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Reviews

Reviews

Reflecting on the New York Commune at 20 Years

Daphne Lundi - 9 April 2024
What happened in the decades after the Hunts Point Insurrection? M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi use speculative...
Reviews

Finding the People’s City

Benjamin Holtzman - 26 March 2024
In A People’s Guide to New York City, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis and Emily Tumpson Molina provide an engaging...
Reviews

Reinventing Politics Against its Brutalization

Laurent Bazin & translated by Oliver Waine - 27 October 2023
In Greece, the violence of anti-migration policies is compounded by that of economic adjustment measures....
Reviews

An American in Marseille

Olivier Gaudin & translated by Oliver Waine - 17 March 2023
In his latest work, Marseille, Port to Port, the New York-based ethnographer William Kornblum paints a rich and...
Reviews

Making Routes on the Sea

Natasha N. Iskander - 24 February 2023
Natasha N. Iskander reviews Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula by Laleh...
Reviews

The Black Middle Class, or the Harsh Reality of the American Dream

Sylvie Tissot & translated by Oliver Waine - 24 January 2023
The suburbs of the United States, once the epicenter of racial segregation, are now home to more African Americans...
Reviews

Episodes from the Social Life of the Delhi Metro

Sneha Mandhan - 20 January 2023
What is the impact of a new metro on a large and growing city? As new metros are cropping up across Asia, Rashmi...
Reviews

Cooperating in Democracies

Evan Casper-Futterman - 13 January 2023
Evan Casper-Futterman reviews Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism by Andrew Zitcer, which reflects...
Reviews

Underground Berlin: Where Infrastructure Meets Politics

Clarence Hatton-Proulx & translated by Oliver Waine - 2 December 2022
Water, electricity, gas: in Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss presents a history of Berlin’s infrastructure networks...
Reviews

New York City’s Descent into Neoliberal Policy: A Review of Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis

John Krinsky - 19 July 2022
Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis tells the story of New York’s prolonged descent into neoliberal policy. For those...
Reviews

Disposability in the City: A Review of Waste Worlds

Lily Baum Pollans - 5 July 2022
Lily Pollans reviews Jacob Doherty’s Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability, which shows...
Reviews

At the Borders of Europe

Elsa Tyszler & translated by Oliver Waine - 13 May 2022
Against the backdrop of the deaths of 27 exiled people, who drowned in the English Channel while trying to reach...
Reviews

Reconsidering Wasteways from Boston to Seattle

Lisa Jean Moore - 1 February 2022
Throughout the Covid‑19 pandemic, with disposable masks and endless testing, garbage proliferates. It is extremely...
Reviews

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private

Claire Dunning - 14 December 2021
Claire Dunning reviews Jeremy R. Levine’s new book, Constructing Community, an ethnographic study of community...
Reviews

Infrastructure Financing and the Bonds of Inequality

Rachel Weber - 19 October 2021
Rachel Weber reviews historian Destin Jenkins’ new book, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the...
Reviews

The Belhoumi Family and the Sociologist

Adèle Momméja & translated by Oliver Waine - 15 October 2021
What are the objective and intimate conditions for the social ascension of the children of immigrants? And what...
Reviews

A Social Portrait of the Subprime Crisis

Camille François & translated by Oliver Waine - 14 May 2021
What have been the social and urban consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis, and what lessons can be learned...
Reviews

The Ancestors of Pandemic Pets and Vector Animals

Lisa Jean Moore - 11 May 2021
How has the place—and role—of animals in the city evolved over the last two centuries, and what bearing have these...
Reviews

Queens, New York: A Global Microcosm

Susie J. Tanenbaum - 4 May 2021
Susie J. Tanenbaum reviews Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, New York,...
Reviews

“Land Is the New Sugar”: A Review of Sai Balakrishnan’s Shareholder Cities

Thomas Crowley - 15 December 2020
Shareholder Cities argues that India’s urban corridors are driven by complex negotiations, transformations, and...
Reviews

Institutional Readings on Zoning

Jamaal Green - 20 November 2020
A new edited volume on zoning approaches the subject as a tool of planning, part of a network of institutions and...
Reviews

Centering Equity in the Smart-Cities Project Dialogue

Margaret Cowell - 13 October 2020
In Uneven Innovation, Jennifer Clark argues that the technological innovations behind “smart cities” can cultivate...
Reviews

Europe and the Question of Social Class

Gilles Laferté & translated by Oliver Waine - 29 May 2020
A recent French work addresses the issue of social class in Europe, considering the different profiles and...
Reviews

Confronting Police Violence and an Unjust Justice System

Michele Graham - 19 May 2020
We publish Michele Graham’s review of the 2018 book The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a...
Reviews

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 February 2020
The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings...
Reviews

Understanding School Closures in Chicago: A Review of Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Ryan M. Good - 17 December 2019
Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard portrays recent school reform efforts in Chicago through the eyes of those...
Reviews

Black Homeownership Under Racial Capitalism: A Review of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit

Hilary Botein - 10 December 2019
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit examines the urban homeownership programs of the 1960s and 1970s, and...
Reviews

The Just Transition, Economic Democracy, and the Green New Deal

Evan Casper-Futterman & Jason Spicer - 5 November 2019
Can participatory and economic democracy in the US support a Green New Deal? Evan Casper‑Futterman and Jason Spicer...
Reviews

Why School Securitization Fails. Lessons from Morrill and Musheno’s Navigating Conflict

Andrés Besserer Rayas - 8 October 2019
Navigating Conflict describes how pupils are able to address conflicts on their own, and how school securitization...
Reviews

Crisis Makes Heroes: Affordable Housing in New York City During and After a “Decade of Fire”

Susan Saegert - 2 July 2019
Susan Saegert discusses the memoirs of two hard-fighting Bronx housing advocates, active at a particularly...

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Series

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
Climate Change and Social Change

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...
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...
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

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
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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