures,” such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossroads of such technical “things” with architecture and art.Based on

64:05

Georgios Tsourous, "Orthodox Choreographies:...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/30

Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem's Old City (Gorgias Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive anthropological study of lived Christianity in Jerusalem’s Old City, with a special focus on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Anastasis. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores the experiences of the Rum Orthodox community, examining their internal dynamics and relationships with other Christian groups. Within the Church of the

63:02

Laurian R. Bowles, "Headstrong: Women Porters,...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/24

Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) explores the experiences of women porters, called kayayei, in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, anthropologist Laurian R. Bowles shows how kayayei navigate precarity, bringing into sharp relief how racialization, rooted in histories of colonialism and enslavement, undergirds capital accumulation in Ghana. Bowles's ethnographic storytelling follows these women through their work as human

49:03

Jacinto Cuvi, "The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/24

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade;

82:24

Devin Smart, "Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/21

Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City (Ohio UP, 2025) is an urban history that connects town and country. Devin Smart examines how labor migrants who left subsistence food systems in Kenya’s rural communities acquired their daily meals when they arrived in the Indian Ocean city of Mombasa, a place where cash mediated access to daily necessities. In their rural homes, people grew their own food and created mealtimes and cuisines that fit into the

38:44

Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts:...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/18

Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?Through extended ethnographic and

36:51

Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/14

From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished,

58:30

Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary:...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/09/07

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members.In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries,

30:20

Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/30

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of

44:02

Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/27

In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between empires and the creatures they govern. What is the relationship between the subjugation of human communities and that of animals? How did various interactions with animals enable articulations of power between diverse peoples? This book is one of the first to tackle these questions in the context of a

56:00

Harald Bodenschatz et al., "Urban Planning in Nazi...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/26

Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945 (DOM, 2025) is edited by Uwe Altrock, Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Jannik Noeske, Christiane Post, and Max Welch Guerra. The book includes contributions from Christian von Oppen, Piero Sassi, and Jannik Noeske. Two co-editors, Victoria Grau and Max Welch Guerra, join the New Books Network to discuss this work. In this book, urban planning under the Nazi dictatorship is for the first time examined not

62:50

Dan Wang, "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/26

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, and previously a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before that, he was an analyst focused on China’s technology capabilities at Gavekal Dragonomics, based across Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Dan is perhaps best known for a series of annual letters, published between 2017-2023, which encapsulate his reflections on Chinese society; his writing has also appeared in other outlets including Foreign

68:03

LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs &...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/25

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street.Now an award-winning historian, Harris uses eyewitness accounts, legal

53:28

Bettina Ng′weno, "No Place Like Home in a New City: ...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/21

Bettina Ng’weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, DavisNairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi (U of California Press, 2025) traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads, and dancehalls

48:18

Bench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/20

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American

67:54

Kate Herrity, "Sound, Order and Survival in Prison:...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/16

The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown (Bristol UP, 2024) tells the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividly to life for the first time through aural ethnography.Dr. Kate Herrity’s sensory criminology challenges current thinking on how power is experienced by

50:30

Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/15

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community

50:53

Jamie Wang, "Reimagining the More-Than-Human City:...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/14

As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (MIT Press, 2024), Jamie Wang

63:08

Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt,...

New Books in Urban Studies ·

2025/08/13

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity.Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family suburban home, the repository of many families’ long-term wealth. While the man who did the most to make the automobile a mass commodity—Henry Ford—is well known, few know the story of the man who did the

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