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The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin.

The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘Underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture.

The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht).

Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity. 

Place has become both a major field of criminological study as well as an important area for policy development. Capturing state of the art crime and place research methods and analysis, Understanding Crime and Place is a comprehensive Handbook focused on the specific skills researchers need. 

The editors and contributors are scholars who have been fundamental in introducing or developing a particular method for crime and place research. Understanding Crime and Place is organized around the scientific process, introducing major crime and place theories and concepts, discussions of data and data collection, core spatial data concepts, as well as statistical and computational techniques for analyzing spatial data and place-based evaluation. The lessons in the book are supplemented by additional instructions, examples, problems, and datasets available for download.

Conducting place-based research is an emerging field that requires a wide range of cutting-edge methods and analysis techniques that are only beginning to be widely taught in criminology. Understanding Crime and Place bridges that gap, formalizes the discipline, and promotes an even greater use of place-based research.

Contributors: Martin A. Andresen, Matthew P J Ashby, Eric Beauregard, Wim Bernasco, Daniel Birks, Hervé Borrion, Kate Bowers, Anthony A. Braga, Tom Brenneman, David Buil-Gil, Meagan Cahill, Stefano Caneppele, Julien Chopin, Jeffrey E. Clutter, Toby Davies, Hashem Dehghanniri, Jillian Shafer Desmond, Beidi Dong, John E. Eck, Miriam Esteve, Timothy C. Hart, Georgia Hassall, David N. Hatten, Julie Hibdon, James Hunter, Shane D. Johnson, Samuel Langton, YongJei Lee, Ned Levine, Brian Lockwood, Dominique Lord, Nick Malleson, Dennis Mares, David Mazeika, Lorraine Mazerolle, Asier Moneva, Andrew Newton, Bradley J. O’Guinn, Ajima Olaghere, Graham C. Ousey, Ken Pease, Eric L. Piza, Jerry Ratcliffe, Caterina G. Roman, Stijn Ruiter, Reka Solymosi, Evan T. Sorg, Wouter Steenbeek, Hannah Steinman, Ralph B. Taylor, Marie Skubak Tillyer, Lisa Tompson, Brandon Turchan, David Weisburd, Brandon C. Welsh, Clair White, Douglas J. Wiebe, Pamela Wilcox, David B. Wilson, Alese Wooditch, Kathryn Wuschke, Sue-Ming Yang, and the editors.

How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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Los Angeles's experience in managing urban growth and change

America's first truly twenty-first-century metropolis, Los Angeles is often depicted as diverse, fragmented, polarized, and ungovernable, a city without a unifying geographic center or civic culture. The sprawling evolution of the city and its infamous problems—traffic, pollution, growing inequality—are usually attributed to a Wild West version of capitalism—the triumph of an unregulated free market over comprehensive urban planning. But market choices and lack of planning did not set the terrain of Southern California: Los Angeles has been profoundly shaped by a wide range of local, state, and federal public policies and programs.

Urban Aloha reveals the vibrant, little-known story of Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) diaspora in Los Angeles, home to the largest Hawaiian community outside Hawai‘i. Moving beyond tourist clichés and the persistent myth that Hawaiian Gardens represents “the” Hawaiian enclave, author Lani Cupchoy traces how a diasporic community took root across the South Bay and San Gabriel Valley. Beginning with the peak migrations of the 1950s and 1960s, and driven by economic recession in the islands, the narrative follows families as they built new lives through civic clubs, newsletters, churches, restaurants, and backyard gatherings.

Drawing on oral histories, archival research, foodways, hula halau, and organizations such as the Hawaiian Inter-Club Council of Southern California, Urban Aloha explores how “Hawaiianness” shifts from identity to lived cultural community. Cupchoy examines how belonging is shaped not only by ancestry but by region, memory, leisure, and everyday practice. At once intimate and intellectually compelling, this book challenges manufactured fantasies of paradise and reveals a dynamic mainland community negotiating authenticity, representation, and cultural resilience. Richly researched and deeply human, Urban Aloha redefines what it means to be Hawaiian—on the continent and beyond.

In words and photographs, reimagining the city as lived space

In contrast to Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and other European thinkers engaged with the concept of the urban, American intellectuals tend to envision the modern city as a dystopia, their perception of urban life influenced by negative stereotypes and fictional depictions in popular culture. In Urban Encounters, Helen Liggett challenges this fatalism by approaching the city as a vibrant, lived space. Combining a sophisticated critique of the urban with striking, street-level images, Liggett reclaims the human experience of the city.

Today a majority of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas: they are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most individuals in the twenty-first century. Despite this basic fact, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples concentrate solely on rural Indigenous populations.

Aiming to highlight these often-overlooked communities, this is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. The contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.

Indigeneity is often seen as being “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, but these essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too. The book challenges many of the imaginaries and tropes of what constitutes “the Indigenous” and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the real lives of Indigenous people today.

Contributors
Aiko Ikemura Amaral
Chris Andersen
Giuliana Borea
Dana Brablec
Andrew Canessa
Sandra del Valle Casals
Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov
Daniela Peluso
Andrey Petrov
Marya Rozanova-Smith
Kate Stevens
Kanako Uzawa

Over the past two decades, Latin American politicians and activists have reckoned with their nations’ histories of racism, forced displacement of native peoples, and inequality by acknowledging Indigenous communities as peoples preexisting the modern states. In Argentina—a nation long fixated on presenting itself as “white” and “European”—this shift has been dramatic. After decades of erasure and racism toward Indigenous peoples, Argentinian civil society is identifying Indigenous groups as not just an element from the past, but as nations central to the country’s culturally plural and multiracial identity.

In Urban Indigenous Assemblages, Ana Vivaldi considers how Argentina’s urban Indigenous population fits into this recent political and social movement. To do this, she focuses on how the Qom Indigenous people—whose traditional territories are in northern Argentina—have moved to Buenos Aires, made homes in shantytowns alongside other migrants, and remade urban space by building Indigenous lives in the city. Starting from a Qom barrio in Greater Buenos Aires, Vivaldi traces how Qom peoples’ travels to rural communities and movement across the city create complex networks and produce an urban life always in connection to other places. She argues that urban racialized indigeneities represent sites of contradictory relations visible and invisible to state actors and hypervisible to development agencies, as the Qom are expected to prove their authenticity and remove themselves from important relationships with nonwhite neighbors to access rights and recognition.

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, this book analyzes the historical process that created the barrio: the constant remaking of this Indigenous space in interaction with state institutions and NGOs, the links between the barrio and northern Argentina through travels “far out” to rural communities in the Chaco, and the expansion of “Indigenous territories” beyond bounded location.

Divided into three sections, this edition of Urban Land Use Planning deftly balances an authoritative, up-to-date discussion of current practices with a vision of what land use planning should become. It explores the societal context of land use planning and proposes a model for understanding and reconciling the divergent priorities among competing stakeholders; it explains how to build planning support systems to assess future conditions, evaluate policy choices, create visions, and compare scenarios; and it sets forth a methodology for creating plans that will influence future land use change.

Discussions new to the fifth edition include how to incorporate the three Es of sustainable development (economy, environment, and equity) into sustainable communities, methods for including livability objectives and techniques, the integration of transportation and land use, the use of digital media in planning support systems, and collective urban design based on analysis and public participation.

An exploration of how the citizens of Quito created community via transportation systems in spite of political crisis.

Between 2007 and 2017, Ecuadoreans breathed the air of revolution. Their national project, spearheaded by Democratic Socialist president Rafael Correa, was known as buen vivir—good living. Both a discourse and a development strategy, buen vivir promoted interdependence with and among working-class and marginalized people. And public investment shifted toward shared infrastructure, especially transit. Yet much work was still to be done when Correa left office, and Ecuador has since seen retrenchment.

Urban Solidarity explores and interprets buen vivir’s afterlife, as local organizers in the capital Quito sustain and build the interdependence agenda in the midst of state retreat. Since the IMF forced the government to cancel fuel subsidies, residents have responded by developing impressive carsharing (taxirutas) and shared-cycling resources. These efforts are markedly feminist as well, prioritizing women’s safety and independence as they travel about the city to earn money and care for their families. Gamble argues that buen vivir planted the seed of a new politics, that could once again inspire state action. For now, the people of Quito continue to foster the solidarity foundational to a good life.

An accessible, informative, and intrepid insight into urban violence through a decolonial and multidisciplinary lens. 

Placing peripheralized people at its center, Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities unpacks how urban violence must be understood from multiple points of view, namely through the distinct perspectives of powerholders, decision-makers, law enforcers, urban planners, creative artists, and particularly from the lived standpoint of less empowered communities. Combining social science approaches with explorations in film, media, and the performing arts, the volume challenges conventional, stereotypical, and reductive definitions and conceptions of urban violence by placing local marginalized communities at the forefront of a multilogue and embracing inclusive, innovative, and unconventional analytical and practical approaches and frameworks. A diverse cohort of contributors offers policy-focused counternarratives and potential solutions to systematized forms of overt, covert, and hybrid forms of urban violence(s).

A unique more-than-capitalist take on urban dynamics

Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification.

The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City—once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living—from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space. 

Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place—in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are.

How writers and artists have used city planning strategies to push back against harm

Black queer feminist thinker Audre Lorde famously declared that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This language is normally understood as a metaphor, but as author Davy Knittle argues in this provocative book, queer and trans activists have long used the tools of city planning and urban design to create written and visual art that critiques those in power and offers points of resilience to their own communities.

A close look at the ways queer and trans writers and artists resisted predatory redevelopment in New York City from 1950 to 2020, Urbanist Desire draws on the work of James Schuyler, June Jordan, David Wojnarowicz, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Zeyn Joukhadar, exploring how they intervened in major political flashpoints like the War on Poverty, the AIDS-era housing crisis, and gentrification in Brooklyn and Queens. Presenting a new cultural history of New York City, Knittle explains how urban change and the more-than-human life of cities have been foundational concerns for queer and trans cultural production since the 1950s.

Ending with analysis of the 2022 speculative novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, Urbanist Desire looks to the past to imagine a better future for New York City and for all marginalized people. Knittle demonstrates how to move past a recuperative response to harm and toward one that can change the structure of society by documenting how queer and trans activists have engaged the strategies of planning and design to address spatial, social, and economic inequality.

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