923 books match the query 'Urban' and 11 start with j

cover of JOAN

JOAN

Jake Rose

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry. A narrative sequence of lyric poems reimagining Joan of Arc as a framework for queer identity, transformation, and poetic voice. 
 
Collapsing biography and autobiography, the poetry of Jake Rose’s debut explores queer identity, grief, and desire through the historical framework of Joan of Arc’s life. Moving through rural landscapes of the speaker’s youth, contradictions of faith, consequences of desire, and fragmentations of trauma, JOAN is structured as an excavation of the speaker’s most intimate moments, combining poetry with historical quotations, visual collage, and a sequence of film stills. Through vivid lyric moments, the poems construct a speaker and world both intimate and charged­—“I have to touch my farthest feeling,” “the sapphire dusk draping its lace arias”—with clarity and vibrant intensity. Refusing resolution, these poems dwell in rupture, reinvention, and fluid forms of gender that come to life outside of inherited boundaries. This collection speaks from the margins, searching for a body the self might inhabit and asking what it means to transform through language, gender, and desire.
 
JOAN is the winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.
 

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cover of Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism

Jameson on Jameson

Conversations on Cultural Marxism

Fredric Jameson

Duke University Press, 2007

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.

Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.

The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.

Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang

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cover of Japanese Cities

Japanese Cities

edited by Kuniko Fujita and Richard Child Hill

Temple University Press, 1993

Japan is the world's second most powerful economy and one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Yet English-language literature contains remarkable little about cities in Japan. This collection of original essays on Japanese urban and industrial development covers a broad spectrum of city experiences. Leading Japanese and Western urbanists analyze Japan's largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya); proto-typical industrial cities (Kamaishi, Kitakyushu, Toyota); high technology urban satellites (Kanagawa); and smaller, more traditionally organized industrial districts (Tsubame). This book demonstrates how Japan's flexible economic growth strategies and changing relationship to the world economy have produced a uniquely Japanese pattern of urban development in this century.

Throughout the essays that describe individual cities, contributors provide commentary on each city's twentieth-century history and functional relations with other cities and focus on the dynamic linkage between global relations and local activities. They examine the role of government—central, prefectural, and local—in the restructuring of Japanese industrial and urban life. One essay is devoted to the urbanization process in pre-World War II Japan; another considers urban planning on the western Pacific Rim. This is the first book that analyzes how the economic transformation of Japan has restructured Japanese cities and how urban and regional development policies have kept pace with (and in some ways effected) changes in the economy.

This comprehensive study of Japanese cities provides interdisciplinary coverage of urban development issues of interest to the fields of economics, business, sociology, political science, history, Asian and Japanese studies, and urban planning.

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cover of Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History

Jewish Budapest

Monuments, Rites, History

Géza Komoróczy

Central European University Press, 1999

As a painting by Chagall unfolds layer upon layer when viewed carefully, so does the city in Jewish Budapest. Neither a guidebook or a history in the traditional sense, this book is about the Jewish face of Budapest from medieval times to the present. To get the broadest possible perspective, this book is not only about the Hungarian capital as a Jewish city but, as befits a cosmopolitan metropolis, delves into its myriad elements. There was and is, as Jewish Budapest strikingly reveals, a Roman and a Greek – Catholic Budapest, a Lutheran and a Calvinist Budapest, a German, a Serbian and a Gypsy Budapest. All these are brought into play as backdrop to the main narrative about the history of Jews in Buda, Obuda, and Pest. Past and present Jewish life as an organic part of the life of the Hungarian capital Budapest – be it memory or living reality. Richly illustrated with wonderfully evocative literary line drawings and photos, the book includes a lavish, full-colour section of artwork that enhances the text. Here is a book at once personal and universal. It is about everyday Jewish life, the humor, the pathos, the human condition, which is the same or very similar anywhere in the Diaspora. Every image and incident, every happening is filtered through the strong sensibilities of the key citizens of the city throughout the past few centuries. Remarkable citizens personified by the likes of Theodor Herzl and Joseph Pulitzer. The city is itself the central character of this book. The authors write only about those parts where there is a story to tell. They talk about places where history is still visible, where it can be located, where its traces still exist, where it can be tasted, savoured, and where it surrounds us as part of life in Budapest today. Jewish Budapest amasses huge amounts of lore about the city, its monuments and relics, its language and scholarship, its cultural heart, and its intellectual core. Jewish Budapest proceeds according to the chronological sequence of the birth of the Jewish quarters in the city, focusing on patterns of settlement and occupation, and demography, and unfolds finally into a vision of the future of Jewish life in this remarkably vibrant, venerable city. The book includes a section of detailed comments on the illustrations with an explanation of the abbreviations throughout as well as a bibliography, an index of personal names, an index of cities and towns, and an index of Budapest street addresses.
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cover of Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925

Jews and Other Germans

Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925

Till van Rahden

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

Jews and Other Germans is the first social and cultural history to probe the parameters of Jewish integration in the half century between the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the early Weimar Republic. Questioning received wisdom about German-Jewish assimilation and the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, van Rahden’s prize-winning book restores some of the complexity and openness of relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews before World War I.

Closely analyzing the political, social, and cultural life in a major German city, van Rahden shows that Jews were a part of a broad urban community that encompassed diversity within unity, at once offering them a large measure of equality while permitting them to remain meaningfully Jewish. Jews and Other Germans also substantially revises the chronology of anti-Semitism in Germany, showing that Jews only began to experience exclusion from Breslau’s social world during World War I.

Yet van Rahden not only illuminates Breslau’s multicultural fabric; he also tells the story of this remarkable city as one of cultural and religious conflict and coexistence. Recounting the experiences of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics within a single narrative, he offers a critical intervention into scholarship on liberalism and civil society in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
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cover of Jim Crow from the Harbor: Black Freedom Struggle and Downtown Baltimore, 1945–1980

Jim Crow from the Harbor

Black Freedom Struggle and Downtown Baltimore, 1945–1980

John R. Tilghman

Temple University Press, 2026

How do poor Black communities co-exist with downtown revitalization? How do Black social movements respond to urban renewal to ensure access to better housing and city spaces? John Tilghman investigates these interlocking questions in Jim Crow from the Harbor. Looking at Baltimore, Maryland’s redevelopment in the post-war era of deindustrialization and population decline through white flight, Tilghman tells the story of how Black activists clashed with urban regimes.

Tilghman follows the money—redevelopment profits—which created tensions that prompted anti-freeway campaigns and affirmative action efforts. Through grassroots activism, protests, and community building, participants in the Black Freedom Struggle undermined downtown interests’ efforts to reinforce racial segregation as well as other civil, political, and economic inequalities.

While their efforts met with both success and limitations, Tilghman emphasizes the strengths of this minority majority population as they strove for urban equality. Jim Crow from the Harbor provides a new perspective that helps explain what has provoked today’s struggles in Baltimore for Black Americans.

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cover of Jobs and the Labor Force of Tomorrow: Migration, Training, Education

Jobs and the Labor Force of Tomorrow

Migration, Training, Education

Michael Pagano

University of Illinois Press, 2017

The new volume in the Urban Agenda series addresses the challenges shaping the development of human capital in metropolitan regions. The articles, products of the 2016 Urban Forum at the University of Illinois at Chicago, engage with the overarching idea that a dynamic metropolitan economy needs a diverse, trained, and available workforce that can adapt to the needs of commerce, industry, government, and the service sector. Authors explore provocative issues like the jobless recovery, migration and immigration, K-12 education preparedness, the urban-oriented gig economy, postsecondary workforce training, and the recruitment and professional development of millennials.

Contributors: Xochitl Bada, John Bragelman, Laura Dresser, Rudy Faust, Beth Gutelius, Brad Harrington, Gregory V. Larnell, Twyla T. Blackmond Larnell, and Nik Theodore.
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cover of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis

Johannesburg

The Elusive Metropolis

Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds.

Duke University Press, 2008

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture.

The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, and life for foreigners in the city.

Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Lindsay Bremner, David Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone

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cover of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Volume 16

Johannesburg

The Elusive Metropolis, Volume 16

Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

This issue of Public Culture attempts to overturn perceptions that frame Africa as an object apart from the rest of the world. By placing the city of Johannesburg—the preeminent metropolis of the African continent and a city facing a complicated legacy of racial strife and wealth accumulation—at the heart of new critical urban theory, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis broadens discussions of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and urban renewal to include Africa. The issue brings Johannesburg into direct dialogue with other world cities, creating a space for the interrogation and investigation of the metropolis in a properly global sense.

Contributors to this issue—a mix of scholars, urban planners, and artists, many of whom hail from South Africa—reveal Johannesburg to be a polycentric and international city that has developed its own cosmopolitan culture. In a detailed study of three streets in the modern precinct of Melrose Arch, one essay shows how the thoroughly commodified and marketed Johannesburg cityscape has shaped the cultural sensitivities, aesthetics, and urban subjectivities of its inhabitants, at times even overriding the historical memory of apartheid. Another essay, focusing on the emergence of a new urban culture, examines how the city itself becomes a crucial site for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. By tracking the movement of people with AIDS to various locations in the city to seek relief and treatment, another essay reveals an urban geography very different from what is seen from the highways. Finally, through interviews and commentaries, journalists, artists, and architects of Johannesburg offer reflections on the geography and shifting culture of the city and its townships, on the complicated relationship between Johannesburg and other African cities, and on the search for an architectural style that adequately expresses the complexity of this cosmopolitan city.

Contributors. Lindsay Bremner, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Rodney Place, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michael Watts

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cover of Justice and the American Metropolis

Justice and the American Metropolis

Clarissa Rile Hayward

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Today’s American cities and suburbs are the sites of “thick injustice”—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.

Identifying these often invisible and intransigent problems, this volume addresses foundational questions about what justice requires in the contemporary metropolis. Essays focus on inequality within and among cities and suburbs; articulate principles for planning, redevelopment, and urban political leadership; and analyze the connection between metropolitan justice and institutional design. In a world that is progressively more urbanized, and yet no clearer on issues of fairness and equality, this book points the way to a metropolis in which social justice figures prominently in any definition of success.

Contributors: Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard U; Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford U; Gerald Frug, Harvard U; Loren King, Wilfrid Laurier U; Margaret Kohn, U of Toronto; Stephen Macedo, Princeton U; Douglas W. Rae, Yale U; Clarence N. Stone, George Washington U; Margaret Weir, U of California, Berkeley; Thad Williamson, U of Richmond.

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cover of Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities

Justice at Work

The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities

Marc Doussard

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities

 

In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.

Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. 

Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities. 

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