New Books in Urban Studies

The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began much earlier than most would imagine. Yet, it is only now that the historic Japanese community in Hong Kong is receiving the profound attention it deserves, thanks to a captivating new book: Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024). Its authors, Dr. Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen, take us on a journey into the Meiji era, unrolling a historical scroll woven entirely from the lives of ordinary people. The book even features encounters with literary giants like Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, whose enduring fame makes their historical connections to the city impossible to ignore.

During our interview, Yoshiko discussed her intention to frame this research within a unique historical matrix connecting East and West, a cross-cultural dynamic that is beautifully mirrored in her own collaborative partnership with Georgina.

Perhaps the most moving element for readers is the authors' deep compassion toward Kiya Saki, a karayuki-san (sex worker) from Nagasaki who migrated to Hong Kong, only for her life to end in tragedy and suicide. The way Yoshiko and Georgina spoke during our interview about discovering her story was incredibly touching. Like Saki, both authors understand the experience of living miles away from home, working hard to build a life as a sojourner. Saki’s tragic end stirred deep emotions at the bottom of their hearts, serving as the ultimate inspiration for them to look deeper into the lives of early Japanese residents by meticulously investigating the 470 graves in Happy Valley.

However, looking past individual tragedies reveals that the identity of this diaspora before the early 20th century was fraught with an intense internal dilemma. While the Meiji state desperately sought to project a polished, civilized image of a rising global power, the raw social reality on the ground in Hong Kong was split into a "community of two halves." The elite corporate circles—such as prominent managers of Mitsubishi—and the marginalized underclass of karayuki-san and boarding house runners existed in a state of profound social tension.

Yet, out of this very dilemma arose a powerful story of collective survival and mutual responsibility. Over time, these two disparate halves found ways to support one another through the establishment of crucial community institutions, such as the Japanese Benevolent Society and the Hong Kong Japanese Club. Driven by a deep-seated need for solidarity in a foreign colonial port, the wealthy merchant class actively funded these organizations to provide healthcare, financial relief, and dignified burials for the most vulnerable members of their diaspora. In doing so, they transformed a fractured group of sojourners into a highly organized, resilient community.

This complex social dynamic aligns perfectly with Michel Foucault’s concept of the Heterotopia, which frames the cemetery as a singular counter-site where people are brought together regardless of class, gender, or status. This democratic spatial reality is vividly reflected among the Meiji graves. A co-dependent reality that the living community often tried to obscure in life is permanently exposed in death; the marginalized karayuki-san have their graves closely laid out alongside those belonging to the highest echelons of the upper circle. This postmortem link provides a permanent window into a history shaped by colonization, human trafficking, global trade, and the geopolitical transformation of Japan from a small island nation into a global power.

Beautifully narrated and enriched with vivid archival details, Meiji Graves in Happy Valley represents a vital piece of scholarship that bridges a critical gap in the histories of both Hong Kong and Japan. Through its pages, readers are invited to witness the parallel development of these two distinct spaces, reflected entirely through the intimate, recovered stories of Hong Kong's early Japanese residents.

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

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

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