Urban communities / city life Books

Book SynopsisAs the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.Trade Review"With considerable skill, Ziad Fahmy listens to listeners in a place and time wholly underexplored by historians of the senses. In the process, he offers us an important and trenchant interpretation of the sensory definition of modernity." -- Mark Smith * University of South Carolina *"Street Sounds brings the boisterous soundscape of modernizing Egypt to life. Ziad Fahmy has an ear for the noise of history in motion—street hawkers, calls to prayer, braying donkeys, wagon wheels, claxons and screeching tires, recorded song, and the ever-present buzz of electricity. He allows us to hear an Egypt we might otherwise discount." -- Joel Gordon * University of Arkansas *"In this fascinating and highly original study, Ziad Fahmy takes sound seriously as both a primary source and a qualitatively distinct phenomenon of modernity. Street Sounds apprehends sonic and scopic regimes as interrelated aspects of a larger sensorium, thereby pioneering a new and extraordinarily rich form of Middle Eastern cultural history." -- Walter Armbrust * University of Oxford *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: Historicizing Sounds and Soundscapes chapter abstractIn the Introduction I briefly examine the importance of the field of sound studies and the need for historians of the Middle East to engage with the sounds of the past. I discuss the importance of "listening" to the sources, in order to mine the archives for sonic events. Finally, Street Sounds proposes that by taking into account the changing sounds of the past, and by examining how people dealt with their daily sounded environment, we can be brought closer to a more embodied microlevel analysis of mundane street life. This is especially true in a period of rapid sonic transition, which exemplified the infrastructural and technological transformations during the first half of the twentieth century. 1Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life chapter abstractInspired in part by Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, in Chapter 1, I describe life in early- to mid-twentieth-century Cairo from a pedestrian's perspective. "Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life" is devoted to the sounds of pedestrians and commuters as I analyze the ways that they used, occupied, and walked through those public spaces to commute, work, sell, and shop, and to entertain and be entertained. The first part of the chapter examines some of the social implications of embodied noises, from jingling anklets and bracelets to footsteps, as ordinary Cairenes were negotiating their way through a rapidly changing city. The second half of the chapter focuses on the calls of street hawkers, entertainers, and merchants who relied on their voices to advertise their goods and services. 2Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies chapter abstractChapter 2, "Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies," examines both the Egyptian government's attempts at regulating and silencing public spaces and the class implications of these policies. New anti-begging and anti-homelessness discourses invoked fears of an imminent breakdown of public order and even public health. In this chapter, I also document the interrelated and ever-present class bias in the Egyptian press, especially with regard to its coverage of the urban streets, street hawkers, and the itinerant poor. 3Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles chapter abstractChapter 3, "Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles," examines the modernization of Egypt's urban infrastructure, especially roads and tramways. The changing sounds and the social impact of growing urban traffic is carefully examined, with an emphasis on the introduction of tramways and motor vehicles. The chapter also documents and elaborates on the sonic impact of new urban spaces from large city squares to bustling transportation hubs. The problems of dramatically increased motor traffic and early attempts at regulating car horn noise are especially investigated. 4The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife chapter abstractChapter 4, "The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife," begins by examining the professional lighting of Egyptian cities by private gas utilities and the introduction of electricity and electric lighting. The sonic implication of electricity was of course enormous as it not only allowed the eventual proliferation of radios, loudspeakers, and tramways, but just as importantly brought the electric lights that forever changed the sounds of the Egyptian night. The growth of a regularly boisterous nightlife and the establishment of newer places of public leisure, from amusement parks to cabarets and movie theaters catering to diverse audiences, are closely examined. 5The Sounds of Weddings and Funerals: From Brass Bands to Wails and Ululations chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the evolving street sounds of traditional Egyptian weddings and funerals, which involved elaborate street processions and a variety of auditory and visual displays. It examines the changing roles of street music, singing, loud funerary grieving, and other important verbal and nonverbal vocalizations. The chapter concludes by examining some of the attacks directed against many of the embodied and auditory aspects of these traditional ceremonies by the government and by both secular and Islamic modernists. The one point all the "modernizing" camps agreed on was their belief in the general ignorance of the vast majority of the population and the urgent need for education, reform, and uplift. The chapter also addresses how many of these vulgarizing discourses played a role in the class distinction of Egypt's growing middle classes as they self-consciously attempted to define and separate themselves from the masses through sensory differentiation. 6Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music, and Loudspeakers chapter abstractIn Chapter 6, "Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music and Loudspeakers," I examine the Egyptian state's appropriation of large religious and secular celebrations and festivals. The chapter centers exclusively on the official sounds and spectacles performed and sponsored by the Egyptian state in an ongoing effort to legitimize its secular and religious authority in the eyes and ears of the masses. As I demonstrate in this chapter, drums, cannons, and twenty-one gun salutes are as important as uniforms, flags, and propaganda posters. I will particularly focus on the state's use of music, microphones, and radio speeches broadcast over loudspeakers during parades, festivals, and other large public gatherings. Conclusion: Conclusion: Class Distinction and Remembering Lost Sounds chapter abstractThe Conclusion briefly summaries some of the key arguments of the book and delves into the interrelationship between memory, class, nationalism, and the senses. It discusses the contradiction between an apparent nostalgia for street sounds of the past and a simultaneous vulgarization of contemporary street sounds.

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Book SynopsisFollowing 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 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.Trade Review"Drawing on her long-term collaboration with indigenous people, M. Bianet Castellanos eloquently critiques the dispossession of Maya in Cancún and illuminates their resistance. Her passion for revealing and dismantling the racial and gender hierarchies embedded in neoliberal projects is compelling. A nuanced contribution to our understanding of settler colonialism." -- Patricia Zavella * University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism *"In this compelling and timely work, M. Bianet Castellanos has given us a powerful indictment of neoliberalism's perpetuation of the settler project of Indigenous dispossession. She also effectively demonstrates how Indigenous peoples develop strategies of resistance to new technologies of domination like racialized debt, and in the process craft new forms of urban Indigeneity." -- Shannon Speed * University of California, Los Angeles *"A fascinating and highly readable study of how Indigenous Maya experience twenty-first-century rounds of dispossession and esclavitud—this time born of debt tied to housing financing. Focusing upon mortgage-based access to social interest housing in modern-day Cancún, M. Bianet Castellanos' account foregrounds Indigenous voices as they struggle to become homeowners." -- Peter M. Ward * University of Texas at Austin *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Indigenous Cancún chapter abstractThe central argument of this book is that as Indigenous migrants move to cities, they are no longer treated as Indigenous and instead become deracialized subjects who are disciplined through neoliberal instruments of debt, like mortgage finance and credit cards, leading to greater economic precarity and a loss of autonomy from the state. Through an ethnography of Maya migrants living in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest growing cities, I show that Maya migrants' struggles to own a home reveal the colonial and settler colonial structures underpinning the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. As they grapple with predatory lending and foreclosure, Maya families cultivate strategies of resistance, from "waiting out" the state to demanding recognition as Indigenous peoples in urban centers. Through these maneuvers, Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that counters a discourse of urban malaise and articulates dignity with democracy. 1Before Housing Reform: The Gendering of Urban Property chapter abstractChapter one maps out the history of land policies in Cancún and how they have been shaped by ideologies of family, gender, and citizenship. By excluding migrants who were unmarried and childless from affordable housing and land programs, the state defined citizenship narrowly and encouraged migrants to embrace the nuclear family if they wished to become citizens of this new urban space. In response, Maya women mobilized their status as wives and mothers to lobby for land. 2Promoting Housing Reform: Debt as Patrimony chapter abstractChapter two examines the transformation of Mexico's land distribution policies and property rights through a discursive analysis of the ideologies central to government campaigns promoting "dignified" housing. Analyzing news articles, government campaign documents, and one Maya family's response to these campaigns, I examine the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies used to make housing attractive and to align debt with national ideals. The language of patrimony and suburban domesticity is intended to soften the retreat of the state from land redistribution, and makes palatable and desirable the process of going into debt on a much larger scale than previously possible. 3After Housing Reform: Credit as the New Frontier chapter abstractChapter three analyzes Indigenous migrants' willingness to take on debt. Prior to 2000, Maya aspired to own, but without debt. Homeownership has increased Maya migrants access to credit, making them the "new frontier" of capitalism. But it has concomitantly increased their economic risk. It considers how credit and risk take on a gendered and "moral valence." For male migrants, going into debt to purchase a home is a risky venture that ignores lessons learned from Indigenous experiences with debt servitude. Yet for female migrants, owning a concrete block home has become a sign of progress and security from natural disasters. To tease out this moral, cultural, and gendered dilemma, I examine migrants' experiences with microfinance and credit cards. 4Foreclosure: Waiting Out the State chapter abstractChapter four centers on one Maya family's experience with foreclosure. How do Indigenous peoples cope with this loss and how does it (re)structure their attachments to place, land and nation? Even as housing reform becomes a form of discipline to produce new types of citizens and construct new narratives of progress, debt delinquency, and insecurity, I show how migrants' resistance strategies, from foot dragging to legal suits to postponing foreclosure, are transformed into a process of "waiting out" the state and capital. In so doing, Maya migrants sidestep the bureaucratic measures created to regulate the poor and convert consent into provocative acts of obstruction and defiance. 5Eviction: Invoking Indigenous Resistance chapter abstractChapter five examines the case of Maya migrants who reject social housing and instead opt to live in the squatter settlement of Colonia Mario Villanueva. Social housing, Maya migrants argue, entails great risk (due to mortgage debt) and is rife with social atomization. In contrast, life in Colonia Mario Villanueva is organized around the principles of Indigenous communal land practices. It is centered around the colonia's legal battle to avoid eviction, which was led by Maya women. These women relied on strategies of resistance derived from Indigenous land struggles. Colonias are perfect places to cultivate political subordination, but in the case of Mario Villanueva, they also become spaces of insubordination. Epilogue: A Cautionary Tale of Indebtedness chapter abstractThe book concludes by assessing how Indigenous migrants have fared under housing reform. Galvanized by the parallels between their ancestors' struggle with esclavitud and their own land and housing struggles, Maya migrants demand to be engaged as Indigenous and accorded the rights to land and self-determination. Migrants urge us to engage with a more expansive conception of territoriality, one that is not limited to the land boundaries of rural communities but is broad enough to recognize the peninsula's sacred Maya geography and to encompass Indigenous diasporas in urban centers. Through this articulation, they offer a more dynamic interpretation of Indigenous rights that aims to combat settler tactics of elimination through assimilation and dispossession. In so doing, Maya migrants are forging a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that moves beyond a colonial politics of recognition.

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Book SynopsisIn the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.Trade Review"This subtle and complex ethnography of urban citizenship in Chile analyses how poor city-dwellers forge their political subjectivity through collective struggles for dignity and rights to housing. Miguel Pérez deftly weaves ethnographic description and theory together with historical narrative, showing how these contemporary ethico-political projects are both shaped by neoliberal regimes of social rights and deeply grounded in past experience and intergenerational understandings of what it is to be a poblador. This profoundly important study comes at a time when Chile has become the focus of the latest wave of democratization in the region, and helps us understand how that has become possible."—Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"By focusing on dignity as a central claim of housing struggles in Chile, Miguel Pérez brilliantly demonstrates the emergence of new political subjectivities and a new political language. The moral claim of dignity opens up a new space of contestation that transforms the discourse of rights in the context of the dominance of neoliberal housing policies. Pérez's carefully crafted and cutting-edge analysis has global importance, as countries everywhere adopt these policies and as social movements have to reinvent themselves to articulate their claims in new forms."—Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley"The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. Pérez's reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process."—Andrea Urbina Julio, Journal of the American Planning Association"[The] Right to Dignity not only documents a powerful case study of a decades long housing campaign. It presents teachable lessons about urban people power that will inspire other urban movements around the world."—Amanda Tattersall, International Journal of Housing PolicyTable of Contents1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City 2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement 3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados 4. Performances of City Making 5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship 6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons 7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"

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Book SynopsisA National Endowment for Democracy Notable Book of 2022 Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan's past, present, and future.Trade Review"Protesting Jordan offers readers of Arab politics and contentious politics alike a narrative of how protest shapes how states reproduce their power and, in turn, reshape protest. Jillian Schwedler blends a deep immersion in the Middle East with a firm grasp of contentious politics theory in this thought-provoking book."—Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University"Superbly researched, Protesting Jordan provides a fascinating and groundbreaking alternative history of Jordan. Jillian Schwedler skillfully unpacks and challenges traditional accounts of state-making in Jordan as a top-down process. An essential read for those seeking to better understand Jordan's history and how protests maintain state power."—Janine Clark, University of Toronto"Schwedler has crafted an extraordinarily rich portrait of the creation of Jordan and the fortunes of the Hashemite monarchy through the lens of those who contested its policies, its institutions, and sometimes even its very existence. In doing so, she demonstrates that protest has been a routine part of politics in Jordan since before the modern state was established."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"It's not just the best book I've read about Jordan... but also one of the very best political science books I've read this year... Protesting Jordan should be a must read for scholars of the Middle East and of comparative politics more broadly, as well as for analysts, journalists and policymakers trying to understand the country's politics."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"[Protesting Jordan] gives a detailed and rich account of Jordan's social and political history, showing how repertoires of protest and repression created, transformed, and continue to afect state and society in Jordan. But the book is also written in a way that makes it essential reading for any scholar interested in protests, repression, and state development – not just in Jordan, but indeed anywhere else."—Curtis R. Ryan, APSA MENA Newsletter"Protesting Jordan is an important contribution to the study of protest. It is a cry and demand not only for scholars to carry on the critical work of studying popular struggle to illuminate its social significance but to forge novel approaches to understand the state, its political economy and urban form."—Deen Sharp, APSA MENA Newsletter"Schwedler's work pushes us to think about the effects of social movements above and beyond narrow conceptions of success or failure; the book traces and convincingly demonstrates the myriad ways that regimes learn from protest activity and deploy repressive state power through the construction (or lack thereof) of cities and communities."—Summer Forester, APSA MENA Newsletter"Protesting Jordan is a wonderful read and an ambitious model for writing contentious politics into political history. ... Schwedler is one of our field's great ethnographic writers, and her keen eye for meaningful details and almost-imperceptible shifts in power relations rendered this routine set of protests into powerful grounds for theorizing about the everyday work of contention."—Chantal Berman, APSA MENA Newsletter"Schwedler's approach is consciously interpretive and inductive....[A]nyone interested in interested in the relationship between popular opposition and state formation in Jordan will find a wealth of new empirical material and fresh analysis here."—Laurie A. Brand, Middle East Journal"Schwedler's scholarship shows how and why in-depth local knowledges are important: certainly to better understand local contexts, but also in order to reflect on 'generalist' scholarship and 'broader' theoretical debates."—Andrea Teti, Mediterranean Politics"Throughout the work, Schwedler challenges readers to rethink the politics of modern protests by interrogating their meaning under Jordan's authoritarian power structure. Protests are not static attacks on normality; they are frequent and normal expressions of commonplace struggles. They enable Jordanians to assert claims and challenge their regime's rules, but they also elicit autocratic responses. Protests represent frontiers where state power is exerted and negotiated and where the state itself becomes seen."—Sean L. Yom, Middle East Research and Information ProjectTable of Contents1. The Shifting Political Stakes of Protest 2. Transforming Transjordan 3. Becoming Amman: From Periphery to Center 4. Jordanization, the Neoliberal State, and the Retreat and Return of Protest 5. An Ethnography of Place and the Politics of Routine Protests 6. Jordan in the Time of the Arab Uprisings 7. The Techniques and Evolving Spatial Dynamics of Protest and Repression 8. Protest and Order in Militarized Spaces 9. Protesting Global Aspirations

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Book SynopsisIn the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.Trade Review"The Right to Be Counted presents a rich ethnographic analysis of the range of strategies adopted by displaced populations crowding into urban slums to stake their claim to belong to the city. Routray's depiction of 'numerical citizenship' is persuasive and enlightening. This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on popular politics in megacities."—Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University"This is a 'how things work' book of top quality. With deep, analytical, thoughtful scholarship, Routray provides one of the clearest and most accessible accounts of how the poor fight to make a home in Delhi."—Durba Chattaraj, Ashoka University"Routray offers an impressive and authoritative account that displays a remarkable ability to synthesize interdisciplinary ideas from across disciplines and geographies, while always building his theorizing from a deep commitment to a historically informed ethnography. I learned so much about the relationship between housing, politics and citizenship in Delhi, and beyond. I am sure this text will resonate well beyond its origins."—Ryan Powell, Housing Studies"Routray's book highlights how the logics of planning are employed not only by the powerful to suit the interests of global city making but also by marginalized communities to resist processes of uprooting and work to secure the rights of urban citizenship. The author navigates the difficult task of arguing for the agency of Delhi's urban poor while documenting the profound injustice and suffering they endure in the process."—Shoshana Goldstein, Journal of the American Planning Association

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Book SynopsisIn the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.Trade Review"The Right to Be Counted presents a rich ethnographic analysis of the range of strategies adopted by displaced populations crowding into urban slums to stake their claim to belong to the city. Routray's depiction of 'numerical citizenship' is persuasive and enlightening. This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on popular politics in megacities."—Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University"This is a 'how things work' book of top quality. With deep, analytical, thoughtful scholarship, Routray provides one of the clearest and most accessible accounts of how the poor fight to make a home in Delhi."—Durba Chattaraj, Ashoka University"Routray offers an impressive and authoritative account that displays a remarkable ability to synthesize interdisciplinary ideas from across disciplines and geographies, while always building his theorizing from a deep commitment to a historically informed ethnography. I learned so much about the relationship between housing, politics and citizenship in Delhi, and beyond. I am sure this text will resonate well beyond its origins."—Ryan Powell, Housing Studies"Routray's book highlights how the logics of planning are employed not only by the powerful to suit the interests of global city making but also by marginalized communities to resist processes of uprooting and work to secure the rights of urban citizenship. The author navigates the difficult task of arguing for the agency of Delhi's urban poor while documenting the profound injustice and suffering they endure in the process."—Shoshana Goldstein, Journal of the American Planning Association

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Book SynopsisIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.Trade Review"A thoroughly researched and highly innovative scholarship at the frontier of new political developments and Anthropocenic challenges. This book will push you to think about those dimensions usually clouded by refracting syllables. The Brahminical nationalist assumptions of dairy as strength and hominid centrism of the globe have received a thorough challenge by Narayanan. Much awaited credit is honored to fellow nonhuman animals who have participated in nation-building by sweat, blood, milk, skin, flesh, and soul for the believers. A successful project that manages to deliver the message with aplomb and sincerity. Narayanan has delivered a timely call to action."—Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters"Yamini Narayanan' Mother Cow, Mother India addresses the unsettling questions we have needed, but failed, to ask about connections among race, gender, religion, caste, and species, never losing sight of all the individuals involved. Her devastating critique of the Indian invocation of cow as "mother" exposes how, in the interests of nationalism and capitalism, the idea of mother, like the cow herself, is being continually exploited. Every gift a scholar needs to bring to such demanding and incisive work—compassion, courage, persistence, exhaustive research, and political acumen—Narayanan brings to this amazing and compelling book."—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat"Mother Cow, Mother India is a highly sophisticated and empathetically engaged analysis of the cows, buffaloes, and their calves at the heart of India's cow protection politics. Narayanan skillfully elicits in the reader a deep sensitivity to the animals' whose lives, experiences, and deaths are caught up in the dairy and beef industries within a fraught landscape of human politics and violence. This work is nothing short of groundbreaking. It is truly the first of its kind – a great gift to the worlds of both animal studies and South Asia studies, not to mention the global animal advocacy movement."—Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389"Yamini Narayanan's exposé of the cruelty entrenched within the industrialised capitalist Indian dairy animal-agriculture system and how it is advanced and supported by Hindutva bovine politics is commendable."—Sagari R. Ramdas, The Wire"These analyses underscore the centrality of caste and communal politics to meat-eating practices in India, even while seeking to argue that there are other historical, political and socioeconomic factors involved."—Kaashif Hajee, The CaravanTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Dairy Politics and India's Milk Nationalisms 2. Breeding Bovine Caste 3. Milking 4. Gaushalas: Making India "Pure" Again 5. "Save Cow, Save India" 6. Trafficking 7. Slaughter 8. Envisioning Post-Dairy Futures

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Book SynopsisOver the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city's 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present. Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.Trade Review"This book helps us understand the centrality of caste as a category and the processes of pollution/purity linked as they are to the labyrinths through which waste work is organized in Lahore. It is a path-breaking contribution to the fields of urban studies, informal labor practices and the production of social marginality in Pakistan. It will undoubtedly be a model for future research."—Kamran Asdar Ali, University of Texas, Austin"Life Beyond Waste is a deeply sensitive ethnography of Lahore's waste workers and traders, offering luminous insights on the entanglements of people, matter, and institutions that constitute the city's "waste infrastructure." The book is also distinctive for its historical analysis of how agrarian class and caste inequalities are reproduced in urban Pakistan. A model for urban anthropology and waste studies!"—Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota"Butt shows waste infrastructure is about more than where pollution goes and who decides. Combining richly-detailed ethnography with in-depth history on the continuity between colonial governance and recent statecraft, he uncovers the diverse forms of labor that are necessary to reproduce urban life and inequality, whether in Pakistan or in wasted worlds beyond."—Joshua Reno, Binghamton University"How is hate channeled through waste work carried out by Christians as non-Muslims? How do powerlessness and anger touch the lives of those who work with waste materials? Butt's interventions on these critical questions bring to life a story of caste, waste work, and urban life that are not only in a state of flux and transformation but also a site of contestation and struggle."—Nausheen H. Anwar, The Developing EconomiesTable of ContentsPreface 1. Introduction 2. An Order for Urban Life 3. The Appearance of Things 4. Surplus and Its Excess 5. The Unevenness of Intimacy 6. The Possibility of Reproduction 7. Coda

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Book SynopsisOnce the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897–1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of "erasure"—monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon existing palace structures—to articulate to colonized Korean subjects the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, and the naturalization of colonial rule as inevitable historical change. Drawing from and analyzing a wide range of materials, from architecture and photography to print media and sound recordings, City of Sediments shows how Seoul became a site to articulate a new mode of time—modernity—that defined the place of the colonized in accordance with the progression of history, and how the underbelly of the city, latent places of darkness filled with chatters of the alleyway, challenged this visual language of power. To do so, Se-Mi Oh builds an inventive new model of history where discrete events do not unfold one after the other, but rather one in which histories layer atop each other like sediment, allowing a new map of colonial Seoul to emerge, a map where the material traces of the city are overlapping, with vibrant residues of earlier times defiantly visible among the superimposed signs of modernity and colonial domination.Trade Review"City of Sediments assembles its kaleidoscope of colonial Seoul from ever-more-surprising shards: from renovations and ruins, cacophonous sign boards and comedians' banter, a streetcar's blurring speed and the metronome sound of a night patrol's wooden batons. Oh conjures the lost city while dissolving every prior notion of how history should be written and read, and leaves us with a revivified way of not only meeting the past, but our own place and time."—Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise and Winner of the 2019 National Book Award"Bold and ambitious, beautifully written and rigorously argued, City of Sediments is a pathbreaking book that provides a new framework to explore the history of Seoul. Crisscrossing the vast range of fields—cultural history, visual arts, architecture, film, and media—it also builds an archive of extraordinarily rich and diverse materials, that include those that experiment with new forms of writing, those that capture the fleeting moments of new experiences, and those that have usually been considered inconsequential and insignificant."—Namhee Lee, author of Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea"City of Sediments is one of the most sophisticated pieces of scholarship on the colonial period in Korea that has been written in the past two decades. It eloquently captures the nuances and dynamics of the history of colonial life in Seoul through the lens of sedimentary history, paving the way for rethinking how history should be represented and studied."—Albert L. Park, author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea"City of Sediments does an eloquent job of situating colonial Seoul in various theoretical contexts to scrutinize the uneven textures of urban landscape and the emotional commodification of everyday objects. Se-Mi Oh's voluminous reflections of the past, and her creative analysis of photography, signages, and aural sensibilities, set the gold standard for future historians."—Suk-Young Kim, author of K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia PerformanceTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. Figuring History through Architecture: An Urban Synesthesia 2. Ritual, History, Memory: Photographing Kojong's Funeral of 1919 3. Signage and Language: Reading Hanja/Kanji 4. Oral/Aural Community: Sin Pul-ch'ul's Language Play and Deception 5. The City on the Move: The Ordinary and the Infraordinary 6. Nightly Reports: Playing under Surveillance Epilogue: A Time of Rehearsal

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Book SynopsisThe term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Bazaar Aesthetics, Commerce, and Commons 2. Bazaar Pricing and Bargaining 3. Bazaar Tinkering, Jugaad, and Popular Knowledge 4. Bazaar Ethics and a Common Human Condition 5. Bazaar Platforms: Encounters with a New Competitor Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Bazaar Aesthetics, Commerce, and Commons 2. Bazaar Pricing and Bargaining 3. Bazaar Tinkering, Jugaad, and Popular Knowledge 4. Bazaar Ethics and a Common Human Condition 5. Bazaar Platforms: Encounters with a New Competitor Conclusion

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Book SynopsisCommunity is a central idea in urban studies but remains conceptually vague and empirically difficult to work with. Building on existing theories of community, Talja Blokland offers an important contribution to defining and understanding this key theme. Blokland argues that there has been too much focus on community as a stable construct, formed by durable relationships with kin, friends, social groups or neighbours. She draws attention to the non-durable, fluid encounters that constitute community, theorizing communities as shared urban practices in a globalizing world. The book proposes two core ways of thinking about community: the dimension of familiarity, defined by our ability to construct identities, and the dimension of access, defined by our freedom to enter and leave urban spaces. These dimensions form various urban configurations which enable us to experience and practise community in diverse ways. As this book maintains, community is after all an urban practice, not a fixed state of affairs.Trade Review"Everybody thinks they know what the concept of community means, but it proves increasingly elusive as you try to pin it down. Talja Blokland, one of the most perceptive observers of how we live together in cities, here offers a compelling interpretation that focuses on how we perform communities, especially by drawing their boundaries."—John Mollenkopf, Graduate Center, City University of New York"Talja Blokland's beautful book explains why the search for community retains its importance into the twenty-first century. She provides a wonderful, comprehensive overview of recent research to show that communities are not a nostalgic throwback, but continue to matter as they are produced by ongoing social ties, symbolic identities, and struggles."—Mike Savage, London School of Economics and Political Science"From fluid relations to ritualized, hierarchical performances, Blokland draws on a wide range of cases to show that "community" is neither homogeneous nor permanent, yet it remains a focus of longing in an anxious, urban world. Humans perform community to define society: an effort to find a place between intimacy and anonymity, the public and the private, the home and the world."—Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New YorkTable of ContentsAcknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Traditions of Theorizing Community 3 Community as Culture 4 Engagements, Encounters, Social Ties 5 Relational Settings of Belonging 6 Practices of Exclusion 7 Conclusion References

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Book SynopsisThe poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In such cities, popular districts are the settings of more uncertain operations that take place under the cover of darkness, generating uncanny alliances among disparate bodies, materials and things and expanding the urban sensorium and its capacities for liveliness. In this important new book AbdouMaliq Simone explores the nature of these alliances, portraying urban districts as sites of enduring transformations through rhythms that mediate between the needs of residents not to draw too much attention to themselves and their aspirations to become a small niche of exception. Here we discover an urban South that exists as dense rhythms of endurance that turn out to be vital for survival, connectivity, and becoming.Trade Review“Here, urban worlds – metal scrap, unhinged concrete, electrical waste, slowdowns, and interruptions – emerge with and through secretive human connections. AbdouMaliq Simone narrates the urban as an aesthetics of promise, where the uninhabitable generates districts of improvising communities, collectively living-with, and unsettling, infrastructures of harm.”Katherine McKittrick, Queen's University, Ontario, Canada ‘A brilliant and innovative account of urban life, seen both as confined to place and at the same time enduring and generative, composed through the weaving together of different experiments, connections, gatherings and imaginaries. As ever in his work, Simone provides us with a unique perspective on the city, and a distinctive way of seeing urbanism and speculating on its social, economic and political potentials.’Colin McFarlane, Durham UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements vi 1 The Uninhabitable 1 2 Ensemble Work 34 3 The Mechanics of Improvised Relations 59 4 Inscribing Sociality in the Dark: The Pragmatics of a Legible Home 89 5 The Politics of Peripheral Care 122 References 138 Index 147

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Book SynopsisBuilding on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu's topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape. Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory.Trade Review"In this captivating book, Loïc Wacquant excavates Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory for insights that might illuminate the neoliberal metropolis and its contentious power relations. In so doing, he produces an incisive, if deeply disturbing, portrait of contemporary urban marginality and neighborhood-level 'taint', a remarkable interpretive synthesis of his own illustrious pathway of urban inquiry, and a brilliantly creative application of Bourdieu's key concepts and methods to the field of urban social science."—Neil Brenner, University of Chicago "Loïc Wacquant dissects carefully the conceptual framework of Bourdieu, provides a differentiated view of social space from Bourdieu's understanding of relational sociology, and reminds us that marginalization continues to be a main concern for urban scholars. A must-read for anyone interested to see how Wacquant eloquently combines Bourdieu’s work with an urban perspective as well as draws on his own influential work from over the years to sharpen our theoretical and methodological lenses on urban inequality."—Professor Talja Blokland, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin“[A] significant milestone in enhancing urban theory by introducing fresh perspectives.”Journal of Urban AffairsTable of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements Taking Bourdieu to Town Prologue 1 Bourdieu in the Urban Crucible 2 The Bitter Taste of Territorial Taint 3 Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neoliberal Metropolis Epilogue Bourdieu in the City, the City in Bourdieu References

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Book SynopsisThe Penn School of Social Policy and Practice enjoys a reputation as Penn's social justice school, for its faculty actively strives to translate the highest ideals into workable programs that better people's lives. In this election year, as Americans debate issues like immigration, crime, mass incarceration, policing, and welfare reform, and express concerns over increasing inequality, tax policy, and divisions by race, sex, and class, "SP2," as the school is colloquially known, offers its expertise in addressing the pressing matters of our day. The practical solutions on offer in this volume showcase the judgment and commitment of the school's scholars and practitioners, working to change politics from blood sport to common undertakings. Contributors: Cindy W. Christian, Cynthia A. Connolly, Dennis Culhane, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Malitta Engstrom, Kara Finck, Nancy Franke, Antonio Garcia, Toorjo Ghose, Johanna Greeson, Chao Guo, David Hemenway, Amy Hillier, Roberta Iversen, Alexandra Schepens, Phyllis Solomon, Susan B. Sorenson, Mark Stern, Allison Thompson, Debra Schilling Wolfe.

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Book SynopsisIn twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia’s University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market. The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predominantly Black neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in the late 1960s to make way for the University City Science Center and University City High School. It also provides new insight into organizations whose members experimented during that same period with alternative conceptions of economic advancement. The book then shifts to the present, documenting contemporary efforts to position university-adjacent neighborhoods as locations for prosperity built on scientific knowledge. Wolf-Powers examines the work of mobilized civic groups to push cultural preservation concerns into the public arena and to win policies to help economically insecure families keep a foothold in changing neighborhoods. Placing Philadelphia’s innovation districts in the context of similar development taking place around the United States, University City advocates a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments—and in one another—are precious urban resources. *** Pictured on the book's cover is a luncheon on Melon Street between 37th and 38th Streets in West Philadelphia, May 31, 2014. The community meal was part of Funeral for a Home, a project that honored the life and passing of a house at 3711 Melon Street in Mantua. Photo by Jeffrey Stockbridge. Funeral for a Home was commissioned by Temple Contemporary, Temple University. Original support for Funeral for a Home was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.Trade Review"University City is a significant addition to scholarship concerning innovation districts, megaprojects, citizen participation, and the role of universities in urban redevelopment...and offers an excellent foundation for future comparative research." * Journal of Urban Affairs *"The book’s appeal and approach are interdisciplinary: it speaks to urban planning, uses historical and ethnographic research and engages with topics like power, stigma and local political processes that are relevant to political science, sociology and geography...[Wolf-Powers] challenges universities to attend to the historical events that have shaped their surroundings, where wealth, income, access to education and power are unequally distributed." * Urban Studies *"A powerful interrogation of the ‘innovation district’ as the dominant urban planning model in today’s knowledge economy. Laura Wolf-Powers takes us back to the origins of innovation in West Philadelphia but brilliantly draws our attention to the nonfinancial visions of development created by local residents that have been lost to the planning focus on real estate values. By tracking the enduring harms of past development decisions, University City makes a compelling case for placing reparations at the center of urban planning." * Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower *"A long overdue critical look at university-driven urban development in a contemporary knowledge and innovation economy. Laura Wolf-Powers masterfully situates the rise of innovation districts as an outgrowth of the failures of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal policies and practices, specifically. She demonstrates how the emergence of coalitions of public-private interests pursue innovation-driven development, often in tension with legacy communities and predictably at the expense of more equitable and inclusive urban revitalization. This book will be an essential read for scholars who want to understand the changing dynamics of urban growth coalitions." * Sheila Foster, Georgetown University *"Laura Wolf-Powers offers a powerful, forthright accounting of what is owed to urban communities sacrificed for ‘innovation district’ redevelopment—in the twenty-first century as much as the 1950s–60s. Her telling of the story from the community’s perspective is masterful, rooted in rigorous archival research, economic analysis, and direct observation. She delivers profound insights about what residents value, and how universities’ unquestioning pursuit of ‘innovation’ created precarity among their neighbors. University City will enable clearer, more grounded, more searching understandings for all of us implicated in these contests." * Randall F. Mason, University of Pennsylvania *

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Book SynopsisSituated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”Trade Review"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens." * Dawn *"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it." * Anthropology Book Forum *

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Book SynopsisSituated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”Trade Review"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens." * Dawn *"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it." * Anthropology Book Forum *"This book is an engaging read for those interested in how multiple structural conditions intersect and how they are positioned vis-à-vis historical periods of colonialism, postcolonial nation building, and global warfare. Whilst being ethnographically situated with Afghans who fled to Pakistan, this book invites the reader to draw acute parallels with the dismantling of hospitality towards refugees in the post-2015 crisis in European refugee reception, the hostile governing of uprooted people who experience oppressions at the intersections of ethnicity and class, and the effects of the nationalist territorialization of spaces across the globe." * Politics, Religion & Ideology *"[A] valuable contribution to the scholarship on urban citizenship, migration, and the politics of belonging. In it, Alimia provides a nuanced and sympathetic account of Afghan lives in urban Pakistan...Refugee Cities is a valuable political intervention in a time when the global policy environment relating to migration is increasingly hostile" * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction. Refugee Cities Part I. Background Chapter 1. Ghosts of Empire: The Afghan Question in Pakistan Part II. Claiming Rights Chapter 2. The Right to Water in an Informal Refugee Camp Chapter 3. Bulldozers and Violence in a Pakistani Settlement Chapter 4. Peshawar's Afghan Transformation Part III. Pushing Out Afghans Chapter 5. Surveillance, Documents, and Repatriation Conclusion Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisNation’s Metropolis describes how the national capital region functions as a metropolitan political economy. Its authors distinguish aspects of the Washington region that reflect its characteristics as a national capital from those common to most other metropolitan regions and to other capitals. To do so, they employ an interdisciplinary approach that draws from economics, political science, sociology, geography, and history. Royce Hanson and Harold Wolman focus on four major themes: the federal government as the region’s basic industry and its role in economic, physical, and political development; race as a core force in the development of the metropolis; the mismatch of the governance and economy of the national capital region; and the conundrum of achieving fully democratic governance for Washington, DC. Critical regional issues and policy problems are analyzed in the context of these themes, including poverty, inequality, education, housing, transportation, water supply, and governance. The authors conclude that the institutions and practices that accrued over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are inadequate for dealing effectively with the issues confronting the city and the region in the twenty-first. The accumulation of problems arising from the unique role of the federal government and the persistent problem of racial inequality has been compounded by failure to resolve the conundrum of governance for the District of Columbia. They recommend rethinking the governance of the entire region. While many books are concerned with the city of Washington, DC, Nation’s Metropolis is the only book focused on the development and political economy of the metropolitan region as a whole. It will engage readers interested in the national capital, metropolitan development more generally, and the growing comparative literature on national capitals.Trade Review"This book has created new knowledge and has practical public policy applications...All cities have their unique characteristics while also sharing many common challenges with urban communities across the nation. This is the story of the capital region. But the approach taken here can guide researchers in those communities. Nation’s Metropolis proves the case for the case study." * Journal of Urban Affairs *

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Book SynopsisChina turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. This book situates China’s urbanization in the interconnected forces of historical legacies, contemporary state interventions, and human and ecological conditions. It captures the complexity of the phenomenon of urbanization in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on the country’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It is also a book about China, in which the contributors provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change. The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, achieve three interconnected aims. The first is to explore how the process of urbanization has shaped and been influenced by the social, economic, and physical interactions that take place in and beyond cities, and the state interventions intended to regulate such interactions. The second is to examine the shifts and evolutions emerging in urban China, such as the economic slowdown, population aging and low fertility rates, and how cities interact with the environment and planet given China’s rising role in the global discourse on climate change. The third is to explore new sources of information for conducting research on urban China, such as satellite and street-level imagery data and online listings, to account for the complexity and heterogeneity that characterize contemporary Chinese urbanization. Contributors: Juan Chen, Dean Curran, Deborah Davis, Peilei Fan, Qin Gao, Pierre F. Landry, Shi Li, Shiqi Ma, Justin Remais, Alan Smart, Shin Bin Tan, Jeremy Wallace, Sarah Williams, Binbin Wu, Weiping Wu, Guibin Xiong, Wenfei Xu.Trade Review"Readers can gain a rich and in-depth understanding of China’s recent urbanization through this book. It covers a wide range of urbanization issues including not only well-studied themes such as rural migrant workers, land, urban housing, and segregation but also novel yet important themes such as environment, health, and digital governance....China Urbanizing can inspire readers to explore a variety of additional issues salient to Chinese urbanization: migrants’ children, talent workers, household registration (hukou) and land reforms, urban regeneration, CO2 reduction, COVID-19 impacts, and post-pandemic urbanization. After reading this book, you can understand why China’s urbanization remains an important driver of world development. " * Journal of Urban Affairs *Table of ContentsIntroduction Weiping Wu and Qin Gao 1. Paying for Urbanization: Land Finance and Impacts Weiping Wu 2. Cities for Whom? The 2017 Beijing Demolitions in Context Shiqi Ma and Jeremy Wallace 3. Housing Markets, Residential Sorting, and Spatial Segregation Shin Bin Tan, Wenfei Xu, and Sarah Williams Appendix A. Filtering Criteria Appendix B. Descriptive Statistics for Fang.com Listings Appendix C. Calculating Spatial Exposure/Isolation and Spatial Entropy 4. Has the Economic Situation of Rural Migrant Workers in Urban China Been Improving? An Updated Assessment Shi Li and Binbin Wu 5. Urban Poverty in China: Has Dibao Been an Effective Policy Response? Qin Gao 6. Implementing the National New-Type Urbanization Plan: Regional Variations Juan Chen, Pierre F. Landry, and Deborah Davis 7. Dementia or Anomie: What Explains the Missing Older Adults Phenomenon in China? Guibin Xiong 8. Environmental Impact of Urbanization in Post-Reform China Peilei Fan 9. Shifting Exposures in China’s Urbanization Experience: Implications for Health Justin Remais 10. Prospects and Social Impact of Big Data–Driven Urban Governance in China: Provincializing Smart City Research Alan Smart and Dean Curran List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisIn Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives. Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.Trade Review"A theoretically well-informed, engaging account... Its comparative approach and theoretical richness will make it a worthwhile read not only for anthropologists of Iran, the Middle East, and Central Asia, but also for those in other disciplines working on such themes as youth culture, under- or unemployment, neoliberalism, inequality, gender and the family, crime and criminalization, and class." * Anthropological Quarterly *"Professor Khosravi has provided detailed, well written accounts of the lives of ordinary Iranians, as well as analysis of some contemporary film and artistic endeavors. His narrative gives welcome prominence to the Iranian middle and lower economic classes, with some additional material from areas outside of Tehran, including his native Bakhtiari region, where members of his family still reside. This book thus departs from other recent works that have focused on more elite populations, with heavy attention to the wealthier residents of northern Tehran." * The Middle East Journal *"Shahram Khosravi's elegant new book weaves together his two substantive areas-urban Iranian youth culture and migration and border studies-to narrate stories of social lives carved out of multiple precarities, ever-present waitings, but also, the need to hope. Dispensing with facile dichotomies that caricature contemporary Iran, Khosravi's rich and granular storytelling breathes life, in all of its complexity and contradiction, into depictions of Iran's most vulnerable populations." * Arzoo Osanloo, University of Washington *"In his second important anthropological accounting of social tensions in contemporary Iran, Shahram Khosravi deftly brings Iran into the conversation about the transformations affecting countries across the globe: precarity and the criminalization of youth; neoliberal practices of 'blaming the victims' of increased poverty; and street-level performances of resistance and demands for rights. Engaging with film, photography, painting, and street performativity, Khosravi shows Iran is not as 'other' as either Western or Iranian media portray it, and calls to mind comparative phenomena such as Japanese shut ins, American incarceration culture, and European migrant detention camps." * Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry *"Shahram Khosravi writes brilliantly about the unintended consequences of the Iranian Revolution on the traditional family, on the social lives of young people, on the 'street' as a space of free expression and protest, and on public walls as places of political expression. Precarious Lives is a thoroughly researched analysis of the 'precarious' society that is contemporary Iran, a country at war with its own youth." * Paul Stoller, author of The Sorcerer's Burden and 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology *"There is so much social theory incisively deployed by Shahram Khosravi, and so many pertinent anthropological works about other places used for comparative purposes, that Precarious Lives will appeal to more readers than those interested in Iran, or those interested in the anthropology of time and space." * Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne *

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Book SynopsisA comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planetBetting on Macau delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world. Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth. Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture. Trade Review "In this timely and impressive book, Tim Simpson charts the predicament of Macau—a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China—as a laboratory of consumption, and of planning and architecture as disciplinary technologies, all employed toward prototyping a scholastic program for the production and naturalization of commodity-driven social imaginaries in post-Mao China. A must-read for scholars and practitioners of urban planning and architecture, particularly those working in or studying urbanization in China."—Miodrag Mitrašinović, coeditor of The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion "Betting on Macau is a creative, engaging, wide-ranging, and insightful analysis that both dazzles the reader with a litany of the astonishing transformations Macau has undergone in the past two decades and provides a solid conceptual framework for understanding those changes in a world-historical context."—Cathryn H. Clayton, author of Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness "Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture."—Progressive Geographies "Betting on Macau is a worthy introduction to Macau and suitable for anyone, inside and outside academia, interested in a place of exception for Chinese gambling tourists."—Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change "Tim Simpson’s book is a timely contribution to a slender yet growing volume of works that have sought to reposition Macau within a cocktail of national, regional, and global themes."—Current History

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Book SynopsisA rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.Trade Review"Globalized Authoritarianism is a must-read for scholars and political organizers interested in urban neoliberal politics in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Exploring political change through the frame of the city, Koenraad Bogaert traces how the geopolitical concept of the urban comes to take a central place in class and biopolitics in contemporary Morocco, a major shift since the 1970s and an elite response to heightened social struggle from below. Bogaert brilliantly synthesizes Marxist literatures and their critics to show how the urban becomes a central arena of social struggle in a neoliberal period that continues to haunt and afflict the living long past its heyday."—Ahmed Kanna, author of Dubai: The City as Corporation"Bogaert’s Globalized Authoritarianism is an important step in reframing the links between global economy, local politics, and urban projects in North Africa—and thus in the world at large."—Technology and Culture"This is a welcome addition to a growing collection of remarkable books published over the past decade that use the entry point of urbanization and its planning in specific cities of the global South in order to provide powerful insights about broader political change across the globe. Decentring urban analysis from the handful of European and American metropolises that constitute the model for the majority of urban studies, these books combine an engagement with contemporary theory with richly documented and analysed case studies that force critical reconsiderations of the existing theoretical frames through which we understand cities, their residents and planning."—International Journal of Urban and Regional Research"Bogaert brilliantly illustrates how deeply neoliberal globalization and authoritarian rule are entangled in Morocco."—Jadaliyya"The book is well written, the argument is finely articulated throughout the three parts of the book, and the empirical evidence is extensive, thus making this a book that all those interested in urban Africa and in the wider debates on globalization and neo-liberalism ought to read."—Planning Perspectives"Globalized Authoritarianism is welcome and timely."—Urban StudiesTable of ContentsContentsAcronymsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Morocco’s Urban RevolutionPart I. Neoliberalism as Projects1. Considering the Global Situation2. An Urban History of Neoliberal Projects in MoroccoPart II. (State-)Crafting Globalization3. Neoliberalism as Class Projects4. Imagineering a New Bouregreg ValleyPart III. Transforming Urban Life5. Changing Methods of Authoritarian Power6. Power and Control through Techniques of SecurityConclusion: A New Geography of PowerNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisUrbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime.Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics—from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular “mediator” (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question “What is a city, today?” The Urban Apparatus serves as an “urban” bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia’s Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.Trade Review"Reinhold Martin's work productively connects debates on architectural culture to fundamental questions related to the political economy of city-building, urbanism, and urbanization. His ideas are at once philosophically grounded, historically nuanced, spatially attuned, and political."—Neil Brenner, Harvard University"The Urban Apparatus offers a brilliant meditation on the new realities and experiences of the city in a fluid and rapidly changing global situation. Reinhold Martin explores an extraordinarily diverse set of objects in ways that are illuminating, original, and often deeply moving—all of which take on special urgency in our current national and geo-political climates."—Phillip E. Wegner, University of FloridaTable of ContentsContents Preface Introduction: The Urban Apparatus 1. City, Country, World 2. Financial Imaginaries 3. The Thing About Cities 4. Public and Common(s) 5. Horizons of Thought 6. Polis = Oikos 7. Notes of the Housing Question 8. Broken Windows 9. Beijing in Detroit 10. Infrastructure and Mediapolitics Notes Index

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Book SynopsisUrban development after disaster, the fading of black political clout, and the onset of gentrification Like no other American city, New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina offers powerful insight into issues of political economy in urban development and, in particular, how a city’s character changes after a disaster that spurs economic and political transition. In New Orleans, the hurricane upset an existing stalemate among rival factions of economic and political elites, and its aftermath facilitated the rise of a globally oriented faction of local capital. In Renew Orleans? Aaron Schneider shows how some city leaders were able to access fragmented local institutions and capture areas of public policy vital to their development agenda. Through interviews and surveys with workers and advocates in construction, restaurants, shipyards, and hotel and casino cleaning, Schneider contrasts sectors prioritized during post-Katrina recovery with neglected sectors. The result is a fine-grained view of the way labor markets are structured to the advantage of elites, emphasizing how dual development produces wealth for the few while distributing poverty and exclusion to the many on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity. Schneider shows the way exploitation operates both in the workplace and the community, tracing working-class resistance that joins struggles for dignity at home and work. In the process, working classes and popular sectors put forth their own alternative forms of development.Trade Review"Aaron Schneider provides a compelling—and heretofore untold—story of how power and poverty in New Orleans were restructured after Hurricane Katrina. A must-read, Renew Orleans? is an epic account of how a globally-oriented elite secured political power amidst the chaos, attempted to rebuild the city in their image, and met fierce resistance by working people."—Steve Striffler, coeditor of Working in the Big Easy: The History and Politics of Labor in New Orleans"Aaron Schneider makes a unique contribution in situating New Orleans's political development, both pre- and post-Katrina, in relation to the city's evolving political economy. One of the book's distinctive contributions is that it connects the racial and cultural discourses through which local politics has been articulated to that evolving political economy and competition among governing elites. His analysis is deep, rich, and concrete; it makes an important intervention in the urban politics and political economy field and should be a touchstone for all subsequent scholarship on New Orleans."—Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania"Aaron Schneider’s Renew Orleans? gives us an unprecedented account of labor conditions in post-Katrina New Orleans and a critical examination of elite power in the city. Drawing on a wealth of quantitative and historical material, Schneider captures the experiences of the Crescent City’s laboring classes, whose plight has too often been neglected in popular celebrations of recovery. Renew Orleans? tells the story of those who are fighting for a more just New Orleans through unionization, community struggles, and sector-wide models of worker organizing."—Cedric Johnson, author of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New OrleansTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Dual Development, Segmented Labor Markets, and Urban Regimes2. The Rise of a Globally Oriented Elite in a Fragmented City3. Satellite Governance, Public Finance, and Networks of Power4. The Post-Katrina Political Transition5. Globalized Construction and Ethnic Segmentation6. Racial and Gender Segmentation in Tourism and Services7. Deindustrialization versus Joined-up Workplace and Community StruggleConclusionAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Satellite EntitiesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life. Trade Review"Through interviews and historical research, Amanda Huron gives us an in-depth description of the formation of a housing cooperative in Washington, D.C. in the ’70s and develops a theoretical structure enabling us to generalize this experience to other cities. It is a incisive book that speaks to a vital issue in contemporary politics and social theory."—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation"Amanda Huron illuminates new ways of thinking what social justice in the City can look like. Her writing is rigorous yet upholds the dignity of the people she studies and their attempts to stake out a right to their city. Carving Out the Commons will be a go-to both for academics and organizers in the coming years."—James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars"Carving Out the Commons offers deep and carefully researched insight into alternative ways to imagine, organize, and enact the urban commons that, if more broadly realized, could improve life for many. This important book should be read by students of the city as well as those trying to make it more socially just."—Nik Heynen, University of Georgia"Investigating urban commons in the context of rapid and increasing urbanization is a critical endeavour. Ultimately, the book argues that the commons, as exemplified by the housing cooperatives, is “a pragmatic practice to be pursued, within and between and against capitalist practices” (page 155). The commons, and particularly urban commons, is a potential pathway to building a post-capitalist world." —Environment & UrbanizationTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction1. What Is the Commons? Merging Two Perspectives2. The Urban Commons: Contradictions of Community, Capital, and the State3. Forged in Crisis: Claiming a Home in the City4. A Decent Grounds for Life: The Benefits of Limited-Equity Cooperatives5. Survival and Collapse: Keeping and Losing Housing Over Time6. Commoning in the Capitalist CityConclusionAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life. Trade Review"Through interviews and historical research, Amanda Huron gives us an in-depth description of the formation of a housing cooperative in Washington, D.C. in the ’70s and develops a theoretical structure enabling us to generalize this experience to other cities. It is a incisive book that speaks to a vital issue in contemporary politics and social theory."—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation"Amanda Huron illuminates new ways of thinking what social justice in the City can look like. Her writing is rigorous yet upholds the dignity of the people she studies and their attempts to stake out a right to their city. Carving Out the Commons will be a go-to both for academics and organizers in the coming years."—James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars"Carving Out the Commons offers deep and carefully researched insight into alternative ways to imagine, organize, and enact the urban commons that, if more broadly realized, could improve life for many. This important book should be read by students of the city as well as those trying to make it more socially just."—Nik Heynen, University of Georgia"Investigating urban commons in the context of rapid and increasing urbanization is a critical endeavour. Ultimately, the book argues that the commons, as exemplified by the housing cooperatives, is “a pragmatic practice to be pursued, within and between and against capitalist practices” (page 155). The commons, and particularly urban commons, is a potential pathway to building a post-capitalist world." —Environment & UrbanizationTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction1. What Is the Commons? Merging Two Perspectives2. The Urban Commons: Contradictions of Community, Capital, and the State3. Forged in Crisis: Claiming a Home in the City4. A Decent Grounds for Life: The Benefits of Limited-Equity Cooperatives5. Survival and Collapse: Keeping and Losing Housing Over Time6. Commoning in the Capitalist CityConclusionAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA forensic examination of the mutual relationship between art and real estate in a transforming Los Angeles Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City, Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles’s burgeoning definition as the global city of the twenty-first century.Pairing particular works of art with specific innovations in real estate development, The Speculative City reveals the connections between real estate and contemporary art as they constructed Los Angeles’s present-day cityscape. From banal parking lots to Frank Gehry’s designs for artists’ studios and museums, Newbury examines pivotal interventions by artists and architects, city officials and cultural philanthropists, concluding with an examination of how, in the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, contemporary art emerged as a financial asset to fuel private wealth and urban gentrification. Both a history of the transformation of the Southland and a forensic examination of works of art, The Speculative City is a rich complement to the California chronicles by such writers as Rebecca Solnit and Mike Davis.Trade Review "The Speculative City is an accomplished piece of work, incredibly nuanced in its research, synthetic in its claims, and novel in its arguments. Susanna Phillips Newbury achieves a compelling picture of the transformation of the Southland through a network of developers, and she convincingly shows how certain real estate moguls-cum-builder-philanthropists literally laid the foundation for the rise of contemporary art in Los Angeles."—Suzanne Hudson, author of Contemporary Painting "In twentieth-century Los Angeles, there is the art of the haves and the art of the have-nots. In this fascinating study, Susanna Phillips Newbury shows how those two worlds have been structured—separately and unequally—through the nexus of art, real estate, and urban development. Essential reading for students of art and political economy, The Speculative City explores the aesthetic foundations of the neoliberal city."—Eric Avila, author of The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City "From a unique approach to cultural history, economics and planning, Newbury’s book, with its extensive notes and comprehensive bibliography, has much to offer libraries and will serve the needs of many academic programs. "—ARLIS/NA Reviews Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Art on FIRE1. Thirtyfour Parking Lots in the Fragmented Metropolis2. Art in the Suburbs: Master Plans and Industrial Images3. Performing Lifestyle in Townhome California 4. The Artist’s Studio Exposed5. Risk Architecture: Museums in CrisisEpilogue: Asset ArtAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA forensic examination of the mutual relationship between art and real estate in a transforming Los Angeles Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City, Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles’s burgeoning definition as the global city of the twenty-first century.Pairing particular works of art with specific innovations in real estate development, The Speculative City reveals the connections between real estate and contemporary art as they constructed Los Angeles’s present-day cityscape. From banal parking lots to Frank Gehry’s designs for artists’ studios and museums, Newbury examines pivotal interventions by artists and architects, city officials and cultural philanthropists, concluding with an examination of how, in the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, contemporary art emerged as a financial asset to fuel private wealth and urban gentrification. Both a history of the transformation of the Southland and a forensic examination of works of art, The Speculative City is a rich complement to the California chronicles by such writers as Rebecca Solnit and Mike Davis.Trade Review "The Speculative City is an accomplished piece of work, incredibly nuanced in its research, synthetic in its claims, and novel in its arguments. Susanna Phillips Newbury achieves a compelling picture of the transformation of the Southland through a network of developers, and she convincingly shows how certain real estate moguls-cum-builder-philanthropists literally laid the foundation for the rise of contemporary art in Los Angeles."—Suzanne Hudson, author of Contemporary Painting "In twentieth-century Los Angeles, there is the art of the haves and the art of the have-nots. In this fascinating study, Susanna Phillips Newbury shows how those two worlds have been structured—separately and unequally—through the nexus of art, real estate, and urban development. Essential reading for students of art and political economy, The Speculative City explores the aesthetic foundations of the neoliberal city."—Eric Avila, author of The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City "From a unique approach to cultural history, economics and planning, Newbury’s book, with its extensive notes and comprehensive bibliography, has much to offer libraries and will serve the needs of many academic programs. "—ARLIS/NA Reviews Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Art on FIRE1. Thirtyfour Parking Lots in the Fragmented Metropolis2. Art in the Suburbs: Master Plans and Industrial Images3. Performing Lifestyle in Townhome California 4. The Artist’s Studio Exposed5. Risk Architecture: Museums in CrisisEpilogue: Asset ArtAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA critical look at the political economy of urban bicycle infrastructure in the United StatesNot long ago, bicycling in the city was considered a radical statement or a last resort, and few cyclists braved the inhospitable streets of most American cities. Today, however, the urban cyclist represents progress and the urban “renaissance.” City leaders now undertake ambitious new bicycle infrastructure plans and bike share schemes to promote the environmental, social, and economic health of the city and its residents. Cyclescapes of the Unequal City contextualizes and critically examines this new wave of bicycling in American cities, exploring how bicycle infrastructure planning has become a key symbol of—and site of conflict over—uneven urban development. John G. Stehlin traces bicycling’s rise in popularity as a key policy solution for American cities facing the environmental, economic, and social contradictions of the previous century of sprawl. Using in-depth case studies from San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Detroit, he argues that the mission of bicycle advocacy has converged with, and reshaped, the urban growth machine around a model of livable, environmentally friendly, and innovation-based urban capitalism. While advocates envision a more sustainable city for all, the deployment of bicycle infrastructure within the framework of the neoliberal city in many ways intensifies divisions along lines of race, class, and space.Cyclescapes of the Unequal City speaks to a growing interest in bicycling as an urban economic and environmental strategy, its role in the politics of gentrification, and efforts to build more diverse coalitions of bicycle advocates. Grounding its analysis in both regional political economy and neighborhood-based ethnography, this book ultimately uses the bicycle as a lens to view major shifts in today’s American city.Trade Review"In a strong wake-up call to current cycling policy in North American cities, John G. Stehlin gives us the best study yet of why the bicycle is failing to meet its emancipatory potential. Focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, Detroit, and Philadelphia, he shows how business-friendly bike advocacy leads to an inequitable ‘cyclescape’ grounded in racialized disinvestment and green gentrification. Tracing developments from Critical Mass to wheelie crews, and from mobility-as-a-service to Vision Zero, this comparative study underlines how race, class, and gender are formed in relation to mobility practices in urban space. For anyone interested in mobility justice, this book is a necessary read."—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes"Through rigorous empirical research and thoughtful analysis, John G. Stehlin illuminates the emergence of a complex politics of mobility that stems from the intersection of cycling and urban change."—Kathe Newman, Rutgers University"This is an excellent investigation of the role of cycling in remaking of the street. With a close eye on the relationship between cycling and urban transformation in North America, John G. Stehlin offers a lucid and important analysis of how cycling becomes caught up in exclusionary relations between race, gentrification, and the city. Cycling becomes an infrastructure of both sustainability and economic exclusion. Yet, as Stehlin shows, it can also become part of a more hopeful and progressive politics for the city."—Colin McFarlane, Durham University"Cyclescapes, in its documentary of the knotty history of bike advocacy, and its rigorous examination of the intersecting phenomena of racialized gentrification and urban planning, tracks precisely this shift. Stehlin’s critique of prominent bike advocacy groups like Critical Mass—an early champion of cyclists’ rights, but one largely committed to White middle-class notions of “sharing the road”—is a case in point. Such putatively radical organizations have, according to Stehlin, actually advanced the agenda of gentrification by historically ignoring questions of race and class. In this way, the book also creates space for consideration of alternative visions of cycling in America’s cities. Such alternatives include cycling groups in San Francisco, Detroit, and Philadelphia—comprised of riders of color, voicing the concerns of their communities—as well as specific examples of policy and design, which could allow cycling, bikeshare programs, and just development to coexist and support one another."—Public Books"Stehlin offers a lot about San Francisco’s biking history, from Critical Mass to the present. He deserves credit for examining a still overlooked issue, which is how urban America misuses its streets."—Beyond Chron"This thoroughly researched book examines the current state of the developing bicycle infrastructure in the modern American city. Highly recommended."—CHOICE"This book will be most interesting to students who want to gain an introduction to urban studies through a critical mobilities perspective, learning to identify layers of meaning through scholarship and personal observation."—Journal of Urban Affairs"From the in-depth analysis of and critical reflection on the many case studies considered in this work, it emerges that in future both the planning of the city and the activation of popular struggle must be renewed."—Regional Studies"Cyclescapes is a solid critical geography of early twenty-first-century bicycle politics in the United States."—AAG Review of BooksTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Vehicle for a New City1. The City and the Cyclescape2. The Bicycle and the Region in Post-Crisis America3. Everyday Practices and the Social Infrastructure of Urban Cycling4. Gentrification and the Changing Publics of Bicycle Infrastructure5. Institutional Power, Intra-Class Conflict, and Complete Streets6. Bicycle Sharing Systems as Already-Splintered InfrastructureConclusion: Notes on a Passive Revolution in MobilityAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA critical look at the political economy of urban bicycle infrastructure in the United StatesNot long ago, bicycling in the city was considered a radical statement or a last resort, and few cyclists braved the inhospitable streets of most American cities. Today, however, the urban cyclist represents progress and the urban “renaissance.” City leaders now undertake ambitious new bicycle infrastructure plans and bike share schemes to promote the environmental, social, and economic health of the city and its residents. Cyclescapes of the Unequal City contextualizes and critically examines this new wave of bicycling in American cities, exploring how bicycle infrastructure planning has become a key symbol of—and site of conflict over—uneven urban development. John G. Stehlin traces bicycling’s rise in popularity as a key policy solution for American cities facing the environmental, economic, and social contradictions of the previous century of sprawl. Using in-depth case studies from San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Detroit, he argues that the mission of bicycle advocacy has converged with, and reshaped, the urban growth machine around a model of livable, environmentally friendly, and innovation-based urban capitalism. While advocates envision a more sustainable city for all, the deployment of bicycle infrastructure within the framework of the neoliberal city in many ways intensifies divisions along lines of race, class, and space.Cyclescapes of the Unequal City speaks to a growing interest in bicycling as an urban economic and environmental strategy, its role in the politics of gentrification, and efforts to build more diverse coalitions of bicycle advocates. Grounding its analysis in both regional political economy and neighborhood-based ethnography, this book ultimately uses the bicycle as a lens to view major shifts in today’s American city.Trade Review"In a strong wake-up call to current cycling policy in North American cities, John G. Stehlin gives us the best study yet of why the bicycle is failing to meet its emancipatory potential. Focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, Detroit, and Philadelphia, he shows how business-friendly bike advocacy leads to an inequitable ‘cyclescape’ grounded in racialized disinvestment and green gentrification. Tracing developments from Critical Mass to wheelie crews, and from mobility-as-a-service to Vision Zero, this comparative study underlines how race, class, and gender are formed in relation to mobility practices in urban space. For anyone interested in mobility justice, this book is a necessary read."—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes"Through rigorous empirical research and thoughtful analysis, John G. Stehlin illuminates the emergence of a complex politics of mobility that stems from the intersection of cycling and urban change."—Kathe Newman, Rutgers University"This is an excellent investigation of the role of cycling in remaking of the street. With a close eye on the relationship between cycling and urban transformation in North America, John G. Stehlin offers a lucid and important analysis of how cycling becomes caught up in exclusionary relations between race, gentrification, and the city. Cycling becomes an infrastructure of both sustainability and economic exclusion. Yet, as Stehlin shows, it can also become part of a more hopeful and progressive politics for the city."—Colin McFarlane, Durham University"Cyclescapes, in its documentary of the knotty history of bike advocacy, and its rigorous examination of the intersecting phenomena of racialized gentrification and urban planning, tracks precisely this shift. Stehlin’s critique of prominent bike advocacy groups like Critical Mass—an early champion of cyclists’ rights, but one largely committed to White middle-class notions of “sharing the road”—is a case in point. Such putatively radical organizations have, according to Stehlin, actually advanced the agenda of gentrification by historically ignoring questions of race and class. In this way, the book also creates space for consideration of alternative visions of cycling in America’s cities. Such alternatives include cycling groups in San Francisco, Detroit, and Philadelphia—comprised of riders of color, voicing the concerns of their communities—as well as specific examples of policy and design, which could allow cycling, bikeshare programs, and just development to coexist and support one another."—Public Books"Stehlin offers a lot about San Francisco’s biking history, from Critical Mass to the present. He deserves credit for examining a still overlooked issue, which is how urban America misuses its streets."—Beyond Chron"This thoroughly researched book examines the current state of the developing bicycle infrastructure in the modern American city. Highly recommended."—CHOICE"This book will be most interesting to students who want to gain an introduction to urban studies through a critical mobilities perspective, learning to identify layers of meaning through scholarship and personal observation."—Journal of Urban Affairs"From the in-depth analysis of and critical reflection on the many case studies considered in this work, it emerges that in future both the planning of the city and the activation of popular struggle must be renewed."—Regional Studies"Cyclescapes is a solid critical geography of early twenty-first-century bicycle politics in the United States."—AAG Review of BooksTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Vehicle for a New City1. The City and the Cyclescape2. The Bicycle and the Region in Post-Crisis America3. Everyday Practices and the Social Infrastructure of Urban Cycling4. Gentrification and the Changing Publics of Bicycle Infrastructure5. Institutional Power, Intra-Class Conflict, and Complete Streets6. Bicycle Sharing Systems as Already-Splintered InfrastructureConclusion: Notes on a Passive Revolution in MobilityAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisSeeing the consequences of competitive school choice policy through students’ eyesWhile policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice.Phillippo’s work amplifies the voices of students—rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research—and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically. Through students’ experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students’ developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people’s individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students’ policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources.With competitive choice, even the winners—the lucky few admitted to their dream schools—don’t outright win. A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.Trade Review"Finally, a smart, thorough, in-depth examination of the impact of high-stakes competitive high school admissions processes on the young people who engage it. A Contest without Winners holds a mirror up to the district, showing what the costs are for policy decisions to heavily invest in a few elite schools rather than ensuring that all students in the district have access to high-quality schooling."—Amanda E. Lewis, coauthor of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools"A Contest without Winners shows readers the faces and voices of the eighth graders embroiled in Chicago’s competitive choice system. Kate Phillippo describes how the students navigate the demands placed on them, how the system changes their views of fairness and of themselves, and how school choice policy legitimizes the very inequalities that rig the competition."—Kevin G. Welner, director, National Education Policy CenterTable of ContentsContentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Competitive Choice Policy, the Students Who Enact It, and Its Social Backdrop1. Unequal Opportunities, Unevenly Distributed: The Puzzle of Admission Results2. Education Policy without Educators: How Competitive Choice Puts Responsibility for Quality Schooling on Students3. The Sculptors and the Sculptures: How Neighborhoods Shape and Are Shaped by Competitive Choice Policy4. Differentially Defended: Students’ Developmental Vulnerability to Competitive Choice and Family Capital’s Buffering Role5. Civic Education: How Competitive Choice Policy Encourages Civic IndividualismConclusion: Surprises, Lessons Learned, and a Few Paths ForwardAcknowledgmentsAppendix A: Research ParticipantsAppendix B: Research Methods: Learning from Adolescents about Urban Education PolicyAppendix C: High Schools Attended or Mentioned by Study Participants, by School TypeNotes Index

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Book SynopsisSeeing the consequences of competitive school choice policy through students’ eyesWhile policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice.Phillippo’s work amplifies the voices of students—rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research—and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically. Through students’ experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students’ developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people’s individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students’ policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources.With competitive choice, even the winners—the lucky few admitted to their dream schools—don’t outright win. A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.Trade Review"Finally, a smart, thorough, in-depth examination of the impact of high-stakes competitive high school admissions processes on the young people who engage it. A Contest without Winners holds a mirror up to the district, showing what the costs are for policy decisions to heavily invest in a few elite schools rather than ensuring that all students in the district have access to high-quality schooling."—Amanda E. Lewis, coauthor of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools"A Contest without Winners shows readers the faces and voices of the eighth graders embroiled in Chicago’s competitive choice system. Kate Phillippo describes how the students navigate the demands placed on them, how the system changes their views of fairness and of themselves, and how school choice policy legitimizes the very inequalities that rig the competition."—Kevin G. Welner, director, National Education Policy CenterTable of ContentsContentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Competitive Choice Policy, the Students Who Enact It, and Its Social Backdrop1. Unequal Opportunities, Unevenly Distributed: The Puzzle of Admission Results2. Education Policy without Educators: How Competitive Choice Puts Responsibility for Quality Schooling on Students3. The Sculptors and the Sculptures: How Neighborhoods Shape and Are Shaped by Competitive Choice Policy4. Differentially Defended: Students’ Developmental Vulnerability to Competitive Choice and Family Capital’s Buffering Role5. Civic Education: How Competitive Choice Policy Encourages Civic IndividualismConclusion: Surprises, Lessons Learned, and a Few Paths ForwardAcknowledgmentsAppendix A: Research ParticipantsAppendix B: Research Methods: Learning from Adolescents about Urban Education PolicyAppendix C: High Schools Attended or Mentioned by Study Participants, by School TypeNotes Index

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Book SynopsisThe interplay of psychology, design, and politics in experiments with urban open space As suburbanization, racial conflict, and the consequences of urban renewal threatened New York City with “urban crisis,” the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) experimented with a broad array of projects in open spaces to affirm the value of city life. Mariana Mogilevich provides a fascinating history of a watershed moment when designers, government administrators, and residents sought to remake the city in the image of a diverse, free, and democratic society.New pedestrian malls, residential plazas, playgrounds in vacant lots, and parks on postindustrial waterfronts promised everyday spaces for play, social interaction, and participation in the life of the city. Whereas designers had long created urban spaces for a broad amorphous public, Mogilevich demonstrates how political pressures and the influence of the psychological sciences led them to a new conception of public space that included diverse publics and encouraged individual flourishing. Drawing on extensive archival research, site work, interviews, and the analysis of film and photographs, The Invention of Public Space considers familiar figures, such as William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs, in a new light and foregrounds the important work of landscape architects Paul Friedberg and Lawrence Halprin and the architects of New York City’s Urban Design Group.The Invention of Public Space brings together psychology, politics, and design to uncover a critical moment of transformation in our understanding of city life and reveals the emergence of a concept of public space that remains today a powerful, if unrealized, aspiration.Trade Review"Deeply researched and wonderfully written, The Invention of Public Space will inspire a re-thinking of a concept—public space—and a place and time—New York City in the 1960s and ’70s—that we thought we knew well. Mariana Mogilevich captures the unique excitement of that moment when the top-down framework of modernist urban design and planning had collapsed and a new world of open, inclusive, and participatory design seemed to be beginning."—Robert Fishman, Taubman College of Architecture + Planning, University of Michigan"Mariana Mogilevich avoids the expected judgements about the spaces she surveys—how ‘public’ were they, really?—and shows how the idea of ‘public space,’ with all its paradoxes and exclusions, was itself devised as a response to urban crisis in 1960s New York City. Pithy, clever, and wise, The Invention of Public Space is a much-needed reminder that ideas about self and society are at the heart of the cultural history of urbanism."—Samuel Zipp, coeditor of Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs"Thanks to the author's original research and acute analysis, this an important book, not just for the history of 20th-century New York but also for the history of urban America more broadly."—CHOICE"Design and planning of public space play an important role in creating the physical conditions for imagining and experiencing democratic citizenship. But rather than settling on a conclusion whether Lindsay, or later Bloomberg, failed in achieving this goal, Mogilevich leaves us with encouragement to continue the experiment."—Journal of Urban Design"Mogilevich successfully explores how design projects driven by high-minded ideals of spatial politics impacted or even contributed to ongoing racial injustice in the city, and often overlooked the experiences of communities whose lives designers and urbanists were seeking to improve."—ARLIS/NA"This timely book squashes naïveté and inspires, leaving the reader energized and better prepared to pursue spatial justice anew."—The Architect’s NewspaperTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Invention of Public Space1. Space and Politics in Lindsay’s New York2. Topographies of Experience: Jacob Riis Plaza3. Strangers and Neighbors: Residential Territories4. Open Space as Interface: Vest-Pocket Parks5. Pedestrian Experiments: Designs on the Street6. Metropolitan Environments: The Waterfront ParkEpilogue: The Deaths and Lives of Urban Public SpaceAcknowledgmentsAbbreviations for Frequently Cited Archival CollectionsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA unique more-than-capitalist take on urban dynamics Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification.The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City—once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living—from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space. Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place—in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are.Trade Review"From a long-term immersion on an (extra)ordinary block on the Westside of NYC, Christian M. Anderson demonstrates how the blunt powers of urban restructuring are intricately nestled in the jostling of everyday compositions of things through which collectives are made—collectives stitched and woven by the everyday efforts to keep social violence at bay, which can both support and undermine new forms of living, and which then demand a new politics of those spaces in-between."—AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield"Conceptually rich, artfully crafted, and with a striking immediacy, Urbanism without Guarantees offers a compelling analysis of the meanings of urban change from the perspective of ordinary residents."—Christine Hentschel, Hamburg University "A fascinating new book."—Viewing NYC"Christian Anderson’s Urbanism without Guarantees takes its name from Stuart Hall’s ‘Marxism without Guarantees’ (1983) and lives up to its name by delivering a critical Marxist analysis of everyday life."—Myung In Ji, ANTIPODETable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Situating a StruggleI. Renovating and Making the Urban Question Critical: Toward a Parallax Urbanism1. Fateful Leaps: Flipping the Script on Rent Gaps and Revanchism 2. Unsettling the Urban Question3. The Contingencies of Civic Action, Revisited4. The Hitch, or, Performative InfrastructureII. Place-Embedded Stories and Other Incitements to Parallax Urbanism5. A Brief (Infrastructural?) History of West Forty-Sixth Street6. Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense7. Battles, Contradictions, and Good SenseConclusion: This Hegemony Is a DragAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA unique more-than-capitalist take on urban dynamics Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification.The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City—once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living—from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space. Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place—in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are.Trade Review"From a long-term immersion on an (extra)ordinary block on the Westside of NYC, Christian M. Anderson demonstrates how the blunt powers of urban restructuring are intricately nestled in the jostling of everyday compositions of things through which collectives are made—collectives stitched and woven by the everyday efforts to keep social violence at bay, which can both support and undermine new forms of living, and which then demand a new politics of those spaces in-between."—AbdouMaliq Simone, The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield"Conceptually rich, artfully crafted, and with a striking immediacy, Urbanism without Guarantees offers a compelling analysis of the meanings of urban change from the perspective of ordinary residents."—Christine Hentschel, Hamburg University "A fascinating new book."—Viewing NYC"Christian Anderson’s Urbanism without Guarantees takes its name from Stuart Hall’s ‘Marxism without Guarantees’ (1983) and lives up to its name by delivering a critical Marxist analysis of everyday life."—Myung In Ji, ANTIPODETable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Situating a StruggleI. Renovating and Making the Urban Question Critical: Toward a Parallax Urbanism1. Fateful Leaps: Flipping the Script on Rent Gaps and Revanchism 2. Unsettling the Urban Question3. The Contingencies of Civic Action, Revisited4. The Hitch, or, Performative InfrastructureII. Place-Embedded Stories and Other Incitements to Parallax Urbanism5. A Brief (Infrastructural?) History of West Forty-Sixth Street6. Specters, Traditions, and the Dominance of Common Sense7. Battles, Contradictions, and Good SenseConclusion: This Hegemony Is a DragAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn in-depth look at life in the “smart” city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.Trade Review"Design, Control, Predict presents smart urbanism as both a logistical node and network. Where global flows of data and capital merge with widespread movements toward austerity and surveillance: there we find smart cities emerging on nearly every continent. Yet as Aaron Shapiro’s illuminating ethnographic research demonstrates, each node in that global assemblage is itself a logistical network within which algorithms orchestrate the circulation of bodies and bicycles, carceral logics and cybernetic imaginaries."—Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media"An enticing and informative book that tells a contemporary story of deception and appropriation of public goods."—Journal of Urban Affairs

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Book SynopsisAn in-depth look at life in the “smart” city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.Trade Review"Design, Control, Predict presents smart urbanism as both a logistical node and network. Where global flows of data and capital merge with widespread movements toward austerity and surveillance: there we find smart cities emerging on nearly every continent. Yet as Aaron Shapiro’s illuminating ethnographic research demonstrates, each node in that global assemblage is itself a logistical network within which algorithms orchestrate the circulation of bodies and bicycles, carceral logics and cybernetic imaginaries."—Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media"An enticing and informative book that tells a contemporary story of deception and appropriation of public goods."—Journal of Urban Affairs

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Book SynopsisQuestions increasingly dominant urban planning orthodoxies and whether they truly serve everyday city dwellers What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism. Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification.Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience. Trade Review"Jacob Lederman shows how politicians’ ambitions to make Buenos Aires a ‘world-class’ city appeal to global audiences while inflaming local tensions and reinforcing inequality. This nuanced study of a ‘creative’ city in the global South is a provocative, elegantly written contribution to comparative urban studies."—Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City and The Innovation Complex "This clearly written and persuasively argued book will be of invaluable use to urban sociologists and geographers interested in understanding in more detail and depth the varied ideological debates and pragmatic ramifications of urban policy making, city planning, and class relations in the Global South."—American Journal of Sociology"Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a book that ties conceptual innovation with empirical richness, and aims to put in conversation theories from different toolkits. "—Sociological Forum"A significant contribution to our provisional and still incomplete understanding of architecture’s relation to capitalism. "—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians"[Chasing World-Class Urbanism] stands out in its nuanced analysis of the dynamics of global and local cultural politics."—City & CommunityTable of ContentsContentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: A City in Transition1. Turning to Culture in Times of Crisis 2. New Objects of Government Innovation: Heritage, Culture, and Tourism3. Becoming a Historic Center: The Invention of San Telmo4. Best Practice in a Transnational Discourse Community5. Recentering the South: The Creative, Livable City6. The Production of Value in a Tourist Market7. Contested Urban FuturesAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisQuestions increasingly dominant urban planning orthodoxies and whether they truly serve everyday city dwellers What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism. Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification.Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience. Trade Review"Jacob Lederman shows how politicians’ ambitions to make Buenos Aires a ‘world-class’ city appeal to global audiences while inflaming local tensions and reinforcing inequality. This nuanced study of a ‘creative’ city in the global South is a provocative, elegantly written contribution to comparative urban studies."—Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City and The Innovation Complex "This clearly written and persuasively argued book will be of invaluable use to urban sociologists and geographers interested in understanding in more detail and depth the varied ideological debates and pragmatic ramifications of urban policy making, city planning, and class relations in the Global South."—American Journal of Sociology"Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a book that ties conceptual innovation with empirical richness, and aims to put in conversation theories from different toolkits. "—Sociological Forum"A significant contribution to our provisional and still incomplete understanding of architecture’s relation to capitalism. "—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians"[Chasing World-Class Urbanism] stands out in its nuanced analysis of the dynamics of global and local cultural politics."—City & CommunityTable of ContentsContentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: A City in Transition1. Turning to Culture in Times of Crisis 2. New Objects of Government Innovation: Heritage, Culture, and Tourism3. Becoming a Historic Center: The Invention of San Telmo4. Best Practice in a Transnational Discourse Community5. Recentering the South: The Creative, Livable City6. The Production of Value in a Tourist Market7. Contested Urban FuturesAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA timely ethnography of how Indonesia’s coastal dwellers inhabit the “chronic present” of a slow-motion natural disaster Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a timely and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this global warming–driven existential challenge. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life: toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted. As Lukas Ley shows, the residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure, ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this predicament through the temporal lens of a “meantime,” a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better future—a “chronic present.” Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it—and shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding.Trade Review "In this careful study of keeping water at bay in Semarang’s floodplain kampungs, Lukas Ley takes us to a material landscape riddled with the legacies of maldevelopment. With historical precision and ethnographic nuance, Building on Borrowed Time shows us how an urban world of dysfunctional flood protection systems generates everyday, intensely localized burdens of chronic breakdown and disrepair that often hinder—and sometimes fully prevent—communities from engaging with future-looking efforts to mitigate the threats of a changing climate. A must-read for anyone seeking to better understand the complexity of urban flood management and community well-being on an ever-warmer planet."—Anne Rademacher, New York University "How do residents of a sodden Semarang inhabit both the waters that now regularly soak their homes, and also crusty, transnational urban political agendas? Building on Borrowed Time is a brilliant book that wades through the muddy political environment of a frequently inundated city. It shows how Semarang’s residents occupy the chronic present—a mode of living with the violence of accreted infrastructures and their regular breakdowns. Dwelling with planners, transnational development experts, local political leaders, and residents, Lukas Ley demonstrates how socialities and politics relentlessly emerge from residents staying afloat in a meantime in which the promise of future transformation is noticeably absent. This is a rare ethnography that is both historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated—a great read for anyone thinking about the futures of coastal cities in the climate changed present."—Nikhil Anand, author of Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai "In Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang, Lukas Ley offers a new ethnrography exploring how people in Semarang, Indonesia, deal with the everyday threat of flooding. This fascinating book is worthwhile reading not only for urban studies scholars but for all those wanting to understand the complexity of living in a chronic disaster area from the perspective of inhabitants."—LSE Review of Books "Ley's study offers a valuable look at Indonesian politics and the complexities of living with (or despite) infrastructure."—H-Net Reviews Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Tidal Flooding and Chronic Infrastructural Breakdown1. Becoming: Semarang’s Swamp in Late Colonial Times2. Stuck: Never-Ending River Normalization3. Floating: Endurance and the “Quasi-Events” of Living with Flooding4. Figuring: Environmental Governance and the Political Affordances of Infrastructure5. Promise: Remodeling DrainageAfterwordAcknowledgmentsGlossaryNotesReferencesIndex

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Book SynopsisExamines how radical bookstores and similar spaces serve as launching pads for social movements How does social change happen? It requires an identified problem, an impassioned and committed group, a catalyst, and a plan. In this deeply researched consideration of seventy-seven stores and establishments, Kimberley Kinder argues that activists also need autonomous space for organizing, and that these spaces are made, not found. She explores the remarkably enduring presence of radical bookstores in America and how they provide infrastructure for organizing—gathering places, retail offerings that draw new people into what she calls “counterspaces.”Kinder focuses on brick-and-mortar venues where owners approach their businesses primarily as social movement tools. These may be bookstores, infoshops, libraries, knowledge cafes, community centers, publishing collectives, thrift stores, or art installations. They are run by activist-entrepreneurs who create centers for organizing and selling books to pay the rent. These spaces allow radical and contentious ideas to be explored and percolate through to actual social movements, and serve as crucibles for activists to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white privilege, patriarchy, and homophobia. They also exist within a central paradox: participating in the marketplace creates tensions, contradictions, and shortfalls. Activist retail does not end capitalism; collective ownership does not enable a retreat from civic requirements like zoning; and donations, no matter how generous, do not offset the enormous power of corporations and governments. In this timely and relevant book, Kinder presents a necessary, novel, and apt analysis of the role these retail spaces play in radical organizing, one that demonstrates how such durable hubs manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protest. Trade Review "Radical bookstores have finally received the full-length study they deserve. Focusing on contentious politics and constructive placemaking, Kimberley Kinder shows that these shops do much more than sell political literature. If you want to understand how movements use bricks, mortar, and books to build their own worlds and spread their ideas—even in the twenty-first century—you should read this book."—Joshua Clark Davis, University of Baltimore "The Radical Bookstore is a sorely needed corrective to the conventional story of retail bookselling. The focus on print-based movement spaces yields an absorbing narrative in which social justice-oriented bookstores emerge as critical sites for negotiating belonging, enacting care, and fostering equity. Kimberley Kinder shows us that another print culture, divested of the overwhelming demands of consumer capitalism, is indeed possible."—Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder "The work is well-written and enjoyable to read. The biggest strength in the book lies in how it contextualizes the radical bookstore counterspaces within a larger social context."—Social Forces "The scope of Kinder’s analysis is impressive, yet the author also leaves room for further engagement on a number of questions addressed throughout the text, in a way that is fruitful and generative. The book makes a number of interesting theoretical contributions, unthreading the ways in which the different radical spaces are built, run, and sustained through organising and solidarity networks."—Urban Studies Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Building the Infrastructure of Dissent1. Constructing Places for Contentious Politics2. Creating Accessible and Autonomous Activist Enterprises3. Reinventing Activist Bookstores in a Corporate Digital Age4. Claiming Spaces and Resources in Gentrifying Cities5. Designing Landscapes that Shout, Entice, and Heal6. Governing Safe Spaces that Restructure Public Speech7. Nurturing Camaraderie in Filtered Third Places8. Supporting Public Protests from the WingsConclusion: Evaluating Constructivism in an Ephemeral WorldNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding the processes and policies of urbanization and suburbanization in American Indian communities Nearly seven out of ten American Indians live in urban areas, yet studies of urban Indian experiences remain scant. Studies of suburban Natives are even more rare. Today’s suburban Natives, the fastest-growing American Indian demographic, highlight the tensions within federal policies working in tandem to move and house differing groups of people in very different residential locations. In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.At the intersection of federal Indian policy and federal housing policy, American Indians and the American Dream analyzes the dispossession of Indian land, property rights, and patterns of home ownership through programs and policies that sought to move communities away from their traditional homelands to reservations and, later, to urban and suburban areas. Keeler begins this analysis with the Homestead Act of 1862, then shifts to the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, the creation of Little Earth in Minneapolis, and Indian homeownership during the housing bubble of the early 2000s.American Indians and the American Dream investigates the ways American Indians accessed homeownership, working with and against federal policy, underscoring American Indian peoples’ unequal and exclusionary access to the way of life known as the American dream. Cover alt text: Vintage photo of Native person bathing smiling child in the sink of a midcentury kitchen. Title in yellow.Trade Review "Crucial new insights on Indigenous place, space, and suburbanity fly off the pages of this thoroughly researched and beautifully written exploration of the intersection between federal Indian and housing policies and the lived experiences and purposeful actions of Native people in Minnesota from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. American Indians and the American Dream inaugurates a paradigm shift in the field by transcending the urban/reservation binary."—Daniel M. Cobb, editor of Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887 "Kasey R. Keeler's book explores the history of Indigenous urbanization in the United States from the exciting and largely under-researched lens of suburbanization. Focusing on the state of Minnesota, she convincingly demonstrates American Indian individuals and families’ agency as they made pragmatic use of—but also, when necessary, grappled with the structural racism of—existing federal, state, and even municipal policy to make an Indigenously suburban place of their own."—Chris Andersen, coeditor of Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation "I highly recommend this book for its poignant and honest approach."—UP Book Review

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Book SynopsisUnderstanding the processes and policies of urbanization and suburbanization in American Indian communities Nearly seven out of ten American Indians live in urban areas, yet studies of urban Indian experiences remain scant. Studies of suburban Natives are even more rare. Today’s suburban Natives, the fastest-growing American Indian demographic, highlight the tensions within federal policies working in tandem to move and house differing groups of people in very different residential locations. In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.At the intersection of federal Indian policy and federal housing policy, American Indians and the American Dream analyzes the dispossession of Indian land, property rights, and patterns of home ownership through programs and policies that sought to move communities away from their traditional homelands to reservations and, later, to urban and suburban areas. Keeler begins this analysis with the Homestead Act of 1862, then shifts to the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, the creation of Little Earth in Minneapolis, and Indian homeownership during the housing bubble of the early 2000s.American Indians and the American Dream investigates the ways American Indians accessed homeownership, working with and against federal policy, underscoring American Indian peoples’ unequal and exclusionary access to the way of life known as the American dream. Cover alt text: Vintage photo of Native person bathing smiling child in the sink of a midcentury kitchen. Title in yellow.Trade Review "Crucial new insights on Indigenous place, space, and suburbanity fly off the pages of this thoroughly researched and beautifully written exploration of the intersection between federal Indian and housing policies and the lived experiences and purposeful actions of Native people in Minnesota from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. American Indians and the American Dream inaugurates a paradigm shift in the field by transcending the urban/reservation binary."—Daniel M. Cobb, editor of Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887 "Kasey R. Keeler's book explores the history of Indigenous urbanization in the United States from the exciting and largely under-researched lens of suburbanization. Focusing on the state of Minnesota, she convincingly demonstrates American Indian individuals and families’ agency as they made pragmatic use of—but also, when necessary, grappled with the structural racism of—existing federal, state, and even municipal policy to make an Indigenously suburban place of their own."—Chris Andersen, coeditor of Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation "I highly recommend this book for its poignant and honest approach."—UP Book Review

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Book SynopsisA powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable?Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives: a pair of co-op grocers in Philadelphia, each adjusting to recent growth and renewal; a federation of two hundred low-cost community acupuncture clinics throughout the United States, banded together as a cooperative of practitioners and patients; and a collectively managed Philadelphia experimental dance company, founded in the early 1990s and still going strong. Through these case studies, Andrew Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. In so doing he asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism.Practicing Cooperation is grounded in the voices of practitioners and the result is a clear-eyed look at the lived experience of cooperators from different parts of the economy and a guidebook for people on the potential of this way of life for the pursuit of justice and fairness. Trade Review "Amid talk of Covid-19, Trump, U.S. imperialism, and racialized capitalism, it is always good to hear about the ‘other America’ built on social justice, cooperation, and creativity. Andrew Zitcer’s engaged, sympathetic, but not uncritical, study of four Philadelphia cooperatives ranges across bodies and practices, scales, and inclusion and exclusion to paint a theoretically rich study of the visions and activities of today’s cooperators that will inspire those of us who would like to build such societal wealth in our communities."—Peter North, author of Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements "Andrew Zitcer’s Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism accomplishes the difficult task of disarticulating the act of cooperating from cooperatives themselves while asking what makes both ‘ethical, effective, and sustainable.’"—Antipode Table of ContentsContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Social Imperative of Cooperation2. Tools for the Journey3. Practices of the Body4. Practices of Work and Organization5. Practices of Community Economy6. Practices of DemocracyConclusionNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable?Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives: a pair of co-op grocers in Philadelphia, each adjusting to recent growth and renewal; a federation of two hundred low-cost community acupuncture clinics throughout the United States, banded together as a cooperative of practitioners and patients; and a collectively managed Philadelphia experimental dance company, founded in the early 1990s and still going strong. Through these case studies, Andrew Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. In so doing he asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism.Practicing Cooperation is grounded in the voices of practitioners and the result is a clear-eyed look at the lived experience of cooperators from different parts of the economy and a guidebook for people on the potential of this way of life for the pursuit of justice and fairness. Trade Review "Amid talk of Covid-19, Trump, U.S. imperialism, and racialized capitalism, it is always good to hear about the ‘other America’ built on social justice, cooperation, and creativity. Andrew Zitcer’s engaged, sympathetic, but not uncritical, study of four Philadelphia cooperatives ranges across bodies and practices, scales, and inclusion and exclusion to paint a theoretically rich study of the visions and activities of today’s cooperators that will inspire those of us who would like to build such societal wealth in our communities."—Peter North, author of Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements "Andrew Zitcer’s Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism accomplishes the difficult task of disarticulating the act of cooperating from cooperatives themselves while asking what makes both ‘ethical, effective, and sustainable.’"—Antipode Table of ContentsContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Social Imperative of Cooperation2. Tools for the Journey3. Practices of the Body4. Practices of Work and Organization5. Practices of Community Economy6. Practices of DemocracyConclusionNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA fascinating deep dive into one city’s urban policy—and the anxiety over immigrants that informs it The city of Toronto is often held up as a leader in diversity and inclusion. In Fearing the Immigrant, however, Parastou Saberi argues that Toronto’s urban policies are influenced by a territorialized and racialized security agenda—one that parallels the “War on Terror.” Focusing on the figure of the immigrant and so-called immigrant neighborhoods as the targets of urban policy, Saberi offers an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the politics of racialization and the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities.A comprehensive study of urban policymaking in Canada’s largest city from the 1990s to the late 2010s, Fearing the Immigrant uses Toronto as a jumping-off point to understand how the nexus of development, racialization, and security works at the urban and international levels. Saberi situates urban policymaking in Toronto in relation to the dominant policies of international development and public health, counterinsurgency, and humanitarian intervention. Engaging with the genealogies and contemporary developments of major policy techniques involving mapping and policy concepts such as poverty, security, policing, development, empowerment, as well as social determinants of health, equity, and prevention, she scrutinizes the parallel ways these techniques and concepts operate in urban policy and international relations. Fearing the Immigrant ultimately asserts that the geopolitical fear of the immigrant is central to the formation of urban policy in Toronto. Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, urban policy as it has been practiced aims to pacify the specter of urban unrest and to secure the production of a neocolonial urban order. As such, this book is an urgent call to reimagine urban policy in the name of equality and social justice.Trade Review"Fearing the Immigrant is a searing analysis of the colonial management of contemporary global suburban spaces. This dazzling work eschews disciplinary and geopolitical borders to offer a cutting critique of the securitization of the city as domestic warfare and leaves us with bold new ways to think race, struggle, and the future of urban life."—Deborah Cowen, author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade"Innovative and detailed, Fearing the Immigrant opens up Toronto’s urban policy, both conceptually and geographically. Connecting urban policy to debates around space, state, racialization, and geopolitics, Parastou Saberi makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities."—Mustafa Dikeç, author of Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded

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Book SynopsisA fascinating deep dive into one city’s urban policy—and the anxiety over immigrants that informs it The city of Toronto is often held up as a leader in diversity and inclusion. In Fearing the Immigrant, however, Parastou Saberi argues that Toronto’s urban policies are influenced by a territorialized and racialized security agenda—one that parallels the “War on Terror.” Focusing on the figure of the immigrant and so-called immigrant neighborhoods as the targets of urban policy, Saberi offers an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the politics of racialization and the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities.A comprehensive study of urban policymaking in Canada’s largest city from the 1990s to the late 2010s, Fearing the Immigrant uses Toronto as a jumping-off point to understand how the nexus of development, racialization, and security works at the urban and international levels. Saberi situates urban policymaking in Toronto in relation to the dominant policies of international development and public health, counterinsurgency, and humanitarian intervention. Engaging with the genealogies and contemporary developments of major policy techniques involving mapping and policy concepts such as poverty, security, policing, development, empowerment, as well as social determinants of health, equity, and prevention, she scrutinizes the parallel ways these techniques and concepts operate in urban policy and international relations. Fearing the Immigrant ultimately asserts that the geopolitical fear of the immigrant is central to the formation of urban policy in Toronto. Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, urban policy as it has been practiced aims to pacify the specter of urban unrest and to secure the production of a neocolonial urban order. As such, this book is an urgent call to reimagine urban policy in the name of equality and social justice.Trade Review"Fearing the Immigrant is a searing analysis of the colonial management of contemporary global suburban spaces. This dazzling work eschews disciplinary and geopolitical borders to offer a cutting critique of the securitization of the city as domestic warfare and leaves us with bold new ways to think race, struggle, and the future of urban life."—Deborah Cowen, author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade"Innovative and detailed, Fearing the Immigrant opens up Toronto’s urban policy, both conceptually and geographically. Connecting urban policy to debates around space, state, racialization, and geopolitics, Parastou Saberi makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities."—Mustafa Dikeç, author of Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded

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