Τα καλύτερα Urban Studies podcast (2025)

1
Dawn Day Biehler, "Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History" (U Washington Press, 2024) 54:44

1d ago54:44

54:44

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of animals. In 1858, the city adopted the Greensward Plan and began the long process of reshaping the 843 acres of land into a park where everything—from the trees to the trails to the inhabitants—wo…

1
Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025) 29:41

1d ago29:41

29:41

Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged. In Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, Timothy Weaver argues that the intercurrent impact of these orders has created a constant battle for power. Weaver brings these clashes…

1
Sybil Derrible, "The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives" (Prometheus Books, 2025) 38:40

3d ago38:40

38:40

Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet – all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have little to no idea how these sys…

1
Laureen D. Hom, "The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles" (U California Press, 2024) 1:26:07

3d ago1:26:07

1:26:07

Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. China…

1
Kelly Alexander, "Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State" (UNC Press, 2024) 1:07:10

6d ago1:07:10

1:07:10

On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across…

1
Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023) 1:01:34

13d ago1:01:34

1:01:34

Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They ar…

1
Joshua Barker, "State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City" (Duke UP, 2024) 56:46

14d ago56:46

56:46

The relationship between fear people experience in their lives and the government often informs key questions about the rule of law and justice. In nations where the rule of law is unevenly applied, interpreting the people involved in its enforcement allows for contextualized understanding about why that unevenness occurs and is perpetuated. Joshua…

1
Miles Glendinning, "Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History" (Bloomsbury, 2021) 1:20:50

15d ago1:20:50

1:20:50

Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a major work that provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programs of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funde…

1
Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 40:59

18d ago40:59

40:59

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to t…

1
Yuca Meubrink, "Inclusionary Housing and Urban Inequality in London and New York City: Gentrification Through the Back Door" (Routledge, 2024) 54:43

23d ago54:43

54:43

Municipalities around the world have increasingly used inclusionary housing programs to address their housing shortages. Inclusionary Housing and Urban Inequality in London and New York City: Gentrification Through the Back Door (Routledge, 2024) problematizes those programs in London and New York City by offering an empirical, research-based persp…

1
Chandigarh 19:47

26d ago19:47

19:47

Chandigarh is the shared capital city of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, built under the leadership of modernist and brutalist architect Le Corbusier, as an emblem of the postcolonial Indian nation state as visualized by the first Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It was a repudiation of the imperialist architectural style, and for L…

1
Greg Suttor, "Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) 33:50

1M ago33:50

33:50

Social housing - public, non-profit, or co-operative - was once a part of Canada's urban success story. After years of neglect and many calls for affordable homes and solutions to homelessness, housing is once again an important issue. In Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016), Greg Suttor tells the …

1
James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024) 45:57

1M ago45:57

45:57

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to …

1
Alva Gotby, "Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing" (Verso, 2025) 54:00

2M ago54:00

54:00

Housing is more than bricks and mortar. The home is where our hopes and dreams play out, and it lies at the heart of our lives. This is where we rest, eat, and relax. The home we enjoy can determine our health, life expectancy, and day-to-day well-being. In contrast, the lack of a stable residence can lead to mental and physical illness and often p…

1
Benjamin H. Bradlow, "Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg" (Princeton UP, 2024) 51:47

2M ago51:47

51:47

Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environment. For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life—including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation—are largely…

1
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) 58:51

2M ago58:51

58:51

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—c…

1
Patrick T. Reardon, "The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020) 45:29

2M ago45:29

45:29

Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago’s elevated Loop was buil…

1
Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021) 47:35

2M ago47:35

47:35

Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad…

1
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020) 1:06:48

2M ago1:06:48

1:06:48

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the s…

1
Oskar Jensen, "Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London" (The Experiment, 2024) 1:28:13

2M ago1:28:13

1:28:13

London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity S…

1
Ágnes Györke and Tamás Juhász, "Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies" (Leuven UP, 2024) 58:32

2M ago58:32

58:32

When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of E…

1
Ben Highmore, "Playgrounds: The Experimental Years" (Reaktion, 2024) 47:06

2M ago47:06

47:06

After World War II, a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings, and roundabouts, these new playgrounds encouraged children to build shacks and invent their own entertainment. Playgrounds: The Experimental Years (Reaktion, 2024) tells the story of how waste grounds and bombsites were transformed…

1
Vincent Haddad, "The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023" (Lever Press, 2024) 1:09:57

2M ago1:09:57

1:09:57

Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the post-apocalyptic genre, the sci-fi dystopia, crime fiction, the superhero genre, and contemporary horror would not exist in the way they do today without the aesthetic material and racial history of Detr…

1
Amy Helen Bell, "Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London" (Yale UP, 2024) 25:26

2M ago25:26

25:26

Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Londoners in the streets below. Mass displacement, the anonymity of shelters, and the bomb-scarred landscape offered unprecedented opportunities for vio…

1
Kenny Cupers, "The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design" (U Texas Press, 2024) 1:21:28

3M ago1:21:28

1:21:28

The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Dr. Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically …

1
Oliver Rosales, "Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley" (U Texas Press, 2024) 1:10:45

3M ago1:10:45

1:10:45

In Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press, 2024), Oliver Rosales uncovers the role of the multiracial west in shaping the course of US civil rights history. Focusing on Bakersfield, one of the few sizable cities within California’s Central Valley for much of the twentieth c…

1
Stacy Torres, "At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America" (U California Press, 2025) 1:10:33

3M ago1:10:33

1:10:33

To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At …

1
James T. White and John Punter, "Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto's CityPlace" (UBC Press, 2023) 1:23:56

3M ago1:23:56

1:23:56

Casting an eye toward the frantic vertical urbanization of Toronto, Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto’s CityPlace (UBC, 2023) traces the forty-year history of the city’s largest residential megaproject. James T. White and John Punter summarize the tools used to shape Toronto’s built environment and critically explore the u…

1
Ptolemy Dean, "Streetscapes: Historic Routes Through English Towns" (Lund Humphries, 2024) 43:56

3M ago43:56

43:56

At a time of increased pressure for new urban development, where there is a focus on either object-based architecture or the rolling out of developer-designed suburban sprawl, there is a concern that the lessons learned about the creation of a general attractive ‘townscape’ or ‘streetscape’ have become forgotten or obscured. Featuring 26 of the mos…

1
Tom Scott-Smith, "Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter" (Stanford UP, 2024) 1:02:07

3M ago1:02:07

1:02:07

Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to…

1
Veronica Keller and Sabrina Mittermeier, "From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song" (Intellect, 2024) 56:40

3M ago56:40

56:40

From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song (Intellect, 2024) tells the history of New York City in song across a variety of different genres that the city has been home to and instrumental in developing, covering everything from early twentieth-century sheet music to Broadway’s musical theater, hip-hop, disco, punk, dancehall,…

1
Dennis Romano, "Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City" (Oxford UP, 2023) 1:08:52

3M ago1:08:52

1:08:52

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, "another world." During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated a…

1
Christopher Bell, "Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience" (Rutgers UP, 2024) 37:48

3M ago37:48

37:48

They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. Though gentrification is rapidly changing the face of this section of upper Manhatt…

1
Benjamin Barson, "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons" (Wesleyan UP, 2024) 1:07:44

3M ago1:07:44

1:07:44

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from b…

1
Vishaan Chakrabarti, "The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy" (Princeton UP, 2024) 1:16:40

4M ago1:16:40

1:16:40

From one of today's most inspired architects and urban advocates, a manifesto for architecture as a force for addressing our biggest social challenges. The world is facing unprecedented challenges, from climate change and population growth, to political division and technological dislocation, to declining mental health and fraying cultural fabric. …

1
Manan Ahmed Asif, "Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore" (New Press, 2024) 1:20:19

4M ago1:20:19

1:20:19

The city of Lahore was more than one thousand years old when it went through a violent schism. As the South Asian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to gain freedom from Britain's colonial hold, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was formed, the city's large Hindu and Sikh populations were pushed toward India, and an even larger Muslim refugee …

1
Sanaullah Khan, "Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self" (Lexington Books, 2023) 54:26

4M ago54:26

54:26

Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration…

1
Brian Groom, "Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World" (Harpernorth, 2024) 27:40

4M ago27:40

27:40

Long before Manchester gave the world titans of industry, comedy, music and sport, it was the cosmopolitan Roman fort of Mamucium. But it was as the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution that Manchester really made its mark on the world stage. A place built on hard work and innovation, it is no coincidence that the digital age began here too, w…

1
Sabina Faiz Rashid, "Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows" (Routledge, 2024) 55:18

4M ago55:18

55:18

Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face. The analysis focuses on two specific histori…

1
Megan Steigerwald Ille, "Opera for Everyone: The Industry's Experiments with American Opera in the Digital Age" (U Michigan Press, 2024) 51:03

4M ago51:03

51:03

Every year a relatively small number of canonic operas are produced around the world. Many companies shy away from new works, afraid of alienating a predominantly white, older, wealthy audience who are comfortable with operatic traditions. But opera can also be a site of incredible innovation. Opera for Everyone: The Industry’s Experiments with Ame…

1
René Boer, "Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives" (Valiz, 2023) 1:10:12

4M ago1:10:12

1:10:12

In cities across the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push toward efficiency, sanitization, surveillance and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative. From Dubai, Hong Kong and London to Amsterdam and Cairo, the smooth city, with its gated communities and theme-park zones, insidiously tr…

1
Adam Greenfield, "Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire" (Verso, 2024) 48:56

4M ago48:56

48:56

In Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (Verso, 2024), Adam Greenfield presents a compelling vision for collective resilience in an age of perpetual crisis. As we grapple with what Greenfield terms the "Long Emergency"—an era marked by cascading disasters from pandemics to climate-driven catastrophes—this timely book explores how …

1
Amanda Shoaf Vincent, "Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City: Paris's New Parks, 1977-1995" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) 1:15:49

5M ago1:15:49

1:15:49

In the space of about two decades, five major parks were proposed, designed, and created in Paris. Some emerged from competitions between professional landscape architects, others were imagined by planners working for the city, all represented a shift in what Amanda Shoaf Vincent calls “post-modern” understandings of the role of parks and garden in…

1
Meghana Joshi, "Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin" (Berghahn, 2024) 59:16

5M ago59:16

59:16

Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and ch…

1
Sharad Chari, "Apartheid Remains" (Duke UP, 2024) 1:20:32

5M ago1:20:32

1:20:32

Over the course of the 20th century, the South African state attempted to construct a “White Man’s Country” on the African continent using the biopolitical tools and spatial and economic planning strategies that characterized modern statecraft. My guest today, the geographer Sharad Chari, examines how racialized subaltern populations of Blacks, Ind…

1
Wes Marshall, "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System" (Island Press, 2024) 44:16

5M ago44:16

44:16

In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that S…

1
Kanupriya Dhingra, "Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 55:01

5M ago55:01

55:01

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge UP, 2024) looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and spatialization. Three actors p…

1
The Ideology of Democratic Athens 1:16:20

5M ago1:16:20

1:16:20

We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team constantly looking for ways to make the academic publishing industry grow and to promote groundbreaking academic publications to scholars, students and enthusiasts globally. Based in the renowned publishing city of Leiden, we eat, sleep and breathe publishing! Matteo Barbato’s The Ideology of Democratic Athens: I…

1
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, "The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places" (MIT Press, 2024) 42:59

5M ago42:59

42:59

An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging. Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the comple…

1
Lynne B. Sagalyn, "Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change" (MIT Press, 2023) 1:01:07

5M ago1:01:07

1:01:07

What is it about Times Square that has inspired such attention for well over a century? And how is it that, despite its many changes of character, the place has maintained a unique hold on our collective imagination? In Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change (MIT Press, 2023), which comes twenty years after her widely acclaimed Times Squ…

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