New Books in Urban Studies

What is the experience of young homeless people? What does this experience tell us about space, place and society? In Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility (Routledge, 2015), Dr. Emma Jackson, a lecturer in the Sociology Department of Goldsmith’s College, University of London, employs an ethnographic approach to understand young people’s experience of homelessness in contemporary London. The book is rich with the stories and experiences of young people, based around a day centre offering support as they navigate the complexities of both London’s super-diverse city and the bureaucracies of the British state. Offering important theoretical and methodological contributions, along with the ethnographic insights, the narratives within the book are essential and important reading for all those seeking to understand what it is to be young in a housing crisis within a highly unequal global city.Dave O’Brien 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

New York City’s growth, from colonial outpost to the center of the gastronomic world is artfully crafted by Cindy R. Lobel, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center, in her tome Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth Century New York (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Lobel examines the evolution of the metropolis as gastronomic capital through the lens of public markets, grocers, restaurants, dining rooms and kitchens as they rose and fell in popularity through the nineteenth century.Lobel’s attention to poignant historical moments, such as the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of middle/leisure class culturalism demonstrate the importance New York City has, and continues to play on gastronomic evolution. Not short on the politicizing of the market industry in the early to mid-nineteenth century, we are taken on the journey through the gritty dairy and meatpacking mills of the city, leading us into the bright light of reform, and healthier and affordable food choices.The “creation of a new urban culture” is explored in chapter four, “To See and Be Seen.” The restaurant, as the new social center of life in the city pointedly addresses the inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity in the development of this consumer leisure experience.  Lobel next takes us into the intimate dining rooms of the emerging middle class, centering the reader in the ideology of “Domestic Goddess.” Gender roles, consumerism, leisure class and capitalism are central to this new “designated space to enact rituals of cohesion and inoculate children with middle class values.”The final chapter all things that make a modern urban setting unique are conflicted with Lobel’s honest examination of immigrant diversity and cultural differences. “Issues of race, class, and ‘perceived’ Anglo-American superiority” coupled with the ongoing regionalization of the cityscape are put on the plate for us to indulge in what makes an urban setting the unique tapestry of difference we have come to appreciate.  This journey of nineteenth century New York City is both colorful and satisfying to all who seek gastronomic fulfillment. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Miao Li, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and School of Philosophy and Social Development at Shandong University, joins New Books in Education to discuss Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (Routledge, 2015). Part of the Research in International and Comparative Education series, the book explores China’s large floating population of migrants who have flocked to urban areas for employment, despite lagging educational opportunities for their children. Utilizing rich ethnographic data with interviews from teachers, principals, and students, Dr. Li thoroughly explores how global economic realities and national educational policies detrimentally affect people on the micro-level.For questions or comments on the podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every city seems to be ‘creative’, whether because it has a creative brand, a creative quarter or is home to creative industries. In his new book Urban Subversion and the Creative City Routledge, 2015), Oli Mould shows how this is an essential, but mistaken, aspect of the neo-liberal city. Creativity in the governance of the neo-liberal city erases and obscures inequalities and prohibits social justice. The book demonstrates a very different way of thinking about the creative city through a variety of subversive practices, from skateboarding and parkour, to urban explorations. Filled with images and global examples, the book will attract readers in geography, urban studies, sociology, cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in alternative forms of urban life. Mould also works across multiple media forms, and you can see more about the visual elements of Urban Subversion here, and read his blog and twitter feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Farrer and Andrew D. Field bring their respective areas of sociological and historical expertise to a new study of cosmopolitan nightlife in modern Shanghai. The fruit of two decades of collaborative work, the co-authored Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores continuity and change over a century of singing, dancing, drinking, playing, and otherwise cavorting in Shanghai’s twentieth century and beyond. The book focuses on the ways that urban nightlife transformed alongside major historical, political, and social changes from the 1920s through the 1990s, but also traces its major threads through later developments in the twenty-first century. Its pages take readers into the cabarets and dance halls of Jazz Age Shanghai in the 1930s and 1930s, secret at-home dance parties, dancing and drinking clubs where revelers first experienced Hong Kong-style DJs or new forms of social drinking, jazz clubs, and nightlife transzones that were crucibles of social change. It’s a fascinating study of modern China, and its urban cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stoker is professor of public policy political science at George Washington University and a member of the faculty of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Administration.After decades of deindustrialization and population loss, the revitalization of cities has paid scant attention to empowering neighborhoods and neighborhood leaders to move ahead. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto), recasts the debate about the future of cities as one about neighborhoods, rather than downtown development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the latest book by Sanjay Srivastava. A wonderfully readable piece of urban anthropology, the book explores the ways spaces and processes are interconnected in the city. From temples that resemble shopping malls, through the gates of luxury apartments and into the electricity supply networks of slums, the book pulls together the threads that entangle city dwellers with one another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-1950s, Venezuela’s military government razed a massive slum settlement in the heart of Caracas and replaced it with what was at the time one of Latin America’s largest public housing projects. When the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown on January 23, 1958, however, thousands of people rushed to occupy the uninhabited portions of the project, taking it over and renaming the resulting neighborhood for the date of the fall of the regime: the 23 de Enero.The neighborhood that emerged stood at the geographic and in some cases political center of Venezuela’s transition to democracy over the decades that followed. This unruly, often contradictory transition is detailed the newly released Barrio Rising: Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015) by Alejandro Velasco, Assistant Professor at the Gallatin School at New York University. The book traces how the residents of the 23 de Enero came to fashion an expansive understanding of democracy–both radical and electoral–from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, and examines how that understanding still resonates today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the fate of culture and urban regeneration in the era of austerity? In Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-industrial Britain (Ashgate, 2015), Zoe Thompson applies critical cultural theory to help understand this question. The book is based on four case studies, of The Lowry in Salford, The Deep in Hull, The Sage Gateshead and The Public in West Bromwich. These four case studies are read through a variety of methods, including walking and visual methods, along with two key theorists, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. Baudrillard and Benjamin are juxtaposed as important thinkers of culture, the symbolic and the urban, in an attempt to show the ambivalences of cultural buildings used for urban regeneration. The buildings are narrated as ‘dreamhouses’ within the symbolic, as well as the political, economy of post-industrial urban spaces. The book shows how all the case studies offer elements of hope and redemption for their locations, whether as sites for individual’s memory, in the case of The Sage, or as collective notions of art and culture, in the example of The Lowry. However the book also shows the risks associated with these spaces, as premature ruins, in the case of the now closed The Public, or sites reminding us of nature’s revenge in the form of climate change, as The Deep does. The book will be of interest to a large range of scholars across cultural and urban studies, through to architecture and critical theory, and it has important lessons for contemporary urban policy too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels from the 1880s to 1914. We’ve read about Paris, London, New York, and Berlin, but what of the middle-sized cities in Europe and North America where so many turn-of-the-century dwellers saw, smelled, heard, touched, and tasted their way through urban life? What did it feel like to live in Montreal and Brussels, to walk their streets, to work in their sites of industry and production, to seek refuge in their domestic spaces?A model of transnational scholarship, The Feel of the City moves from discussion of panoramic and labyrinthine images of the city, to the analysis of sources revealing the ways inhabitants across the social landscape experienced work, home, and the street. In our conversation, Nicolas and I talk about how contemporaries and scholars grapple with this contested term. We also take on ideas about the body and affect, gender and class, the impact of linguistic difference in representations of urban life, and even a recent controversy regarding noise and flight paths over Brussels today. Have a listen… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices