New Books in Urban Studies

Mar 03 2025 645 ep. 54 mins 101
New Books in Urban Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of urban studies about their new books

  Arts  History  Science
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Deborah Reed-Donahay, "Sideways Migration: Being French in London" (Routledge, 2025)

Mar 03 2025 32 mins  
Sideways Migration: Being French in London (Routledge, 2025) examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators - a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of

Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025)

Mar 01 2025 29 mins  
Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged. In Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, Timothy Weaver argues that the intercurrent impact of these orders has created a constant battle for power. Weaver brings these clashes to the fore by showing how New Yo

Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024)

Mar 01 2025 54 mins  
From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of animals. In 1858, the city adopted the Greensward Plan and began the long process of reshaping the 843 acres of land into a park where everything—from the trees to the trails to the inhabitants—would be meticulously planne

Sybil Derrible, "The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives" (Prometheus Books, 2025)

Feb 27 2025 38 mins  
Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet – all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have little to no idea how these systems work. How is water treated?

Laureen D. Hom, "The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles" (U California Press, 2024)

Feb 27 2025 86 mins  
Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. Chinatowns are vital political actors,

Kelly Alexander, "Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State" (UNC Press, 2024)

Feb 24 2025 67 mins  
On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across a diverse set of locations—incl

Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)

Feb 17 2025 61 mins  
Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. These o

Joshua Barker, "State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City" (Duke UP, 2024)

Feb 16 2025 56 mins  
The relationship between fear people experience in their lives and the government often informs key questions about the rule of law and justice. In nations where the rule of law is unevenly applied, interpreting the people involved in its enforcement allows for contextualized understanding about why that unevenness occurs and is perpetuated. Joshua Barker’s State of Fear: Policin

Miles Glendinning, "Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Feb 15 2025 80 mins  
Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a major work that provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programs of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist

Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Feb 12 2025 40 mins  
The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub