California

From the Field

A Crisis of Habitation in LA’s Last Remaining Wetland

Deike Peters & Sam Lutzker - 18 March 2025
As housing crises become increasingly entangled with environmental crises, the question of just outcomes requires...
Debates

Can the Market Solve Los Angeles’ Housing and Homelessness Crisis?

Katherine Smock - 27 February 2025
Policymakers in Los Angeles hope that market-based solutions will solve the city’s housing crisis. Data from the...
Interviews

“There Is No Excused Absence in Prison”

Tanisha Cannon & Dylan O’Donoghue - 19 July 2024
More than 150 years after the passage of the 13th Amendment, the fight to abolish forced labor in the United States...
From the Field

We Are From Nairobi (#panthershit): Black Power Spatial Imaginaries in Silicon Valley

Kimberley S. Johnson - 17 October 2023
East Palo Alto’s Black, Latiné and Pacific Islander residents deploy #panthershit—a Black Power spatial imaginary as...
Essays

The House is Ours: How Moms 4 Housing Challenged the Private-Property Paradigm

Lauren Everett - 6 October 2020
In the midst of a global housing affordability crisis that has been heightened by the Covid‑19 pandemic, it is time...
Interviews

Reinventing Segregation in Northern California: An Interview with Alex Schafran

Alex Schafran & Darian Razdar - 14 May 2019
Darian Razdar interviews Alex Schafran about his new book Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure...
From the Field

Bare Mountaintops and Thirsty Cities: On California and its Snowpack

Sayd Randle - 29 January 2019
Figuring how to represent the oncoming effects of climate change is a common challenge faced by whistleblowers and...
From the Field

Invisible Lines in the Sand: Bather Arrests in Early 20th-Century Los Angeles

Elsa Devienne & translated by Oliver Waine - 13 July 2018
Can beaches reveal the tensions that run through society at a given moment in time? Here, Elsa Devienne shows how...

Series

Horizons in the Housing Struggle
Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of New...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who patrol...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

“Our hallway’s big enough to play football in!” The council housing...

The Guardian
Boasting two-sink kitchens, Tower Court in north London is tailored for the Haredi Jewish community – but its...

Saudi Arabia: How is Mobility Being Transformed in the Oil Kingdom?

Mobile Lives Forum
04 April 2025, by Aniss Mouad Mezoued The launch of the Riyadh metro in late November 2024 once again highlighted...

Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age (Paul Mees)

Mobile Lives Forum
27 March 2025, by Javier Caletrío Can suburbia avoid car dependence? Can low-density areas enjoy first-rate public...

Geopolitics and Electric Vehicles: The Rise of Climate Protectionism

Mobile Lives Forum
17 February 2025, by Xabier Gangoiti and Graham Parkhurst The electric vehicle (EV) revolution is not just a...

One Way to Fight Rising Food Prices: Public Grocery Stores

The New Republic
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed opening government-owned grocery stores as a solution to...

The Quiet Power of Car-Free Neighborhoods

CityLab
Restricting or banning vehicles in congested city centers pays off with cleaner air and safer streets. We need to...
Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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