The achievement of Singapore’s national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the People's Action Party began to deliver on its promises in dramatic fashion. By the 1980s, 85 percent of the population had been rehoused in modern flats, and today, decades later, the provision of public housing shapes Singapore's environment. The standard accounts of this remarkable transformation leave many questions unanswered, from the...

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér sat down with Azra Hromadžić (Syracuse University) to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Riverine Citizenship: A Bosnian City in Love with the River. In the podcast we discussed how in the Bosnian city of Bihać, people’s connection to the river Una has shaped not only the river itself, but also its citizens. The conversation touched upon how the river provided a respite during times of war (and peace), how citizens gathered to...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System (U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how disabled people navigate a transportation system that is far from accessible.  Velho finds disabled passengers constantly...

It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) is unique in focusing on just one band from one city – but the story of Tat Ming Pair, in so many ways, is the story of Hong Kong's recent decades, from the Handover to the Umbrella Movement to 2019's standoff. A comprehensive, theoretically informed study of the sonic history and present of Hong Kong through the prism of Tat Ming Pair, this book will be of interest to cultural...

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order. Collaboratively authored by the...

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who...

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America’s enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller, Assistant Professor of...

Joseph Heathcott discusses his latest book, Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic (Fordham University Press, 2023), an engaging hybrid of text and visual that features a trove of his personal photography of urban spaces throughout NYC's most diverse borough. Including: airports, overgrown yards, possibly the last living speakers of indigenous languages, the Queens Public Library, racial covenants and civil resistance in early real estate development, and much more that, like the borough itself, is...

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by...

A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshid Emami expands our understanding of Isfahan in a global context. He takes the reader on an...

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding...

White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space (Policy Press, 2024) examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies. Dr. Miguel Montalva Barba focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler...

The Search for Shelter: Writings on Land and Housing (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on the global population living in slums, which has increased from 1 billion in 2014 to 1.6 billion in 2018. The book also looks at the impact of neoliberalism on urban planning, the manner of organization and the struggles of the communities affected by these processes, the cultural and political decision-making processes of the State, and their repercussions on the form and life of the city. In this book,...

An exploration of the much-derided English suburbs through rap music. There are many different Englands. From the much-romanticized rolling countryside, to the cosmopolitanism of the inner cities (embraced by some as progressive, multicultural enlightenment and derided by others as the playground of a self-righteous metropolitan elite), or the disparagingly named "left behind" communities which, post-Brexit, have so interested political parties and pundits, demographers and statisticians. But...

In Pittsburgh, the elevation varies wildly, fluctuating 660 feet from highest to lowest points throughout the area and making it one of the hilliest cities in the United States. Throughout this unruly and physically challenging landscape, the city's first mass transportation system was built - a steadily expanding network of public stairways, locally referred to as "city steps," these flights of stairs are a throwback to a very different time in history and a very different...

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal...

Cairo's synagogues shed new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present. Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo's synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo's synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The...

How do public markets, as ordinary as they seem, carry the weight of a city’s history? How do such everyday buildings reflect a city’s changing political, social, and economic needs, through their yearslong transformations in forms, functions, and management? Today’s book is: Everyday Architecture in Context: Public Markets in Hong Kong, 1842-1981 (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023), by Dr. Carmen C. M. Tsui. Integrating architecture and history, the book invites readers to go...

Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustrated young people demand economic opportunities their governments cannot provide? In this episode, Nic Cheeseman talks to Professors Amy Patterson and Megan Hershey about their recent book Africa’s Urban Youth. They explain how young people across Africa are contesting marginalization and claiming citizenship, and set out the broader context that...

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice. Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life--businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers--who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They...

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard UP, 2024), Mark...

A new book reveals an incredible slice of Cuban-American history that’s been all but forgotten until now. Lisandro Perez‘s Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018) tells the story of a vibrant Cuban émigré community in 19th-century New York that ranged from wealthy sugar plantation owners investing their fortunes in New York real estate, to working-class Cubans rolling cigars in Lower Manhattan decades before the industry took hold in Tampa. Cubans in New...

In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna's cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new...

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and community benefits. Yet there are clear economic motives as well—successful parks have helped generate...

Examining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton UP, 2022) focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the...