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For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to broad social and economic conditions, right-wing intellectuals, pundits, policy analysts, and politicians blamed urban problems on the urban underclass itself. This strategy was successful, Macek argues, in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social policies and the assumptions underwriting them.Turning to the media, Macek explains how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists validated the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary. Network television news and weekly news magazines, he shows, covered the inner city and its inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's alarmist discourse. At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban bias in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven. Even advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to sell products from SUVs to home alarm systems.Published during the second term of an American president whose conservative agenda has been an ongoing disaster for the poor and the working class, Urban Nightmares exposes a divisive legacy of media bias against the cities and their inhabitants and issues a wake-up call to readers to recognize that media images shape what we believe about others' (and our own) place in the real world-and the consequences of those beliefs can be devastating.Steve Macek teaches media studies, urban and suburbia studies, and speech communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

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.

Brings together research from different sectors that offers a significant contribution to knowledge on Freetown, Sierra Leone, and demonstrates the potential of transdisciplinary work.

With a population of over one million, Freetown, Sierra Leone faces serious challenges with service provisions, housing, infrastructure, employment, and climate change. In 2015, the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC) was established to address these challenges through research, capacity building, and advocacy. Urban Transformations in Sierra Leone shares SLURC’s progress, articulating its key findings and reflections on the partnerships it helped enable.

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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