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Airport Urbanism studies the exponential leap of global air traffic since the 1980s and its implications for the planning and designing of five East and Southeast Asian cities. Focusing on the low-cost, informal, and “transborder” transportation networks used by newer members of the flying public, the book uncovers the architecture of an emerging global mobility that has been inconspicuously inserted into buildings and places that are not typically associated with the infrastructure of international air travel. The primary focus is in Asia, with research conducted in five different locations: China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Unique security clearance has allowed for access to the restricted zones of airports, unpublished maps, and photographs. In all, the book combines research tools from the humanities and design professions in order to advance an innovative approach to the study of rapidly developing Asian cities in relation to the increase of air travel.

Beautiful Wasteland critically examines the racial logics embedded in the contemporary stories of Detroit that flow through popular culture, from Internet forums, photography, films, advertising, to news medias, in order to map the extension of the mythology of the frontier in American culture. Through analysing the cross-sections of these cultural locations, the book reveals the continued process of racialization in stories told about the rise, fall, and potential rise again of the city of Detroit. Detroit is indeed a ‘beautiful wasteland’, desirable and distressed in its narrative of ruin. The book is primarily a humanities-based audience. However, it is also interdisciplinary in focus in terms of theoretical and methodological intervention, as the study of the circulation of narratives is always in conversation with other ideas and discourses.

Degraded Work provides a new perspective on employment inequality and low-wage work. Jobs are not intrinsically good or bad: They are made better, or worse, by the actions of employers, employees and regulators. The book advances four key, and novel, arguments to this end. First, it argues that focusing on wages, and on the issue of income inequality, understates the extent of workplace inequalities that spread deep into working conditions and job security. Second, it illustrates these inequalities through case studies of employment change in two industries in which poor job quality is assumed to be intrinsic: residential construction and food retail. In each industry, the decline in working conditions has outpaced the decline in wages. And in each industry, work has been degraded as the result of employer choices about the optimal path to profit. Third, the book provides a detailed policy discussion that directly addresses the reality of minimal political will to confront workplace inequalities. Most volumes on low-wage work cite sensible policy fixes – raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, improving enforcement of labor laws – that routinely crumble in the face of strong political opposition. Degraded Work takes this opposition as a starting point, and melds the analysis of industries and employers to a program for identifying new policy and organizing opportunities workers and worker advocates can use to improve working conditions.

In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their community activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city’s public housing communities. They led sit-ins, spoke out at public hearings, and denounced attempts by developers to seize their homes and disperse their communities. Yet ten years later, the St. Thomas community leaders and their activist allies forged a partnership with the city’s most powerful real estate developer to privatize the development and create a new racially integrated, “mixed-income” community that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. From protesting federal and local government initiatives to scale back public housing, tenant leaders and advisors were now cooperating with a planning effort to privatize and downsize their communities. Arena argues that the insertion of radical public housing leaders and their activist allies into a government and foundation-funded non-profit-complex is key to understanding this unexpected political transformation. The new political allegiances and financial benefits of the non-profit model moved these activists into a strategy of insider-negotiations that prioritized the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the housing and other material needs of black public housing residents. White developers and the city’s black political elite embraced and cultivated this new found political “realism” because of the legitimation it provided for the regressive policies of poor people removal and massive downsizing of public housing.

By examining the ways in which the central city of Jakarta continues to accommodate different practices of life and types of residents, the book attempts to reframe the conventional discussion and analysis of urbanism in the Global South and to demonstrate how these heterogeneities can give rise to new theoretical formulations of urban life in general. The unique features include a sustained engagement with populations often left out of urban analysis, an inventive back and forth dialogue between heuristic theoretical concepts and empirical materials generated by different positions in the field—as researcher, activist, resident, policy consultant, and advisor, and a commitment to demonstrating simultaneously the potentials, drawbacks, conundrum, efficacies and dysfunctions inherent in various popular city-making practices.

Today’s American cities and suburbs are the sites of “thick injustice”—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change. Identifying these often invisible and intransigent problems, this volume addresses foundational questions about what justice requires in the contemporary metropolis. Chapters focus on inequality within and among cities and suburbs; articulate principles for planning, redevelopment, and urban political leadership; and analyze the connection between metropolitan justice and institutional design. In a world that is progressively more urbanized, and yet no clearer on issues of fairness and equality, this book points the way to a metropolis in which social justice figures prominently in any definition of success.

The Meeting Place asks what are the conditions of sociability in a globalized world. It argues that the social sciences take communication for granted and for this reason overlook the obstacles to understanding between strangers and the importance of improvised performative tactics in overcoming these. While such disciplines as sociology, legal studies, psychology, political theory and even urban planners treat meeting as a good in its own right (identifying it with the democratic procurement of wellbeing), they fail to offer a model of what makes meeting possible and worth pursuing: a prior and always unfulfilled desire of encounter. To explicate the phenomenon of encounter, Carter stages a dialogue between recent and current theories of community put forward by European and North American cultural philosophers and the theory and practice of meeting in Australian Indigenous societies. The Australian material traverses the troubled history of misunderstanding characteristic of colonial cross-cultural encounter, using recent Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropological research to throw light on the obstacles to understanding evident in the colonial record. When this literature is brought into dialogue with western ways of conceptualizing sociability, a startling discovery: that meeting may not be desirable and, if it is, that its primary object may be to negotiate a future of non-meeting or legally binding distances between people. This finding allows us to reformulate the Modernist trope, that true meeting is only possible between complete strangers, in terms of an ecological understanding of place-making and resource management.

Katrina was not just a hurricane. The death, destruction, and misery wreaked on New Orleans cannot be blamed on nature’s fury alone. This volume locates the root causes of the 2005 disaster squarely in neoliberal restructuring and examines how pro-market reforms are reshaping life, politics, economy, and the built environment in New Orleans. Chapters argue that human agency and public policy choices were more at fault for the devastation and mass suffering experienced along the Gulf Coast than were sheer forces of nature. The harrowing images of flattened homes, citizens stranded on rooftops, patients dying in makeshift hospitals, and dead bodies floating in floodwaters exposed the moral and political contradictions of neoliberalism—the ideological rejection of the planner state and the active promotion of a new order of market rule. Many of these chapters offer critical insights on the saga of disaster reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina. Challenging triumphal narratives of civic resiliency and universal recovery, the book brings to the fore pitched battles over labor rights, gender and racial justice, gentrification, the development of city master plans, the demolition of public housing, policing, the privatization of public schools, and roiling tensions between tourism-based economic growth and neighborhood interests. The chapters also expand and deepen more conventional critiques of “disaster capitalism” to consider how the corporate mobilization of philanthropy and public good will are remaking New Orleans in profound and pernicious ways.

Security in the Bubble is about the struggles of urbanites to come to terms with life in the city as dangerous. This book examines newly emerging aesthetic, affective and inclusionary spatialities of security governance. Urban South Africa is an especially pertinent site for such an endeavour: post-apartheid South Africa has reinvented space, using it as a technique of governance in more “positive” and sophisticated ways that ultimately alter the landscape of urban fragmentation. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid nor to a new class segregation, this fragmentation is now better conceptualized as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of (imagined) safety. Security in the Bubble is about the political dilemma that this landscape of bubbles creates: Security can only be achieved through particularistic strategies against the commons of the city. The book traces two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban: handsome space and instant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to make places safe. Instant space addresses the personal crime-related “navigation” systems of urban residents as they circulate through the city. In both regimes, security is not conceived as a public good, but as a situational experience. The logic of these regimes cuts across distinctions of private and public places or informal and formal actors of security governance and follows remarkably similar rationales of ordering, whether in a bar, a city improvement district, or an informal parking lot.

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also a concrete example of spatial justice in action. This book argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, the book interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, it demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. The book focuses on such innovative labor-community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice.

The Servant Class City demonstrates that for San Diego’s inner city revitalization, focusing on new development, visitor services, and high-rises overlooks the dramatic growth in low-wage service work, and persistent challenges facing poor, and working poor inner city residents. The book documents how over in a 30 year period, San Diego’s urban revitalization targeted specific industries, creating thousands of low-wage jobs and transforming the inner city, while at the same time broader economic trends further eroded the economic standing of the urban poor and working poor. As a result, inner city revitalization was planned and dependent on the continued expansion of poor and working poor households, while a range of other economic challenges, from payday lending and check cashing to unaffordable housing and limited social safety nets, have made the economic standing of the urban poor and working poor even more precarious, despite dramatic urban revitalization. David J. Karjanen argues that this process, as well as the broader efforts of urban policy, fails to adequately address the highly complex economic problems of the urban and working poor, and only a dramatic re-thinking of these issues will generate substantial solutions.

This book explores the process in which 2nd generation Turkish immigrant women in Berlin, Germany find a home in their urban immigrant neighborhood. In comparing local policy positions on immigrant integration with the life stories and personal perceptions of integration by the immigrants themselves, it tells two different stories of integration - one prescribed and imagined from above and one lived. In doing so, this book’s focus is on two of Berlin’s Turkish immigrant neighborhoods—Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Similar at first sight, these two neighborhoods prove to be different in the perception of policy-makers and immigrants alike. Their different socio-historical fabric creates different conditions for the process of immigrant integration. Hinze shows that it is not only the immigrants that change the neighborhood, but that neighborhood and immigrant identity melt together and are mutually contingent in the outcomes of the integration process. Like the immigrants, their urban neighborhoods also turn into hybrids: Like them, the neighborhood feels neither exclusively German nor exclusively Turkish, but lies somewhere in-between: neither here nor quite there. Unique in its comparative focus on both policy-makers and immigrants in the integration process, this book is an excellent resource for researchers, graduate courses, and upper-level undergraduate seminars.