New Books in Urban Studies

Michael Aldrich joins John Ross to discuss Old Lhasa: A Biography, his richly detailed portrait of Tibet's historic capital. It's the third book in his trilogy on Asian cultural centers. He wrote the first two, on Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, while living in those cities, where he worked as a lawyer. There was no opportunity for this with Lhasa, so he had to rely on multiple trips (from his home in Taiwan) and an incredible amount of reading and research. Rather than writing a conventional history, Aldrich set out to present Lhasa as a living character – a city whose temples, alleyways, legends and surviving traditions can still tell their own stories. Books mentioned M.A. Aldrich The Search for a Vanishing Beijing: A Guide to China's Capital Through the Ages (Hong Kong University Press, 2006) Ulaanbaatar beyond Water and Grass: A Guide to the Capital of Mongolia (Hong Kong University Press, 2018) Old Lhasa: A Biography Originally published by Camphor Press in January 2023 and subsequently reissued in 2025 by Speaking Tiger Books with a new epilogue based on Aldrich's 2024 return to Tibet. The episode touches on the amazing story of Ekai Kawaguchi (河口慧海 1866–1945), a Japanese Buddhist monk who spent time in Lhasa in the early 1900s. He is the subject of Scott Berry's A Stranger in Tibet. The Books on Asia Podcast is co-produced with Plum Rain Press. Podcast host Amy Chavez is author of The Widow, the Priest, and the Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island. and Amy's Guide to Best Behavior in Japan. The Books on Asia website posts book reviews, podcast episodes and episode Show Notes. Subscribe to the BOA podcast from your favorite podcast service. Subscribe to the Books on Asia newsletter to receive news of the latest new book releases, reviews and podcast episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mexico City was America's largest city in the seventeenth century – a genuine metropolis. In American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Dr. Tatiana Seijas reveals a rich tapestry of stories about essential workers who remade and transformed the city during this period. Her narrative style carries readers to a unique place and time with residents from around the world who sold food, facilitated transportation, provided care, and valued the city's silver. Free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia, immigrants, and Native Americans pursued opportunities in a wealthy, yet deeply unequal environment, where working people claimed parts of the city for themselves. They carved out spaces to create new businesses and protect their livelihoods, altering the cityscape itself in the process. American Metropolis brings Mexico City to life from the perspective of the working people who transformed this early modern metropolis. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center (Cornell UP, 2026) traces the extraordinary journey of the twisted remnants of the World Trade Center. When the Towers fell on September 11, 2001, nearly all that remained was pulverized concrete and contorted steel. Dr. Samuel and Dr. Max Holleran investigate how fragments of these skyscrapers became modern relics, scattered across all fifty states and beyond, built into hundreds of local memorials in firehouses, parks, and plazas, providing new and creative ways to grieve and remember. Drawing on years of research and interviews with artists, city officials, and first responders, the authors reveal a semi-improvised process that transformed industrial debris into sacred objects. They explore the aesthetics of rust and ruin, the rituals of transport and dedication, and the cultural tensions between grief, patriotism, and public art. From a quiet town square in Wyoming to a monumental glass "book" in Padua, Italy, these memorials tell a story not only of loss but of how communities far from Ground Zero took a piece of the tragedy—and made it their own. At once deeply human and sharply analytical, Scattered Steel asks urgent questions: What does it mean to sanctify matter? How do memorials shape collective memory in an age of global, and highly visual, trauma? And what happens when the symbols of tragedy become part of everyday landscapes? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fort Bend County, Texas, looks like the America we claim to want: a suburb where Black, White, Asian, and Latinx families share cul-de-sacs, schools, and celebrations. Residents trade dishes, honor one another's traditions, and take pride in their community's diversity. Yet beneath this harmony lies what sociologist Dr. Kiara Wyndham calls "the diversity contract"—an unspoken agreement that racial diversity may be celebrated, but racial inequality must not be named.  Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and more than 150 interviews, Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb (University of California Press, 2026) reveals how the language of inclusion can obscure enduring racial hierarchy. In Fort Bend and communities like it, White advantage adapts to diversity rather than disappearing. Vivid and deeply researched, Diversityland transforms how we understand suburban life and challenges foundational narratives of what racial progress will look like in 21st century America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview with Professor Amihai Mazar was conducted by Željko Stanojević for the New Books Network. The conversation focuses on Tel Reḥov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valley, especially Volume V, where the report turns from architecture and pottery to smaller objects and scientific evidence that help reconstruct life at the site. Amihai Mazar is a leading archaeologist of ancient Israel. His research examines the Bronze and Iron Ages, archaeology and biblical history, ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, and historical geography. Tel Reḥov is especially important because it offers a rich archaeological sequence from the Beth-Shean Valley and evidence for the social, economic, and environmental history of northern Israel. Volume V is particularly revealing because it asks what can be learned from material that might appear secondary beside monumental architecture. Its first part examines clay, bone, stone and gypsum vessels; grinding stones and other stone implements; metal objects and metallurgical evidence; beads; objects connected with textile production; scale weights; and lithics. Together, these finds illuminate household work, craft activity, exchange, measurement, and technology. The volume also analyzes the spatial distribution of finds in a distinctive group of ninth-century BCE buildings in Area C. Archaeology is also about understanding where objects were found and how groups of finds functioned together. Distribution patterns can help reconstruct activities within buildings and suggest how work, storage, production, and daily routines were organized. It also includes Assyrian-period burials and later Islamic-period material, showing the site's long history. The second part of Volume V brings natural-science methods directly into the archaeological interpretation. Radiometric dating contributes to chronology. Studies of animal and fish remains, molluscs, and botanical material offer evidence for diet, agriculture, environment, trade, and the use of local and non-local resources. A soil-flotation project recovers small botanical remains that might otherwise disappear from the archaeological record. These studies show how modern archaeology depends on collaboration between excavators and natural-science specialists. One striking example is the paleomagnetic study of tilted walls in Area C, Stratum V. Instead of treating damaged architecture only as a descriptive feature, the researchers used physical evidence to investigate seismic destruction. This demonstrates a central strength of Volume V: interpretation is built by combining objects, context, chronology, biological remains, geology, and physical-science methods. Our discussion with Professor Mazar therefore uses Volume V to ask a larger question: how do small finds and scientific analyses change the historical picture created by excavation? The volume shows that understanding an ancient city requires more than identifying buildings or connecting archaeological horizons with historical narratives. It requires reconstructing technologies, food systems, craft production, movement of goods, environmental conditions, patterns of use within buildings, and the events that transformed them. Željko Stanojević is a host with the New Books Network and President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Belgrade. He is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, an international Diamond Open Access journal supporting research in Hebrew, biblical, Jewish, linguistic, historical, and related studies. He also coordinates the European Hebrew Journal International Online Conference, New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies. Authors of recent academic books are welcome to contact him regarding possible New Books Network interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Planning Library Spaces: A Practical Guide for Library Building Projects (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a book designed for librarians, trustees, local government officials, architects, and interior designers who are designing or planning to build, renovate, or reconfigure library spaces. Most librarians embark upon a library building project with little experience in space planning, architecture, or construction. Written by a registered architect and professional librarian, this is a guidebook for librarians embarking on a library building project. It includes a brief history of library facilities, placing them in the context of public buildings. An introduction to library planning principles and a discussion of library design concepts and trends are presented, including the impact of the 2020 pandemic on library design. Sections on working with architects, building design/construction terminology and the basics of reading architectural drawings provide insight into unfamiliar jargon and visual communication. Extensive illustrations and photographs show examples of library layouts and furniture and equipment, and the final chapter addresses the challenges inherent in a major building project. As library services change, buildings must adapt to accommodate and provide these new innovations. Buildings are living things, and this book will offer guidance to those embarking on a project of any scale or size. Guest: Lauren Stara is a registered architect and a librarian, specializing in library building design. Her past library experience includes everything from front desk clerk to director. As a Library Building Specialist for the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, Lauren administers grant funds and provides technical assistance and advice from initial planning through construction of public library projects. She writes, consults, and speaks on library design, service design, and future trends in libraries and is coauthor of Responding to Rapid Change in Libraries: A User Experience Approach (2020). Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

St. Vincent's Hospital began with a simple, but radical mission: to care for all those in need regardless of race, creed, or financial means. For more than 160 years, the hospital carried out that work, serving notables and the nameless alike, from impoverished immigrants and those stricken by devastating nineteenth-century epidemics to AIDS patients and the victims of the attacks of 9/11. A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent's Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (NYU Press, 2026) provides the first comprehensive history of this remarkable institution, from its humble beginnings in 1849 to its abrupt closure in 2010. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, St. Vincent's earned distinction not only for the quality of its medical programs, but also for its unwavering dedication to the poor. The hospital was a testament to the vision and labor of the Sisters of Charity, who founded, staffed, and administered the hospital with remarkable skill and devotion. This captivating account documents St. Vincent's growth into one of the largest and most prominent Catholic medical centers in the United States, as well as its struggles to sustain its religious mission within the ever-changing and increasingly competitive medical marketplace. A Monument to Charity highlights the immense contributions of Catholic sisters to health care in the United States as well as the enduring legacy of all those who worked alongside them to care for the sick and alleviate suffering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads. The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution's 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university's shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline. A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On (Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination of the Dōjunkai Foundation (1924-2024). Compiled and edited by Dr. Marco Pompili through interviews and studies, it is a must-read for anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture. The Dōjunkai Apartments (1924-1934), the Foundation's best-known work, introduced apartment living to Japan in response to crucial historical and social challenges such as urban reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923 and the emergence of new working and middle classes. The book's texts, by prominent scholars and architects, as well as a series of original drawings and photographs from the period, bring the work of the Dōjunkai Foundation back to life 100 years after its founding. While the Dōjunkai Apartments have unfortunately been lost in the rapid changes and greedy redevelopment typical of Japanese metropolises, this book seeks to contribute to the preservation of their memory and their significance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the future for cities? In Postcapitalist Cities: Towards a common urban future (Manchester University Press, 2026) Oli Mould, a Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, looks at the past, present and future of the city to consider alternatives to the current capitalist urban model that dominates the world. Re-examining key concepts such as gentrification and care, introducing new ideas like solarpunk, and packed with a huge range of global case studies, the book offers approaches to resist, reject and reimagine the city. A significant intervention for geographers and social scientists, the book will also be essential reading for anyone living in a city today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A sweeping history of humanity's most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself. From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane elements―like door-knockers and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material choices have remade the planet's surface. He also confronts the darker side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed homes and space architecture built by robots. Drawing from personal experiences across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our choices in housing continue to influence everything from social relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity's defining challenge into our greatest opportunity. HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations (Leiden University Press, 2026) examines how Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight surveillance regime through volunteering. This book asks how citizens connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research, Ka-ming Wu investigates how citizens conduct volunteer activities that not only promote party-state campaigns and engage with new urban spaces and services, but also experiment with political, social, and cultural rights, including advocating for the rights of people with disabilities and promoting unofficial interpretations of national history. The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice through which citizens navigate existing hierarchies of urban and rural status, gender, age, and ability, while contesting top-down, mega-event-driven urbanization. It situates Chinese everyday urbanism within the context of China's hosting of multiple international events, its expanding public and digital infrastructures, heightened party-state control, and burgeoning digital activism. The book contributes to the infrastructural turn in urban anthropology and the field of China studies, offering a new understanding of urban rights and public access in contemporary China. NOTE: The book Ka-ming Wu mentioned in the interview is Stephen Graham's Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2010). Wu Ka-ming is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for China Studies. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her work is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of cultural studies, anthropology, China studies, and environmental humanities. She is the author of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism (UIP 2015) and the co-author of Living with Waste (CUP 2017). Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cycling Cities is a series of books that investigates 150 years of cycling policy and practice across fifty cities in twenty-five countries, and keeps adding new cities to the list including, recently, Lisbon and Tehran. In this episode, I interview two authors, M. Luísa Sousa and Kazem Afradi, from the teams of researchers that wrote Cycling Cities: The Lisbon Experience and Cycling Cities: The Tehran Experience. These books uncover the histories of bicycles and their cyclists from Lisbon to Tehran, from the 19th century to the 21st century, and from royals to revolutionaries. As you'll hear, while there are of course many differences between Lisbon and Tehran, there are also many commonalities in their cycling histories. Jacob Ward is an historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written on the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he's currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to consider, more broadly, the United States' relationship with liberty and empire. Empire and liberty have been part of the American story since the founding, but they are often at odds, sometimes irreconcilably so. Cook examines their changing relationship and meaning using these two iconic buildings as anchors. She also examines the symbolism and importance of the landmarks themselves. She considers how individuals and groups who have had more limited access to liberty have tried to shape the meaning of the symbols and their own rights at the same time. In telling this sweeping history, Cook touches in themes of American identity and ideals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part and parcel of China's compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people's lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes for the affected populations – China's “landless peasants” - as well as to the construction of divergent narratives about the role of the Chinese state's measures for them. To provide a so-far missing perspective to existing research, Isabel Heger-Laube reconstructs the role of the experienced changes from landless peasants' own narratives, drawing on the “big” and “small” stories collected through fieldwork in Huaming model town in Tianjin's Dongli district. By focusing on ordinary people's subjective processes of meaning making, this book not only puts into perspective objective assessments and persistent narrative tendencies, but also sheds new light on the puzzle of social stability in the wake of large-scale, state-led transformations in contemporary China. China's Landless Peasants and the Role of State-led Rural Urbanization: Narratives, Meaning Making, and the Puzzle of Social Stability was published open access with Würzburg University Press in 2025. Free e-book version. Dr. Isabel Heger-Laube (isabelheger@gmail.com) is a sinologist and social scientist with an interdisciplinary footing in social anthropology, sociology, and psychology. She earned her PhD in Chinese Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2024 and currently works as a scientific associate at the School of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). Alongside her work, she is pursuing a degree in psychosocial counseling. Her research interests include urbanization and social change, higher and adult education, aging and care, as well as narrative meaning making and identity formation. ORCiD. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movies and TV shows winning Oscars and Emmys, and K-Pop groups becoming wildly popular. In Manhattan, Koreatown has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists, drawing them in with its bars, restaurants, and day spas. In Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand (NYU Press, 2026), Jinwon Kim argues that Manhattan's Koreatown has become a new type of ethnic enclave, what she dubs a "transclave." This commercialized ethnic space exists solely for consumption, leisure, and entertainment, and has been shaped by South Korea's nation-branding strategy, new economic and cultural strategies, patterns in Korean migration, and shifts in tourism and urban policies in New York City. Kim posits that for many consumers in Koreatown, especially those who are not of Korean descent, the space has become a commercialized place where transnational culture meets the diverse racial and ethnic mosaic of New York City. Kim emphasizes how the space functions to "brand Korea" as a space to "consume ethnicity," reflecting the landscape of South Korea's consumer culture through the physical appearance of buildings and stores and the inclusion of franchise brands. Ultimately, Koreatown, NYC is a fascinating exploration of the intersection of authenticity, ethnicity, and identity in the heart of New York's midtown. Michael O. Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His research explores symbolic interaction, leisure, meaning, place, community, and sociology of everyday life. He is the author of the forthcoming book Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America (Bloomsbury, January 2027), The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla, and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest. Smalltown Urban explores how small towns create moments of urbanity through festivals, public gatherings, and everyday social life. Since joining the New Books Network in 2017, he has interviewed more than 100 authors across sociology and the social sciences, helping connect scholars and their work with a broad public audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street's entire length. Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of change. Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses; horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown famers. Hines' photographs lingered in the collection of the New York Historical until they were discovered by Nick Yablon, a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Iowa. Now they appear in Nick's new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine's 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway (Columbia University Press, 2026). Combining Hines' photographs with his own analysis, along with maps and other images, Nick has produced an illuminating book that depicts Broadway, its peoples, its buildings, and the many neighborhoods that Broadway traverses, at a distinct moment in time. A digital companion to From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, with a selection of Hine's photographs, an interactive map of Broadway, and more, can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport hub of the present day.  The book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport's environment: the remaking of landforms, the design of terminal buildings, and the surrounding sprawl of hotels, schools, factories, and business parks. At the same time, it shows how the Heathrow area has been moulded by wider shifts in energy, mobility, and the economy, and how the airport has in turn left a lasting mark on its surroundings, both materially and ecologically. Drawing on previously unpublished material, Aviationland includes close studies of key sites, as well as figures who shaped how we see the airport today, including Richard Rogers, Patrick Abercrombie, and J. G. Ballard. Bringing together architectural, landscape, and infrastructural histories that are seldom read in tandem, this volume makes the case for Heathrow as a distinctively modern landscape. The result is a nuanced account of how local places become entangled within global systems, and what happens when they do. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Suzy Hansen, whose previous book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026) is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change, it offers lessons for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global forces remaking our lives. Karagümrük, a neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for petty thieves, cheap apartment blocks, and an influx of Syrian refugees. It's here that Hansen went looking for the truth behind the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian turn, a catastrophic regional war, and an accelerating geopolitical crisis. She asks: Was Turkey a harbinger of what would soon arise in other countries, the resurgence of authoritarianism? Or do the lives in this neighborhood, and the transformations of Erdoğan's Turkey, reveal a more complex story? During a decade spent reporting from Karagümrük, Hansen discovered the neighborhood's secrets and got to know some of its people: Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist in Erdoğan's Islamic nationalist AK Party; and Ebru, a real estate agent and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail. Through these local perspectives, Hansen connects the events unfolding in Karagümrük to the forces roiling Turkey, the Middle East, and the world, capturing the sweep of the last ten years in microcosm.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Molly Brookfield's book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) explores the historical, legal, and cultural history of street harassment in the United States. Historically, Brookfield identified the "masher panic" (late 19th–early 20th century) when reformers and municipalities labeled male accosting of women a public problem and enacted anti-masher ordinances or applied disorderly-conduct laws. On law and policy, the book highlights primarily local legal responses against harassment, with municipal codes and reinterpretations of existing ordinances more common than coherent federal action that criminalizes mashing. In Watching the Girls Go By, street harassment is situated on a continuum with other gendered and sexualized violence, with the argument that street harassment normalizes and underpins more extreme harms against women. The book portrays historical scholarly perspectives to street harassment including those of Cheryl Bernard and Edith Schlaffler. Also, the book builds on diverse historical sources and employs varying terms for similar behaviors. The author uses "intrusive behaviors" as a more precise analytic category while preserving period-specific terms when discussing particular historical contexts.  Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam's greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links: LinkedIn, ORCID, Meta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1644 four norcini or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing this supposed crime, the authors of this accusation blamed residents of Rome themselves, who had become so obsessed with meat that they turned a blind eye to such horrendous acts. This fabricated story points to an underlying reality—that in the early seventeenth century, a series of popes dramatically increased the amount of food and wine consumed by Romans, culminating in a per capita consumption of over a pound of meat per day during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (d. 1644). The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026) traces the efforts and activities of a range of actors who strove to bring meat to the Roman table. Dr. Bradford A. Bouley shows how Rome's preoccupation with food was the result of papal policy in the aftermath of the Reformation; food, and especially meat, served as religious and political propaganda, symbolizing the correctness of the Catholic faith and demonstrating the extent of papal power. Dr. Bouley details the dramatic reorganization of Roman foodways needed to satisfy this demand for meat, as large herds of animals had to be funneled from the countryside to the city. This consumption was ultimately not sustainable, triggering a crisis that fueled sensational rumors of murder and cannibalism and eventually, Dr. Bouley contends, sparked the outbreak of civil war, as vassals rebelled against papal oversight. The Barberini Butchers recovers this significant episode in food, environmental, and cultural history, one that brings early modern politics and history into conversation with concerns over human use of natural resources and consumption of animal products that continue to resonate clearly today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later. Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further, overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance. In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table (Bloomsbury, 2026), Dr. Paul Stangl traces the development of San Francisco's fisheries, seafood markets, cookery, and dining culture from the Gold Rush to the 1920s. Migrants from around the world imported fishing techniques and cuisines, then slowly adapted as they came to understand local resources and each other. Newcomers found the tastiest fish through trial and error and assimilated the “best” into a new cuisine. Different ethnic and occupational groups collaborated, fought, and learned from one another as they irreversibly altered the natural world around them. By the end of the First World War, San Francisco's seafood cuisine scarcely resembled that of the 1850s, due to cultural adaptation, technological advancements, and changes to the natural environment. It was no longer derivative of New England and France, but included influences from the Southern states, Asia, and South America.San Francisco Seafood chronicles the city's transformation from a fish-barren town-where restaurants served canned, pickled, and dried fish from the East Coast-to a seafood-rich metropolis that harvested seafood from Mexico to Alaska. He emphasizes how the impacts on nature and local labor serve as a necessary cautionary tale for today's global seafood trade. This is a thorough and insightful history of a once emerging, and now essential, cuisine for food and history buffs alike. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments. Demonstrating how technology's spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction. Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today's most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed, and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors. Dr. Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures. Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs, and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sponsored sluices, conduits, and quays. These efforts were not confined to England's great cities; small towns with limited means also sought to enhance their competitive edge, even when such investments strained their resources. Drawing on royal records, municipal archives, and archaeological evidence, Dr. Magnusson situates these civic undertakings in their broader social and environmental contexts. She shows how townsmen adapted traditional obligations of labor and charity alongside innovative fiscal tools to sustain projects that could span generations. Yet the balance was fragile. The crises of the fourteenth century—famine, plague, and the harsher climate of the Little Ice Age—undermined local resources, leaving many communities to struggle with maintenance or watch their infrastructures decline. At once a history of engineering, economy, and community, this study illuminates how medieval people conceived of security, health, and prosperity through the material fabric of their towns. By tracing the rise, transformation, and survival of these infrastructures, Dr. Magnusson demonstrates how urban communities navigated centuries of change while shaping the very landscapes in which they lived. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2026). In March 2020, during one of the first major US outbreaks of Covid, New York became an epicenter of the spread. New York's connective tissue, like the walkable city streets, subways, and taxi cabs, became pathways of transmission. In places where ideas and cultures can spread, diseases can, too. As the hospitals began to fill, essential workers from doctors and nurses to ambulance drivers and social workers stepped up to help heal the city in a time of crisis. For a brief moment, health workers became highly visible in our public consciousness. For many, the pandemic came as a shock. It had been more than 100 years since the last pandemic of comparable magnitude hit the five boroughs. We soon discovered that there already existed a network of public health workers and activists waiting to spring into action to blunt the virus's spread. Many wished that this network had been more robust, better developed, and better funded. Fighting for New York looks at the long sweep of public health activism in New York City from the 1960s to now. Covid was not the first public health crisis the city faced, and it certainly won't be the last. Nicholas details various initiatives to mobilize support for public health projects in the city. How have activists identified problems in their communities? How have they gained institutional support in addressing these problems? And how do they discover and implement workable solutions to the identified problems? Though primarily a work of history, Fighting for New York also serves as a road map for public health workers and activists seeking to navigate contemporary issues. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation's leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935. Through a granular analysis of those events and the mapping of their locations, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (Stanford University Press, 2024) reveals that Harlem's residents participated in a complex new mix of violence that was a multifaceted challenge to white economic and political power. Tracing the legal and government investigations that followed, this project highlights how that violence came to be distorted, diminished, and marginalized by the concern of white authorities to maintain the racial order, and by the unwillingness of Harlem's Black leaders and their white allies to embrace fully such direct forms of protest. Focused on capturing rather than simplifying the complexity of the new form of racial violence, Harlem in Disorder is a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. Its structure foregrounds individual events to counter how data can dehumanize the past, and to make transparent the interpretations involved in the creation of data from uncertain and ambiguous sources. Harlem in Disorder is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a Finalist for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, Multimodal Category, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies; winner of the 2025 Ángel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph, sponsored by the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus; Honorable Mention for the 2025 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History, and Honorable Mention for the 2025 Open Scholarship Award, sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Participation in official governmental institutions and activities has declined dramatically. Americans are less inclined to express trust in, or cooperate with, political leaders and each other to address society's most pressing problems. In Neighborhoods Matter: How Place and People Affect Political Participation (NYU Press, 2026), Carrie LeVan explores this growing crisis in civic engagement, arguing that where we live—and the people who live around us—may be to blame. Drawing on national surveys, census data, and spatial analysis, LeVan demonstrates how neighborhood design can dramatically impact political participation, including people's desire and ability to vote in local, state, and national elections. She argues that the suburbs, which isolate residents, require driving, and are zoned for single-use, do not provide an effective infrastructure for civic engagement. However, cities, which are often designed to be walkable, more interactive, and are zoned for mixed-use, provide a supportive environment where people and politics can thrive. Ultimately, LeVan underscores how neighborhoods that support interaction, competition, collective action—and even conflict—can support greater civic engagement and political participation. Neighborhoods Matter highlights the connection between politics, people, and place, calling for good suburban and urban design that can support a vibrant and engaging civic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ukraine's modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognized. This is a result of several factors, including the stigma of belonging to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. Photographer Dmytro Soloviov has crossed Ukraine documenting them to form the most comprehensive publication available on the subject.  With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cultural and political context. Dmytro Soloviov is a photographer, tour guide, and activist, and the creator of the popular Ukrainian Modernism Instagram page. He frequently leads tours of modernist architecture in different cities in Ukraine. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live in an almost odorless world, where everything is reduced to images. Yet smell plays a vital role in how we relate to others and our surroundings, forming our experiences and our memories. Tracing a history of smell from the first ancient cities, through medieval plagues and the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense (Reaktion, 2026) is a tribute to the sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust. Along the way, Bjørn Berge introduces us to twenty iconic scents—from blood and soil to the ocean—and invites readers to reflect on and reawaken their senses. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Insatiable Appetites: Eating Out in Georgian London (Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Peter Ross, step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London—one day, one city, countless appetites. From dawn until past midnight, Londoners dined at taverns, coaching inns, oyster rooms, confectioners, coffee shops, chocolate houses, soup shops and dining rooms. For the poor, the streets bustled with vendors offering early versions of fast food: hot green peas, baked potatoes, suet puddings, curds and whey, rice milk, gingerbread, pastry ‘pigs,' and the now-forgotten saloop, a warming drink made from orchid roots.  After dark, sex workers and their clients indulged in a glass of jelly, then considered an aphrodisiac, as a precursor to a visit to the brothel. As the empire expanded, culinary influences poured in: London's first Indian takeaway appeared in 1773, while the East End became home to Jewish fried fish, Italian baloney and German sausages. Through the course of a single day, this book takes readers on a journey through breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper in Georgian London, drawing on contemporary archives to follow hungry citizens from all walks of life as they navigate the city's diverse food landscape. It reveals not only culinary pleasures and horrors, but also the social challenges and daily struggles that shaped life in the capital. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Photography and Identity in a Global City (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Nancy Micklewright reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in women's lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of enslaved and working women.Appealing to scholars across a range of fields, including fashion history, Ottoman studies, women's and gender history, visual culture and photography history, Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul provides a fascinating insight into women's histories, writing and dress practices in a rapidly changing Istanbul. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually attempt the 30,000-kilometer drive from far northern Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. There is more to the highway, however, than the persistent allure of the open road. In Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway (University of California Press, 2026), historian Dr. Shawn William Miller unveils a larger tale of lofty ideals and bedrock greed, romantic adventure and pragmatic diplomacy, immigrant desperation and Indigenous resistance. This book journeys to the early 1920s when everyday Americans invented the idea of a road that would spread fraternity, democracy, and prosperity across the hemisphere. It looks at the commercial and geopolitical interests that shaped the highway—often with little concern for those living along its margins—and explains why the road became an escape route for millions of migrants rather than a corridor for tourists. Dr. Miller contends that the highway's troubled past points to an unresolved future, offering insights into the growing costs of continuing down well-worn paths. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fred S. Naiden, professor emeritus of history of at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an authority on the ancient world. In the 1980s in New York City, however, he was New York City Transit Authority Employee number 4046. He cleaned subway platforms and restrooms, drove subways and locomotives, and belonged to Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. All of these experiences inform his book, Railroaded: A Motorman's Story of the New York City Subway (Rutgers UP, 2026), published by Rutgers University Press. The book covers his work, his life in New York before gentrification, and how the subway system is embedded in the city's history. Robert W. Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York City History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. His books include Transit Talk: New York's Bus and Subway Workers Tell their Stories (New York Transit Museum/Rutgers University, 1997). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In his new book, Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing (Cambridge UP, 2026), Fabio Lanza examines the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. This first full-length history in English of China's urban communes shows how universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal canteens and nurseries, and women's liberation, were intended to transform modern urban life along socialist lines. Urban Revolution writes a new history of the socialist everyday by showing how urban residents, and women in particular, struggled to enact a radical change in their lives. Lanza argues that this transformation of everyday life must be taken seriously, but that ultimately the failure of urban collectivization reveals the most crucial contradictions of the socialist revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked its 60th anniversary. Created amid the optimism and urgency of the civil rights era, HUD embodied a bipartisan commitment to building stronger, more integrated, and equitable cities. How did that vision unfold alongside the music, culture, and politics that shaped urban life? Street Level, a special audio documentary episode of Soundscapes NYC, explores the intertwined histories of urban policy, housing, and popular culture in the years following HUD's establishment. Through archival recordings, immersive sound design, and music drawn from the neighborhoods most affected by federal housing decisions, the documentary traces how government policies shaped city life—and how residents responded through creativity, resilience, and community. Featuring insights from historian and author Bench Ansfield, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Born In Flames, senior career HUD staff members Kent Watkins and John Finch, and public history scholar Kristin Sylvian, Street Level connects policy decisions to lived experience, revealing how federal housing initiatives shaped the urban landscape—and how music and culture helped sustain joy, identity, and perseverance when city life grew more difficult. Part history, part cultural exploration, and part sonic journey, Street Level offers a powerful new perspective on the forces that have shaped America's cities. HOST/PRODUCER: Ryan Purcell WRITER/PRODUCER: Shelagh Little Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong's historic Japanese community received the attention it deserves through Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024). In this compelling book, Dr Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen guide readers into the Meiji era, reconstructing history through the lives of ordinary people whose stories have long been overlooked. During our interview, Yoshio explained her desire to place this research within a broader East-West framework, a cross-cultural perspective reflected in her own collaboration and long-term friendship with Georgina. Perhaps the book's most moving aspect is the authors' compassion for Kiya Saki, a karayuki-san (sex worker) from Nagasaki who migrated to Hong Kong and later died by suicide. Yoshiko and Georgina spoke movingly about discovering her story. Like Saki, both have experienced life far from home and understand the challenges of building a life as a sojourner. Her tragic fate inspired them to investigate the lives of early Japanese residents through the meticulous study of 470 graves in Happy Valley. Beyond individual tragedies, the book reveals a diaspora divided by deep social tensions. While the Meiji state sought to project the image of a modern, civilised nation, the Japanese community in Hong Kong was effectively a ‘community of two halves'. Elite business figures, including Mitsubishi managers, existed alongside marginalised karayuki-san and boarding-house operators. Yet from this division emerged a remarkable story of solidarity. Through institutions, wealthier members of the community funded healthcare, financial assistance, and dignified burials for those in need. Driven by the necessity of mutual support in a foreign colonial port, they transformed a fragmented group of migrants into a resilient and organised community. This dynamic resonates with Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, which views the cemetery as a counter-site where distinctions of class, gender, and status dissolve. The Meiji graves vividly illustrate this reality. In death, social divisions that shaped everyday life become impossible to conceal: the graves of marginalised karayuki-san lie alongside those of the community's elite. Together, they offer a unique window into a history shaped by colonialism, human trafficking, global trade, and Japan's transformation into a world power. Richly narrated and grounded in extensive archival research, Meiji Graves in Happy Valley fills an important gap in the histories of both Hong Kong and Japan. By recovering the experiences of ordinary migrants, merchants, workers and sojourners, it reveals the human stories behind larger processes of migration, empire, and modernisation, offering a fresh perspective on the intertwined histories of Hong Kong and Japan. Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong. Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. Born in England, she grew up in Switzerland and has called Hong Kong home since 1990. Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country's Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026) explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South. David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.  This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026), Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity. Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University. He previously taught at Wesleyan University and received his PhD with distinction from DePaul University and BA from Cornell University. He is a Mellon Mays fellow and the recipient of a Mellon Career Enhancement Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on the intersections of Latin American, Caribbean, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Home to 25 million people, Shanghai is the most populous and wealthiest city in China. A meeting point between China and the wider world, the city has become the beating heart of Chinese capitalism, a place of initiative, confidence, and forward thinking. It is a city of stark contradictions, suffused with both extreme wealth and poverty, luxury living, and a highly organised criminal underworld. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Michael Dillon explores the full history of Shanghai, from its origins as a small fishing village to the bustling financial hub of today. The city has been central to some of the most turbulent events in China's modern history, from the British and French colonial concessions of the nineteenth century, to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party and its vital role in Chinese economics and politics today. Shanghai is a fascinating portrait of China's most dynamic city—and explores its future role in the country's development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (Routledge, 2024) explores the built inheritance of colonialism and considers how architects, heritage practitioners, students, communities, and activists might narrate, care for, transform, or challenge them today. Awarded the SAHGB's Colvin Medal in 2025, the book draws on a variety of authors to combine historical context with thematically organised case studies across urban and architectural scales. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume calls the “unfinished revolutions” of the Empire State. In sixteen essays by a varied cast of authors, the book explores efforts to achieve what the editor describes as the full promise of the revolution. Central to the book are ordinary New Yorkers who faced great challenges, such as the Oneida who tried to maintain sovereignty in the era of the American Revolution, women winning the vote, and African American soldiers who served in the United States Army in World War I. Together, Dearstyne writes, they tell a story of “the two-and-a-half century struggle to realize the Revolution's ideals and bring increased freedom and opportunities to marginalized populations.” Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State's History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era. Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. rwsnyder@rutgers.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region's geography. From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Dr. Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized. Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices