Metropolitics

The Cities We're Losing—The Cities We Need

Ahmed Allahwala — 2026-03-17T06:00:00Z

Although there is no shortage of work on gentrification, it rarely takes as its object of inquiry those “ordinary” places—diners, corner stores—that are lost. Yet, in The Cities We Need, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani shows the importance of understanding how their loss impacts not only how we understand neighborhoods, but how we understand ourselves.
The Cities We Need explores what we lose when the spaces that anchor life in urban communities disappear. In this beautiful book, visual artist and

- Reviews / gentrification, nostalgia, place, placemaking, displacement, Brooklyn, New York, Oakland, everyday spaces

New York's Soul for Sale: Raising the Rent on Lunch Counters and Counterculture

Benjamin Terrall — 2018-02-13T06:00:00Z

Vanishing New York is Jeremiah Moss's loving chronicle of the neighborhoods, characters, bars, and corner institutions that have disappeared in the accelerated gentrification of the last two decades. There is room to debate what we should be fighting to create, but Moss captures the New York he is fighting to preserve.
When Jeremiah Moss moved to Manhattan from rural New England in the early 1990s at the age of 22, he felt that he had already missed the greatest days of the city's existence –

- Reviews / gentrification, New York, development, displacement, right to the city, nostalgia, Bloomberg, Giuliani, counterculture

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira — 2016-04-19T05:00:00Z

In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who patrol the border with military gear, stand out for taking matters into their own hands. Harel Shapira explains that these militiamen are motivated not just by reflexive right-wing anti-immigrant ideology, but also by a nostalgia for their own lost worlds of work and meaning forged in military careers.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has made the construction of a high border

- From the Field / immigration, United States, work, migration, borders, community, Minutemen, patrol, military, nostalgia, Mexico, immigration control, Featured