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The entanglement of Vancouver’s infrastructure in settler colonialism and racialized exploitation

Vancouver, Canada, has long been held up as an environmentally conscious coastal refuge and model of progressive urban planning. Unpacking the troubling complexities that lie beneath the city’s otherwise tidy self-image, Terminal City reveals the long, recurring patterns of racialized violence and Indigenous dispossession crucial to its formation.

Examining the histories of Vancouver’s infrastructures, including railways, ports, the freeway system, fossil-fuel pipelines, and property, Michael Simpson details the various spatial manifestations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that constitute the city’s urban environment—using it as a case study to reveal such tendencies around the world. Simpson exposes how the seizure of Indigenous lands and the destruction of Black communities has been foundational to the development of the city, and he highlights its structural dependency on these violent legacies, as well as the ongoing struggles to dismantle them.

Bringing together theoretical insights from the fields of urban geography, political ecology, and Indigenous studies, Simpson provides a distinctive intervention into contemporary debates around the material basis of logistics and circulation. At a time when massive upheavals to urban infrastructure are taking place in the hopes of establishing greater sustainability, Terminal City raises important questions about how this moment of transition might be harnessed to bring about decolonial abolitionist futures that redefine what a city can become.

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Black people have been on a continual search for freedom. Since their arrival in the West as exploited sources of labor, through the great migrations out of and back to the U.S. South, to repatriation efforts to Africa and throughout the Diaspora, they have been longing for place and to find or create a Mecca.

The Black Mecca Blueprint examines the current Black Mecca, Atlanta, Georgia.  Jonathan Grant explores the dynamism of Black life in a “Black city,” homing in on race, class, and place and all their inherent complexities. He analyzes the ways place and city spaces are negotiated through power and class struggles and how various spaces, such as the Atlanta University Center and its reputation as a beacon, are recreated.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, hip hop music, cultural podcasts, stand-up comedy, archival research, media, autoethnographic data, and historiography, The Black Mecca Blueprint captures the beauty and burden of Atlanta while creating a blueprint that can be used to help devise more democratic cities across the U.S. and around the world. 

How the transition from physical trading floors to automated ones changed central business districts and urban policy.

Wall Street is defined by the New York Stock Exchange’s headquarters, while the Chicago Board of Trade’s iconic building anchors LaSalle Street in the city’s Loop. These buildings have not moved in a century, but their trading floors have experienced dramatic changes over the past sixty years. While thousands of commuters still work in and around Wall Street, most stocks are traded via computer. Not even the NYSE’s servers are onsite.

The Capitals of Capital charts the rise and dematerialization of stock-exchange trading floors in New York and Chicago, demonstrating how the finance industry has long been entwined with urban planning and development. Aaron Shkuda shows in detail how the industry came to dominate cities both economically and spatially, tracing the demands of firms like Chase Manhattan Bank and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for larger central facilities, better tax breaks, and other accommodations—until technological developments shifted their priorities from spaces for people to capacity for machines. Shkuda’s history of trading floors reveals financial institutions as change agents in urbanism; through their evolving construction proposals, they forced elected officials, urban planners, architects, and voters to consider the value of trading floors, their significance to a city and its people, and what kind of resources they deserved. Today, as Wall Street towers are converted to apartments and server farms, The Capitals of Capital sheds light on the ever-shifting relationship between the finance industry and urban spaces.

A history of San Francisco that studies change in the postwar urban landscape in relation to the city's queer culture.

The City Aroused is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Damon Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organizing among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement.

Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen’s hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape.

Where water supply, railway transportation, and oil reserves have been abundant, towns in central West Texas have prospered; where these resources are few, settlements have maintained only slight growth or disappeared entirely. Supporting his conclusions with profuse statistical evidence, Robert L. Martin traces the economic development of six major towns in the area, all with over 10,000 residents in 1960: Lamesa, Snyder, Sweetwater, Big Spring, Midland, and Odessa.

Ranching brought the first settlers to West Texas in the 1870s and dominated the economy until 1900. In the 1880s farmers began to arrive, and between 1900 and 1930 agricultural production replaced ranching as the most important industry.

With the influx of population came the railroad, and small settlements were established along its route. Those with sufficient water supply prospered and, as counties were organized, became county seats and supply centers for the surrounding agricultural regions.

The land could not support a large agricultural population, and agriculture-related manufactures soon drew population to the towns. However, it was not until the oil discoveries of the 1920's that the modern city emerged. After World War II, oil production and oil-related industries generated great wealth and caused a boom in population growth and urban development. Despite the growth in prosperity, the economy is precariously balanced. Urban centers dependent on oil—an industry of limited life—have matured in an area without sufficient water or agricultural resources to support them. Martin concludes that, without careful planning and a solution to the water problem, these cities could some day become ghost towns on the plains.

Covering the period from the first government survey of the treacherous Limekiln Crossing to the completion of the Livingstone Channel, The Detroit River tells the story of the industrial transformation of the city’s most important waterway.

Interdisciplinary in content as well as approach, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at the ecology of urban communities. Written by experts from a variety of professions—academic researchers, private and public program managers, and citizen activists—the book explores issues of geography, ecology, landscape architecture, urban forestry, law, and environmental education. Contributions include broad overviews of common problems a well as detailed case studies of specific programs. 

Although several contributors are natural scientists, the book focuses on matters of public policy and public-private collaboration. The aim is not only to assess the impact of increasing urbanization on biodiversity, but also to propose new ways of preserving and restoring the balance between the natural and the built environment through planning and design.

While gangs and gang culture have been around for countless centuries, The Gang is one of the first academic studies of the phenomenon. Originally published in 1927, Frederic Milton Thrasher’s magnum opus offers a profound and careful analysis of hundreds of gangs in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. With rich prose and an eye for detail, Thrasher looked specifically at the way in which urban geography shaped gangs, and posited the thesis that neighborhoods in flux were more likely to produce gangs. Moreover, he traced gang culture back to feudal and medieval power systems and linked tribal ethos in other societies to codes of honor and glory found in American gangs. Thrasher approaches his subject with empathy and insightfulness, and creates a multifaceted and textured portrait that still has much to offer to readers today. With handsome images that evoke the era, this unabridged edition of The Gang not only explores an important moment in the history of Chicago, but also is itself a landmark in the history of sociology and subcultural theory.