New Books in Urban Studies

After World War II, America’s religious denominations spent billions on church architecture as they spread into the suburbs. Gretchen Buggeln’s latest monograph, The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America (University of Minnesota, 2015), is richly illustrated history of mid-century churches in the Midwest that shows how architects and suburban congregations joined forces to create a new wave of modernist churches to reflect and shape developments in postwar religion–its ecumenism, optimism, and liturgical innovation, as well as its fears about staying relevant during a time of vast cultural, social, and demographic change.Gretchen Buggeln holds the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christianity and the Arts at Valparaiso University in Indiana.Hillary Kaell is associate professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology. Many have claimed that we are living in a second Gilded Age, marked by the same extreme wealth and high levels of inequality as the early part of the previous century. Amsterdam takes us back to this time period to investigate how the Gilded Age addressed poverty and the role of the business community. Roaring Metropolis describes the rise of urban capitalists at the turn of the last century. Far from anti-government zealots, Amsterdam shows that business leaders pushed for extensive government spending on social programs. They advocated for public schooling, public health, the construction of libraries, museums, parks, and playgrounds. As Amsterdam demonstrates, public spending soared in American cities, especially Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, during the period due in part to businessmen’s political activism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not only the destructive tendencies of urbanization, but also the remarkable ways in which nature survives in one of India’s largest cities. From the ecology of slum life and propensity for home gardens to the differing conceptions of parks and uses of trees, the book brings together the various ways in which nature changes and is changed by the city. As such, Nagendra offers a truly unique retelling of Bengaluru’s story that cuts across academic disciplines, making for an outstandingly innovative yet richly detailed book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly turned to coal to heat their homes and power their businesses. As the amount of smoke produced by burning coal grew it prompted a variety of responses, from crown-directed efforts to prevent it from contaminating the royal space to its adoption in poems and plays as a symbol of modern urban life. As Cavert reveals, these efforts to grapple with the problem of coal smoke presaged the reaction to the much larger issue of industrial pollution throughout England during the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, framed many of these issues in ways with which people are familiar today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mapping and surveying are no longer the primary means for administering urban space. Rather it is a set of vague and powerful aesthetic norms derived from notions of what it is to be world class that set the contours of Delhi’s change.Theoretically stimulating and rich in narrative drive, Rule by Aesthetics opens up new ways for thinking about urban governance in India and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2015), Lisa Bjorkman, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, moves from slums to elite enclaves in analyzing the processesof mapping and politics in the city’s watery infrastructures. Exploring the workings of secondary markets, water brokers, and planning offices she reveals how power, knowledge and authority over how when and why water flows are being reconfigured as Mumbai makes itself a “world class”city. Winner of the 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences the book is both profoundly intimate in its ethnographic depth and wonderfully ambitious with its theoretical reach.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor are the editors of Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016). Mollenkopf is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity, Director, USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, and Director, USC Center for the Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California.Much research on immigrant integration has focused on urban settings. In Unsettled Americans, Mollenkopf and Pastor offer a novel collection of comparative studies of immigrant incorporation at the metropolitan level. The book focuses on the reception of immigrants in seven different metro areas, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as Charlotte, Phoenix, San Jose, and California’s “Inland Empire.” The chapter authors also link their findings to new research on regional governance and on spatial variations within metropolitan areas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as the Trente glorieuses. Rudolph’s emphasis is on French designs and experiences of dwelling, and the interior spaces of French homes in particular. The book argues that housing was essential to the modernizing project that French society engaged in during these years, a vital site of reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War, and a key locus of nation-building and democratization. In this period, the French state actively pursued policies that sought to guarantee its citizens the right to safe, hygienic, and comfortable homes that would nurture individual happiness while helping to strengthen families as the building blocks of a thriving society.From the creation of a Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in 1945, to the housing crisis of 1953, to the yearly Salon des arts menagers promoting new household methods and technologies, to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, At Home in Postwar France examines the class, gender, and design ideals and tensions of a France in the throes of major transformations on multiple fronts. Pursuing the diffusion, mediation, and reception of the new housing forms that developed in the period, the book considers the contributions of state officials, architects and designers, and proponents of domestic economy and organization in France. It also examines the reactions of the residents and social commentators who felt and evaluated the impact of these forms. At Home in Postwar France explores a range of hopes and dreams for modern French living spaces, thinking through a variety of new approaches to housing on a mass scale. Taking on the complicated relationship between home and citizenship in postwar France, the book offers readers new perspective on how French women and men dwelt and thought about dwelling during this critical period in the nations history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How is youth culture changing in a globalised city? In Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City Malcolm James, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, introduces the concept of Urban Multiculture as a framework for understanding his ethnographic research in East London. The book considers memory, territory and cultural practice, thinking through how the politics of class and race, alongside the lived experience of young people in the area, are being reconfigured by technology. This reconfiguration takes place in the context of global flows of people and culture, in a contested and transforming East London. The book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic research, both to how we understand and do politics, and to how we understand the contemporary city. It will be of interested to any scholar of urban studies, as well as those working on youth, race and class.Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter L. Laurence is an associate professor of urban design, history and theory at Clemson University School of Architecture. His book Becoming Jane Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an intellectual biography of the architecture critic and neo-functionist Jane Jacobs and how she came to write the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Beginning with Jacobs’s arrival in New York City in 1934 with only a high school diploma and writing aspirations Laurence follows her career to the pages of Architectural Forum under the editorial direction of Douglas Haskell. At the magazine she honed her critical skills and was exposed to the latest in urban design and renewal working with leading architects and planners. Laurence argues that there are persistent myths about Jacobs, including her status as a housewife and an amateur urban activist who surprisingly wrote a classic, or a genius. Rather, Jacobs transformed herself into a sophisticated critic influenced by the ideas of a wide circle of intellectuals and wrote a great deal before and after her most well known work. Death and Life of Great American Cities synthesized many previous ideas and proposed a new way to think about cities that considered the social networks and perspective of the person on the street rather than top-down planning that disregarded the human element for efficiency and form. Her vision for the city was of a living system with flexibility, creativity, and diversity offering a sense of connection by mixing the old and the new. Laurence offers not only the evolution of Jacobs’s ideas but also the ways mid-century intellectuals conceived of the cities we now live in.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices