New Books in Urban Studies

Researching and writing about infrastructure is a tall task. Infrastructure’s vastness, complexity, and, if it’s functioning, invisibility can defy narratives. Andrew Needham, however, succeeds beautifully. His book, called Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2016), tells the important and dramatic story of how the creation and development of a regional energy system linked Southwestern metropolitan and rural spaces. The book, Needham writes, “constructs a broad new map of postwar urban, environmental, and political change.”Needham shows how that system produced and concealed geographic inequality. Post-World War II Southwest cities depended on abundant cheap energy, namely coal, and the primary source was far away in the Navajo lands. In addition to fueling the rapid metropolitan development, those lands also absorbed the majority of the energy system’s pollution. In other words, while city-dwellers and suburbanites consumed cheap energy, the Navajo bore the brunt of the ecological costs. The book would be of interest to urban historians, environmental historians, Native American studies scholars, historians of technology, and anyone wanting to engage in discussions of inequality and ecology.Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly recesses of American cities in the 19th century. In the decades on either side of the fulcrum between “miasma theory” and the modern germ theory of disease, Americans typically linked smell with healthfulness, or lack thereof. In places like Chicago, New York and Boston, as industrializing businesses generated ever-greater amounts of noxious fumes, medical professionals, policymakers and ordinary people employed various techniques to follow stenches to their source–not always accurately. In a fascinating urban history that centers around the “invisible sense,” Kiechle examines not only what 19th-century cities smelled like, but how people’s thinking about smells changed and how that knowledge came to change their urban environments. This book is a highly creative and unusual glimpse into a realm of environmental history that is rarely accessible to modern observers.Sean Munger is a historian, author, podcaster and speaker. He has his own historical podcast, Second Decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s great “Cosmopolis”—have been a persistent feature of discourse on the probable fate of New York City since the Second World War. The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) traces this “spatial narrative” across many domains of thought and cultural production: fiction and essays, planning theory and practice, humanistic and social-scientific criticism in the public square, and film in the age of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish. Throughout, Tochterman shows that New York intellectuals of diverse political inflections have made specters of urban “ungovernability” central to how America and the world look at New York—whether to compel remedies, to render the city’s very chaos alluring, or, especially, to argue for the futility of intervention. Tochterman sheds new light on such figures as E. B. White, Mickey Spillane, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Lionel Abel, Michael Harrington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and John Lindsay, among other compass points in the urbanism and intellectual life of postwar New York. Between “Fun City” and “Fear City,” a new image of the metropolitan past, present, and future comes into focus.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

It is possible that you did not know that you need a comprehensive labor market analysis of the New York City Parks Department, but John Krinsky and Maud Simonet, in their new book, Who Cleans the Park? Public Works and Urban Governance in New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2017), show that you do. Join us as we talk with Krinsky about what this wildly segmented labor force tells us about work, workers, and workplaces today (not to mention race, sexual harassment, and real estate). The answer to “Who Cleans the Park?” is, in fact, much more complicated — and much more important — than you might think.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freeway Park, downtown Portland’s open-space sequence, the FDR Memorial on the National Mall, and the California planned community of Sea Ranch. Less well known is his distinctive, process-based approach to design—his theoretical commitment, on the one hand, to a dynamic “choreography” of bodies moving through space, and, on the other, the visually arresting notational techniques of “scoring” he devised to represent such movement and carry out his projects in consultation with the public. In City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Alison Bick Hirsch addresses Halprin’s built work and community workshops in equal measure, pointing up important tensions that his participatory “Take Part Process” never quite extinguished: between manipulation and facilitation, universality and difference, conscious choice and emergent chance. Through Lawrence Halprin and his wife, the modern dancer Anna Halprin, Hirsch opens onto a broader history of postwar landscape and urban design, and onto some of the complicated politics in which proponents and critics of Urban Renewal alike found themselves immersed. Hirsch has written a decisive work that joins the intellectual, social, political, and aesthetic histories of urbanism. Geographers, historians, and urbanists of many stripes will learn from her able analysis.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

When the army brutally dispersed Red Shirts protestors in Bangkok’s busy commercial district in May 2010, motorcycle taxi drivers emerged as a key force, capable of playing cat-and-mouse with security forces, evading military checkpoints, and rescuing protestors and their leaders once the army attacked them. Motorcycle taxis are ubiquitous across the developing world. Dexterously weaving in and out of dense urban conurbations, they transport people, commodities and news through peak traffic with an unparalleled knowledge of the city. They are owners of the map.In his vividly etched monograph, Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press, 2017), Claudio Sopranzetti moves across the city and between city and country to examine how migrant laborers driven off the factory floor following structural adjustment reforms in the late-1990s turned to motorcycle taxi driving as a form of flexible and yet unfree means of livelihood. Owners of the Map not only confronts the specific realities of ordinary Thais resisting military authoritarianism over a decade-long period, but also the question of how modes of circulation can become sites of collective action, particularly for precarious workers, in the neoliberal moment.Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.You may also be interested in:Serhat Unaldi, Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown BangkokAnnette Miae Kim, Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh CityMadhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016, Dr Obeng-Odoom won the Patrick Welch Prize awarded by the Association for Social Economics. He also won the EAEPE-Kapp Prize 2017 for “Marketising the commons in Africa: the case of Ghana” Review of Social Economy 74 (4), 390-419. He has recently published Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment (Zed Books, 2016)The shift of world populations into cities and the increasing concentration of activities in urban areas have generated new debates about cities as well as rejuvenating old debates, turning them into global concerns. The economics of cities and regions has, therefore, attained a particularly important status in the twenty-first century. Yet many writers on urban economic issues have never formally studied the subject. Many are mainstream economists who apply their general (equilibrium) economics to cities, but most of them have very little appreciation of the political economy of cities and much less understanding of the built environment, its history, complexities, and peculiarities. The result is the rise of a highly mathematical, mystical urban economics abstracted from critical political, institutional, and social processes at a time when real-world urban economics is urgently needed. This book seeks to offer a corrective to this state of affairs, and to generate further interest in critical real-world urban economics. Through the analysis, exposition, and critique of the urban world in which we live, the book shows fundamental contradictions in the wisdom that more mainstream urban economists have offered over the years. It offers clear alternatives that show that another urban world is possible.Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of political economy at Sapienza University of Rome, and editor of the open access economics journals PSL Quarterly Review and Moneta e Credito. Within EAEPE he is the research area coordinator of History of Political Economy; more info at his website www.carlodippoliti.eu.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPEs permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A city in its original state is arbitrary and has no meaning. The act of placemaking is a multifaceted process in the planning, designing, and management of public spaces. The social construction of meaning is a process that capitalizes on the assets, inspiration, and potential of a public space. This meaning is constructed from the social and emotional sentiments that people evoke from the city. The structural and physical aspects of the city are less important. Jonathan R. Wynn, the author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (University of Chicago, 2015) and my guest for this episode, studied the process of placemaking through observing major music festivals for the cities of Austin, Texas; Nashville, Texas; and Newport, Rhode Island. In our interview, we discuss how this study was shaped from his past study on tour guides and how community members serve as major contributors to placemaking. Wynn also shares his thoughts on the current climate of music festivals in the United States compared to Canada.Jonathan R. Wynn, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Undergraduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Wynn is an urban sociologist who published The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York and regularly contributes to the Everyday Sociology blog. He is currently working on a project about hospitals as a central hub for urban communities.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.” You can learn more about Dr. Johnston’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jamin Creed Rowan is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University. His book The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) offers a history of how American intellectuals and planners thought about urban relationships shaping modern cities. He traces how cities’ physical landscape changed as ideas about the nature of their social life were reconceived. Beginning with Frederick Law Olmsted in the nineteenth century who expressed anxiety over the erosion of social sympathy, to the progressive era’s deployment of the family ideal for urban friendships, to mid-century models that saw these relationships as part of and analogous to an ecological system. Along the way he examines the thought of Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, the journalists at the New Yorker, Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs and the disruptive force of urban renewal projects. Rowan provides the reader with a new way to value “sociable fellow-feelings” in the midst of the diversity and the rapid change of today’s cities.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Modernist architects believed they could build a new city that would match the modernization goals of the new communist government. In Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) , Brigitte Le Normand reveals the ideals that under girded these architects plans for Belgrade, along with the postwar realities that thwarted their attempts to foster a new society through a modernist built environment. She analyzes the political, social, and ideological implications of urban planning and the built environment, demonstrating how modernist architects were able to mold their ideal cityscape to fit Yugoslavia’s third way after the Tito-Stalin split and how market socialism created expectations that undermined their vision of social spaces. Her work demonstrates how architects and urban planners in Belgrade were part of a larger movement of modernism in postwar Europe and were affected by the movement away from modernism in the 1960s.Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices