“Nobody’s listening!” (“Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté,” or literally, “The country, in a word, feels that it is not listened to.”) Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of history at the ...
Tag: Urban Studies
Security Laboratories
In recent years, feminist movements in Egypt have negotiated with gendered logics of governance oriented around the imperative to protect women from sexual harassment. Meanwhile, in Brazil, activists ...
Zero-Sum Urbanism
Cities are big news these days, but in different ways than they used to be, when the talk was of riots, crises, and closings. Now a surfeit of urban books chime in with words like “triumph,” “great,” ...
Cassandra, Retiring
I spent a good portion of 2010 playing the Cassandra, mongering doom and gloom about the heat death of the alternative comics universe.1 Despite some important works—chief among them James Sturm’s ...
New York’s Austerity Man
At times, New York City politics can seem like midnight television, the same sitcom reruns airing in an endless cycle. Such was the feeling this fall, when former Mayor David Dinkins released his new ...
It’s Bigger Than “Buck”
Reading M. K. Asante is like flipping pages between generations, going back and forth among the “flowering of Negro literature” of the Harlem Renaissance, the iconoclastic spirit of the Beat ...
Reflecting Absence: An Interview with Michael Arad
Michael Arad’s winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial has created a landmark for New York City and for design. “Reflecting Absence,” the theme and title of Arad’s winning entry, raises ...
Megalopolis Now
It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ...
RiteCheck 12
The sky is inky black when my alarm clock gongs at 5:30 a.m. By the time I’ve showered and left the house, it’s 6:20, and I hunch my shoulders against January’s cold, hurrying the two blocks from my ...
Arts of Security
Being “against security” would be absurd in a place like Colombia, where my research is based. People from all over the country have suffered through decades of armed conflict only to now face new ...
The City as Literary Field
Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens ...
Sugrue and Venkatesh on Robert J. Sampson’s “Great American City”
Though published only a few months ago, it’s already clear that Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect will rank among the most important works of urban ...
Lives at the Urban Margins
“Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden ...