Cities & Urban Life

Just as importantly, who was responsible for those decisions? I became a fiscal analyst and eventually put those tools to work in government and then in academia...

Until this book, I never wrote about or taught anything related to childhood. I came to this project initially through my interest in film and urbanism. As I wrote and...

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

As a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, I recall walking around the city’s downtown at the time and thinking how much of the central city around me –...

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

Max Weber, the German sociologist, and his wife Marianne weren’t impressed with Manhattan’s spirituality when they visited New York City during their 1904 trip to the United States. They probed...

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

Foreclosed describes the evolution of U.S. mortgage markets from the early twentieth century through to the subprime crisis of the late 2000s. The book details the highly mixed-economy nature of...

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

If a reader were to casually pick up the book, I would hope they would flip to Chapter 7, which is called “Service Teaching.” This chapter focuses on the three...

The book’s primary intent is to portray the American inclination to experiment with forms of settlement, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts at reconceiving how and in what shape...

There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since...

In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of geography, known as psychogeography. This involved a lot of unplanned, drifting walks and purposely getting...

Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of urban politics have criticized urban decision makers for imposing policies that exacerbated the disadvantages suffered by low-income, female, gay, and minority residents. In particular,...

I have lived in, observed, and written about Chicago for approximately 30 years. My academic home is the Political Science Department at DePaul University. I earned my Ph.D. in Urban Planning...

Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began...

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves presents a holistic analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of...

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have begun to investigate the social construction of race and sexuality in the United States. Noting the absence of any fixed biological or...

Most research on children’s development follows a group of people born around the same time—a single birth cohort. But as children grow up, the world around them is also changing. Individual development and social change are intertwined; you cannot really understand one without the other.

I was more interested in actions and public interventions, but I use those methods less and less, since neoliberalism has found a way to appropriate dissent—at least its most superficial forms—and turn it into propaganda for its own ends as well...

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

Chapter 10 relates a particularly compelling episode of how the idea of integrating culture at Ground Zero exposed the tension inherent in accommodating the dual mandate to remember and rebuild.Many...

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago...

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have...

We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built...

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...

If you come across this book in a bookstore, I hope you will browse the Prologue, “The Death of Shorty,” and that it will draw you in to the rest...

Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...

New York’s artists around 1960 were living in the shadows of the city’s deindustrialization—moving among demolition sites, abandoned factories, and decrepit hardware stores, while all around them new highways, sleek...

My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...

One Public explores the contemporary story of one of the most influential theatres in America. While the study covers the colorful history of The Public from its founding by Joseph Papp, the focus of the manuscript is the trajectory of a theatrical impulse, and how the Public nurtures plays from the workshop phase...

Although I hesitated to put a Harlem image on the cover of Slumming, precisely because I wanted to challenge the almost exclusive association of that neighborhood with my book’s topic,...

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...

Just as importantly, who was responsible for those decisions? I became a fiscal analyst and eventually put those tools to work in government and then in academia...

Until this book, I never wrote about or taught anything related to childhood. I came to this project initially through my interest in film and urbanism. As I wrote and...

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

As a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, I recall walking around the city’s downtown at the time and thinking how much of the central city around me –...

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

Max Weber, the German sociologist, and his wife Marianne weren’t impressed with Manhattan’s spirituality when they visited New York City during their 1904 trip to the United States. They probed...

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

Foreclosed describes the evolution of U.S. mortgage markets from the early twentieth century through to the subprime crisis of the late 2000s. The book details the highly mixed-economy nature of...

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

If a reader were to casually pick up the book, I would hope they would flip to Chapter 7, which is called “Service Teaching.” This chapter focuses on the three...

The book’s primary intent is to portray the American inclination to experiment with forms of settlement, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts at reconceiving how and in what shape...

There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since...

In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of geography, known as psychogeography. This involved a lot of unplanned, drifting walks and purposely getting...

Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of urban politics have criticized urban decision makers for imposing policies that exacerbated the disadvantages suffered by low-income, female, gay, and minority residents. In particular,...

I have lived in, observed, and written about Chicago for approximately 30 years. My academic home is the Political Science Department at DePaul University. I earned my Ph.D. in Urban Planning...

Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began...

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves presents a holistic analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of...

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have begun to investigate the social construction of race and sexuality in the United States. Noting the absence of any fixed biological or...

Most research on children’s development follows a group of people born around the same time—a single birth cohort. But as children grow up, the world around them is also changing. Individual development and social change are intertwined; you cannot really understand one without the other.

I was more interested in actions and public interventions, but I use those methods less and less, since neoliberalism has found a way to appropriate dissent—at least its most superficial forms—and turn it into propaganda for its own ends as well...

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

Chapter 10 relates a particularly compelling episode of how the idea of integrating culture at Ground Zero exposed the tension inherent in accommodating the dual mandate to remember and rebuild.Many...

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago...

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have...

We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built...

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...

If you come across this book in a bookstore, I hope you will browse the Prologue, “The Death of Shorty,” and that it will draw you in to the rest...

Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...

New York’s artists around 1960 were living in the shadows of the city’s deindustrialization—moving among demolition sites, abandoned factories, and decrepit hardware stores, while all around them new highways, sleek...

My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...

One Public explores the contemporary story of one of the most influential theatres in America. While the study covers the colorful history of The Public from its founding by Joseph Papp, the focus of the manuscript is the trajectory of a theatrical impulse, and how the Public nurtures plays from the workshop phase...

Although I hesitated to put a Harlem image on the cover of Slumming, precisely because I wanted to challenge the almost exclusive association of that neighborhood with my book’s topic,...

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book...