UBC Press

Risky Cities

The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism

Rutgers University Press

Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards.

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Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti

By Vincent Joos

Rutgers University Press

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes how, in the meantime, people from various backgrounds use, transform, and create vibrant urban spaces and economies that enable them to rebuild their lives. By exploring how the state, international organizations, and everyday people transform the environment,the book reflects on the possibilities of dwelling in post-disaster landscapes.

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The Street

A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality

Edited by Naa Oyo A. Kwate; By (photographer) Camilo José Vergara; Foreword by Darnell L Moore

Rutgers University Press

Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara’s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection address everything from law enforcement to health care in order to analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities.

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Gentrification Down the Shore

By Molly Vollman Makris and Mary Gatta

Rutgers University Press

Gentrification in cities in the United States is a hot topic, but this book contributes something new to the ongoing discussion by offering a rich case study of seasonal gentrification and its effects on long time residents. Summer days in Asbury once again mean tourists strolling the boardwalk and dining by the Atlantic Ocean. But just across the railroad tracks from the seasonal crowds, many of Asbury’s long-time residents live below the poverty line and struggle for their share of this prosperity throughout all four seasons of the year.

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Loft Living

Culture and Capital in Urban Change

By Sharon Zukin

Rutgers University Press

Since its initial publication, Loft Living has become the classic analysis of the emergence of artists as a force of gentrification and the related rise of “creative city” policies around the world. This 25th anniversary edition, with a new introduction, illustrates how loft living has spread around the world and that artists’ districts—trailing the success of SoHo in New York—have become a global tourist attraction.

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Urban Nightlife

Entertaining Race, Class, and Culture in Public Space

By Reuben A. Buford May

Rutgers University Press

Sociologists have long been curious about the ways in which city dwellers negotiate urban public space. How do they manage myriad interactions in the shared spaces of the city? In Urban Nightlife, sociologist Reuben May undertakes a nuanced examination of urban nightlife, drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a Deep South college town to explore the question of how nighttime revelers negotiate urban public spaces as they go about meeting, socializing, and entertaining themselves.

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Contesting Community

The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing

By James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge

Rutgers University Press

What do community organizations and organizers do, and what should they do? Contesting Community addresses one of the vital issues of our day-the role and meaning of community in people's lives and in the larger political economy.It paints a more critical picture of community work which, according to the authors-in both theory and practice-has amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Their comparative study of efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada describes and analyzes the limits and potential of this work.

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Power Politics

Environmental Activism in South Los Angeles

By Karen Brodkin

Rutgers University Press

Power Politics is a rich and readable study of a grassroots campaign where longtime labor and environmental allies found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that pitted good jobs against good air. Karen Brodkin analyzes how those issues came to be opposed and in doing so unpacks the racial and class dynamics that shape Americans' grasp of labor and environmental issues. Power Politics' activists stood at the forefront of a movement that is building broad-based environmental coalitions and placing social justice at the heart of a new and robust vision.

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Power Politics

Environmental Activism in South Los Angeles

By Karen Brodkin

Rutgers University Press

Power Politics is a rich and readable study of a grassroots campaign where longtime labor and environmental allies found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that pitted good jobs against good air. Karen Brodkin analyzes how those issues came to be opposed and in doing so unpacks the racial and class dynamics that shape Americans' grasp of labor and environmental issues. Power Politics' activists stood at the forefront of a movement that is building broad-based environmental coalitions and placing social justice at the heart of a new and robust vision.

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The Hidden War

Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago

By Susan J. Popkin, Victoria E. Gwiasda, Lynn M. Olson, Dennis P. Rosenbaum, Larry Buron, and Rebecca M. Blank

Rutgers University Press

Even well-intentioned initiatives such as the recent effort to demolish and “revitalize” the worst developments seem to be ineffective at combating crime, while the drastic changes leave many vulnerable families facing an uncertain future. The Hidden War sends a humbling message to policy makers and prognosticators who claim to know the right way to “solve poverty.”

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Theorizing the City

The New Urban Anthropology Reader

Edited by Setha M. Low

Rutgers University Press

Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. The New Urban Anthropology Reader corrects this omission by presenting 12 cross-cultural case studies focusing on the analysis of space and place.

Five images of the city—the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city—serve as the framework for the selected essays. These images highlight current research trends in urban anthropology, such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and

studies of the symbolic and social production of urban space and planning.

Selected Chapters:

Theorizing the City: An Introduction by Setha M. Low

Part I. The Divided City

The Changing Significance of Race and Class in an African American Community, Steven Gregory

Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation by Teresa P. R. Caldeira

Part II. The Contested City

Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space in Costa Rica, Setha M. Low

Part III. The Global City

Wholesale Sushi: Culture and Commodity in Tokyo’s Tsukiki Market, Ted Bestor

Part IV. The Modernist City

The Modernist City and the Death of the Street by James Holston

Part V. The Postmodern City

Spatial Discourse and Social Boundaries: Re-imagining the Toronto Waterfront by Matthew Cooper

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Restoring America's Neighborhoods

How Local People Make a Difference

By Michael R. Greenberg

Rutgers University Press

What does it take to mobilize a grass-roots force dedicated to bringing new life into a decaying neighborhood? Can any one person or group successfully halt physical deterioration, drug-related crime, or the encroachment of clusters of factories, highways, and other noxious land uses? Michael Greenberg demonstrates in this book that it can and has been done against all odds.

Restoring America's Neighborhoods profiles twenty-four such cases from across the United States.

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Day of Jubilee

The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788-1909

By Brooks McNamara; Foreword by Robert R MacDonald

Rutgers University Press

Day of Jubilee: the Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788-1909 examines civic performances designed to honor prominent individuals, mark political events and issues of significance in New York City, or signal the completion of great projects that have touched the lives of New Yorkers. The great jubilees of recent years, including the ticker tape parades for the astronauts and championship sports teams and the annual May’s Thanksgiving Day parade, all drew on traditions established in the nineteenth century.

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