We’ve seen a lot of maps in the past six months, but a multitude of maps doesn’t necessarily translate into an expanded sense of the territory. It can be awfully hard to find one’s place. During last ...
Tag: Urban Studies
The Fiction of Bohemian NYC
What does New York City have to do with America as a whole? This metropolis, which gave rise to the nation’s current leader and whose worst gilded …
Design Against Disaster
What is to be done? We are the hapless victims of rising temperatures and tides, droughts and superstorms. Infrastructure buckles and the water is full of lead. Of course all urban ecological ...
Commuter Lit: How to Do an MFA on the MTA
When I moved to New York three years ago, to start graduate school at Columbia University, I took pains to rationalize my decision to live in Brooklyn—rather than, say, Morningside Heights or ...
Urban Park Poetics: Summer in Marcus Garvey Park
For city dwellers, summer is park season. Warm weather draws people out of their homes, onto the streets, and, if they’re lucky, into a nearby park to enjoy recreation of all kinds (eating, napping ...
Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the 1920s: An Interview With Shannon King
This month, I interviewed Shannon King about his new book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era. Dr. King is Associate ...
Rio, Capital of Disaster Capitalism
The Olympic rings loom large over Rio de Janeiro. Seven years after the city won its bid to host the games, the impending two-week extravaganza has swept changes across the Marvelous City, as Rio is ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
Lady Grace and the Factory Girls: Chicago, 1900–1933
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Truth be told, factory girls living in the early 1900s downtown Chicago boarding houses ...
The “New York Values” of “City on Fire”
Some readers will come to Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire with chips on their shoulders. Hallberg’s youth; the seeming ease with which he parlayed his manuscript into an enormous advance ...
Street Space—North Street, Belfast
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The Belfast city center is fractured, divided by motorways, parking lots, empty ...
Illegals
At the height of the refugee crisis in Germany, the following slogans made their appearance on the Hamburg streets: Wir sind alle illegal (We are all illegal) paired with Kein mensch ist illegal (No ...
City of the Future
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “Been gardening?” the Greens campaigner asks. I’ve stopped to chat, knees and hands ...
Make Way for the “World-Class” City
Inaugurating a new generation of mechanical street sweepers, Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister, heralded the coming of a new era: “If we continue to receive the love and support of the public ...
Keep It Dirty, Durham
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. They call it “Bull City,” though, with the exception of a downtown statue, there are no ...
How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the ...
Living Just Enough: New Novels of the City
If you tell a story of the city, rather than merely stage a story there, you lay claim to it, but not always as a fan, a lover, or a life-long insider. Rather, you insist your characters take on the ...
Safe Space
The geography of gay life has shifted dramatically over the past decades. In 1949, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal described homosexuality as located almost exclusively in spaces of moral depredation—in ...
Studying Up
In an often-quoted manifesto, Laura Nader urged fellow anthropologists (and, by extension, sociologists and other social scientists) to “study up,” do their research among the rich and powerful ...
Mexico City Chronicles
According to the latest version of the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, a crónica is both “a history that obeys the order of the times” and “a journalistic piece … about ...
