New Books in Urban Studies

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.
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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.
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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).
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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. 
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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