New Books in Urban Studies

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and the deployment of police terror, and about his conceptual engagements with Afro-pessimist philosophy.Jaime Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research affiliate at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos at Universidad Icesi, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Antipode, Journal of Latin American Studies, Identities, and Critical Sociology.Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Anna Rose Alexander’s City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks at fire as an active agent of change in the urban environment (a catalyst for change). She examines the approaches to dealing with the ever-present threat of fire in Mexico City in an era in which technology and modernity were transforming the city in fundamental ways. Using a methodology borrowed from “hazard studies,” Alexander looks not at the major disasters as agents of fundamental change, but the everyday conflagrations as creating a kind of “culture of disaster” in the porfirian city. Alexander highlights the efforts of fire inspectors and other officials in the realm of public safety to approach fire risk reduction from a perspective that ensured all capitalinos access to fire safety, as a matter of public safety.Julian Dodson is a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at Washington State University. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexican history, specifically the period of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. Other interests include the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations, environmental, transnational, gender, and cultural history. Julian is the author of Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the U.S-Mexico Border, 1923-1930 (Texas A&M University Press, 2019). Follow Julian on Twitter @JulianDodson4. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles.In The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island Press, 2019), distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a failure. Rather, Günel explores the interconnected social, technical, and political ramifications and adaptations involved in this attempt to design a potential fossil fuel-free future. She shrewdly criticizes the limitations of climate change strategies intended to protect the political economic status quo. Yet also, through deep ethnographic fieldwork with participants, Günel demonstrates the valuable role of anthropological insight in social and technological adaptations to a changing climate.Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Sandra C. Mendiola García analyzes independent union activism among street vendors facing state repression and the displacing forces of neoliberalism. Set in Puebla, Mexico’s fourth largest city, Street Democracy traces how these informal workers were politicized in the 1960s and 1970s and collaborated with working-class, leftwing student activists. After forming the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes in 1973, the vendors maintained their independence from the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Mendiola documents the UPVA’s varied strategies of resistance and democratic practices as well as the forms of state violence inflicted upon the rank-and-file members and leadership. She shows that Mexico’s Dirty War was waged not only on dissident students, guerrilla organizations, and peasant groups, but also on these mobilized street vendors who paid a high price for their refusal to collaborate with the ruling party. Street Democracy is also a history of the right to public space in the neoliberalizing city. Mendiola reveals how historical preservation efforts spearheaded by Puebla’s elites served to displace the city’s poor- and working-class citizens from the urban center, making way for transnational capital to move into the most commercially viable zones. As street vendors were pushed toward the city’s margins, the UPVA nevertheless has managed to adapt and survive to the present. Drawing from varied sources, including municipal records, secret police documents, and oral histories, Mendiola’s Street Democracy encourages readers to rethink what we know about labor organizing in twentieth-century Mexico and makes important contributions to the histories of student activism, democracy, and urban development.Rachel Grace Newman has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), geographer David Bissell contends that to commute is to enter a highly eventful domain, an atmosphere in which new “capsular collectives” form and reform, opening onto new political and ethical possibilities for being in public. With Sydney, Australia, as its setting, Transit Life develops a non-representational geography on the move, attentive to the blockages and flows that give infrastructural life its contours. Dwelling on embodiment, temporality, sound and other senses, and a broadly Deleuzian vision of micropolitics, Bissell makes the case that the commute should be understood as anything but an empty interval of time, passively submitted to and upheld only through the force of habit. Rather, he contends, out of its repetition emerges a richly differentiated palette of urban encounters, subjectivities, and agencies. If urban life is increasingly spent in transit, Bissell suggests, geographers’ interventions should begin with an interest in its rhythms.Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Relative wealth has given suburban African Americans employment opportunities and political resources--but not necessarily neighbors, coworkers, or elected officials who share their concerns. How does this environment affect the political behavior of African Americans who have strong racial identifications and policy preferences? Ernest McGowen III set out to answer this question in African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior (University Press of Kansas, 2017). McGowen is assistant professor of political science, University of Richmond.McGowen uses a various surveys to understand the opinion and behavior of suburban African Americans and compares these attitudes their white neighbors and to African Americans in the city. The findings from the book reveal that suburban African Americans feel their minority status acutely. As a result, they find more agreeable networks that reinforce their racial identity, such as churches, fraternal organizations, and charities in black neighborhoods they've left behind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of directors of Houston METRO from 2010-2018, where he oversaw a complete redesign of the bus network that has resulted in Houston being one of the few US cities that are increasing transit ridership.His Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit (Island Press, 2018) is a fascinating book about “How To” develop better transportation modes for US cities and urban areas. Christof has put assembled a dense amount of research with maps, diagrams, and images to demonstrate the successes and lessons learned from US transit. This is a must read book for anyone interested in urban planning, landscape architecture, and the design of our cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are market cities better than people cities? Does the satisfaction that residents take in their city vary from market city to people city? In Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future (NYU Press, 2018), Dr. Michael Oluf Emerson and Dr. Kevin T. Smiley identify the kinds of cities people want to live in and the façades strategically placed by city administrators to draw a specific crowd. Emerson and Smiley characterize cities as being somewhere along a spectrum with market city as one extreme and people city as the other extreme. Market cities are inclined to focus on wealth, employment, individualism, and economic opportunity. People cities are more egalitarian, with government investment in infrastructure and an active civil society.In this interview, Dr. Smiley discusses the implications urban design and policy have on environment and on the experience of people who inhabit these two types of cities. He shares that the approach in which a city takes to mitigate and respond to environmental disaster can be a distinguishing characteristic for labeling a city as market city or people city. Each city lies somewhere along the spectrum and likely does not land on either extreme. An interesting find, however, that Dr. Smiley bore out is that inhabitants of both market cities and people cities tend to be generally satisfied with their place of residence.Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the continuous process that occurs with placemaking at farmers’ market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Candis Watts Smith and Christina Greer are the editors of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification (Routledge, 2019). Smith is assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina; Greer is associate professor of political science and American Studies at Fordham University.Black Politics in Transition examines the role of three themes—immigration, suburbanization, and gentrification—in Black politics today. Immigration has resulted in demographic changes in Black populations throughout the US. In addition, the movement of Black populations out of the cities to which they migrated a generation ago—a reverse migration to the American South or a movement from cities to suburbs shifts the locus of Black politics. At the same time, middle class and white populations are returning to cities, displacing low income Blacks and immigrants alike in a process of gentrification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices