New Books in Urban Studies

Savage: The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong (Cornell University Press, 2026) explores the dark side of colonial modernity through canine eyes, showing the many ways that dogs involuntarily contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century Hong Kong. Dr. Catherine S. Chan follows the piecemeal transplantation of British animal humanitarianism as pedigree dogs accompanied hardening class differences, dogmeat became a contested racial issue, and dogs were roped into the long list of undesirables fabricated in the so-called golden era of reforms following the social disturbances of the 1960s.

Dr. Chan reveals a fragmented civilizing project that constructed do...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Yaron Matras about his new book Speech and the City.

In this timely book, Yaron shows that cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarization by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. The book traces the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the 'multilingual utopia', looking at multilingual spaces acros...

Mexico City was America's largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. In American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Dr. Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around the world who sold food, facilitated transportation, provided care, and valued the city's silver. Free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia, immigrants, and Native Americans pursued opportunities in a wealthy, yet deeply unequal environment, where working people claimed part...

Michael Aldrich joins John Ross to discuss Old Lhasa: A Biography, his richly detailed portrait of Tibet’s historic capital. It’s the third book in his trilogy on Asian cultural centers. He wrote the first two, on Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, while living in those cities, where he worked as a lawyer. There was no opportunity for this with Lhasa, so he had to rely on multiple trips (from his home in Taiwan) and an incredible amount of reading and research. Rather than writing a conventional history, Aldrich set out to present Lhasa as a living character – a city whose t...

Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center (Cornell UP, 2026) traces the extraordinary journey of the twisted remnants of the World Trade Center. When the Towers fell on September 11, 2001, nearly all that remained was pulverized concrete and contorted steel. Dr. Samuel and Dr. Max Holleran investigate how fragments of these skyscrapers became modern relics, scattered across all fifty states and beyond, built into hundreds of local memorials in firehouses, parks, and plazas, providing new and creative ways to grieve and remember.

Drawing on years of research and interviews with artists, city officials, and first responders, the a...

This interview with Professor Amihai Mazar was conducted by Željko Stanojević for the New Books Network. The conversation focuses on Tel Reḥov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valley, especially Volume V, where the report turns from architecture and pottery to smaller objects and scientific evidence that help reconstruct life at the site.

Amihai Mazar is a leading archaeologist of ancient Israel. His research examines the Bronze and Iron Ages, archaeology and biblical history, ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, and historical geography. Tel Reḥov is especially important because it offers a rich ar...

Fort Bend County, Texas, looks like the America we claim to want: a suburb where Black, White, Asian, and Latinx families share cul-de-sacs, schools, and celebrations. Residents trade dishes, honor one another's traditions, and take pride in their community's diversity. Yet beneath this harmony lies what sociologist Dr. Kiara Wyndham calls "the diversity contract"—an unspoken agreement that racial diversity may be celebrated, but racial inequality must not be named. 

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and more than 150 interviews, Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb (University of California Press, 2026) reveals how the language of in...

Planning Library Spaces: A Practical Guide for Library Building Projects (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a book designed for librarians, trustees, local government officials, architects, and interior designers who are designing or planning to build, renovate, or reconfigure library spaces. Most librarians embark upon a library building project with little experience in space planning, architecture, or construction. Written by a registered architect and professional librarian, this is a guidebook for librarians embarking on a library building project. It includes a brief history of library facilities, placing them in the context of public buildings. An introduction to library planning principles and a discussion...

We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads.

The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concret...

St. Vincent's Hospital began with a simple, but radical mission: to care for all those in need regardless of race, creed, or financial means. For more than 160 years, the hospital carried out that work, serving notables and the nameless alike, from impoverished immigrants and those stricken by devastating nineteenth-century epidemics to AIDS patients and the victims of the attacks of 9/11.

A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (NYU Press, 2026) provides the first comprehensive history of this remarkable institution, from its humble beginnings in 1849 to its abrupt closure in 2010. Loca...

Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On (Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination of the Dōjunkai Foundation (1924-2024). Compiled and edited by Dr. Marco Pompili through interviews and studies, it is a must-read for anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture. The Dōjunkai Apartments (1924-1934), the Foundation's best-known work, introduced apartment living to Japan in response to crucial historical and social challenges such as urban reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923 and the emergence of new working and middle classes. The book's texts, by prominent scholars and architects, as well as a series...

What is the future for cities? In Postcapitalist Cities: Towards a common urban future (Manchester University Press, 2026) Oli Mould, a Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, looks at the past, present and future of the city to consider alternatives to the current capitalist urban model that dominates the world. Re-examining key concepts such as gentrification and care, introducing new ideas like solarpunk, and packed with a huge range of global case studies, the book offers approaches to resist, reject and reimagine the city. A significant intervention for geographers and social scientists, the book...

A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves.

Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself.

From ...

Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations (Leiden University Press, 2026) examines how Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight surveillance regime through volunteering. This book asks how citizens connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research, Ka-ming Wu investigates how citizens conduct volunteer activities that not only promote party-state campaigns and engage with new urban spaces and services, but also experiment with political, social, and cultural rights, including advocating for the rights of people with disabilities an...

Cycling Cities is a series of books that investigates 150 years of cycling policy and practice across fifty cities in twenty-five countries, and keeps adding new cities to the list including, recently, Lisbon and Tehran.

In this episode, I interview two authors, M. Luísa Sousa and Kazem Afradi, from the teams of researchers that wrote Cycling Cities: The Lisbon Experience and Cycling Cities: The Tehran Experience.

These books uncover the histories of bicycles and their cyclists from Lisbon to Tehran, from the 19th century to the 21st century, and from royals to revolutionaries. As you’ll hear...

In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to consider, more broadly, the United States' relationship with liberty and empire. Empire and liberty have been part of the American story since the founding, but they are often at odds, sometimes irreconcilably so. Cook examines their changing relationship and meaning using these two iconic buildings as anchors. She also examines the symbolism and importance of the landmarks themselves. She considers how individuals and groups who have had...

As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes for the affected populations – China’s “landless peasants” - as well as to the construction of divergent narratives about the role of the Chinese state’s measures for them. To provide a so-far missing perspective to existing research, Isabel Heger-Laube reconstructs the role of the experienced changes from landless peasants’ own narratives, drawing on the “big” and “small” stories collected through fieldwork in Hu...

How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave

In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movies and TV shows winning Oscars and Emmys, and K-Pop groups becoming wildly popular. In Manhattan, Koreatown has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists, drawing them in with its bars, restaurants, and day spas. In Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand (NYU Press, 2026), Jinwon Kim argues that Manhattan's Koreatown has become a new type of ethnic enclave, what she dubs a "transclave." This commercialized ethnic space exists solely for consumption, leisure, and en...

Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport hub of the present day. 

The book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport’s environment: the r...

In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length.

Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of change.

Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses; horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown famers.

Hines’ photographs lingered in the collection of the New...

From Suzy Hansen, whose previous book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026) is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change, it offers lessons for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global forces remaking our lives. Karagümrük, a neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for petty thieves, cheap apartment blocks, and an influx of Syrian r...

Molly Brookfield’s book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) explores the historical, legal, and cultural history of street harassment in the United States. Historically, Brookfield identified the "masher panic" (late 19th–early 20th century) when reformers and municipalities labeled male accosting of women a public problem and enacted anti-masher ordinances or applied disorderly-conduct laws. On law and policy, the book highlights primarily local legal responses against harassment, with municipal codes and reinterpretations of existing ordinances more common than coherent federal action that criminalizes mashing.

In Watc...

In 1644 four norcini or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a blind eye to such horrendous acts. This fabricated story points to an underlying reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes dramatically increased th...

For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later. Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further, overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance.

In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table...

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe...

In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed, and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors.

Dr. Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures. Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs, and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sp...

Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2026). In March 2020, during one of the first major US outbreaks of Covid, New York became an epicenter of the spread. New York's connective tissue, like the walkable city streets, subways, and taxi cabs, became pathways of transmission. In places where ideas and cultures can spread, diseases can, too. As the hospitals began to fill, essential workers from doctors and nu...

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935.

Through a granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024) reveals that H...

Participation in official governmental institutions and activities has declined dramatically. Americans are less inclined to express trust in, or cooperate with, political leaders and each other to address society's most pressing problems. In Neighborhoods Matter: How Place and People Affect Political Participation (NYU Press, 2026), Carrie LeVan explores this growing crisis in civic engagement, arguing that where we live—and the people who live around us—may be to blame.

Drawing on national surveys, census data, and spatial analysis, LeVan demonstrates how neighborhood design can dramatically impact political participation, including people's desire and ability to vote in local, state, and national elections. S...

Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognized. This is a result of several factors, including the stigma of belonging to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. Photographer Dmytro Soloviov has crossed Ukraine documenting them to form the most comprehensive publication available on the subject. 

With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cult...

The sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live in an almost odorless world, where everything is reduced to images. Yet smell plays a vital role in how we relate to others and our surroundings, forming our experiences and our memories. Tracing a history of smell from the first ancient cities, through medieval plagues and the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense (Reaktion, 2026) is a tribute to the sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust. Al...

In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes, suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry ‘pigs,’ and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots. 

After dark, sex workers an...

Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Photography and Identity in a Global City (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Nancy Micklewright reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in women's lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of en...

A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually attempt the 30,000-kilometer drive from far northern Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. There is more to the highway, however, than the persistent allure of the open road. In Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway (University of California Press, 2026), historian Dr. Shawn William Miller unveils a larger tale of lofty ideals and bedrock greed, romantic adventure and pragmatic diplomacy, immigrant desperation and Indigenous resistance.

This book...

Fred S. Naiden, professor emeritus of history of at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an authority on the ancient world. In the 1980s in New York City, however, he was New York City Transit Authority Employee number 4046. He cleaned subway platforms and restrooms, drove subways and locomotives, and belonged to Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.

All of these experiences inform his book, Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway (Rutgers UP, 2026), published by Rutgers University Press. The book covers his work, his life in New York before gentrification, and how...

During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In his new book, Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing (Cambridge UP, 2026), Fabio Lanza examines the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. This first full-length history in English of China's urban communes shows how universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal canteens and nurseries, and women's liberation, were intended to transform modern urban life along socialist lines. Urban Revolution writes a new history of the socialist everyday by showing how urban resi...

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked its 60th anniversary. Created amid the optimism and urgency of the civil rights era, HUD embodied a bipartisan commitment to building stronger, more integrated, and equitable cities. How did that vision unfold alongside the music, culture, and politics that shaped urban life?

Street Level, a special audio documentary episode of Soundscapes NYC, explores the intertwined histories of urban policy, housing, and popular culture in the years following HUD’s establishment. Through archival recordings, immersive sound design, and music drawn from the neighborhoods most affected by fede...

The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong’s historic Japanese community received the attention it deserves through Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024). In this compelling book, Dr Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen guide readers into the Meiji era, reconstructing history through the lives of ordinary people whose stories have long been overlooked. During our interview, Yoshio explained her desire to place this research within a broader East-West framework, a cross-cultural perspective reflected in her own collaboration and...

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself.

These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian step...

In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026), Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a ran...