New Books in Urban Studies

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Dr. Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren’t only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.
But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.
The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Dr. Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.

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 this episode, we speak with Dr. Mehmet Çelik about his new book, Empire and Nation in the City: Rusçuk from Ottoman Rule to Bulgarian Statehood, published by Syracuse University Press in 2026.
The book tells the story of Rusçuk — known today as Ruse, in northern Bulgaria — a cosmopolitan port city on the Danube that, within the span of just fifteen years, passed through three entirely different political systems: a modernized Ottoman provincial administration, a Russian military provisional government, and a newly independent Bulgarian national state. Through this one city, Çelik offers a striking new account of how empires end and nations begin — and how much continuity lies beneath the surface of what looks like rupture.
At the heart of the book is the Tanzimat reform era, when Governor Midhat Pasha turned Rusçuk into a laboratory of Ottoman modernization. The city became home to the first provincial municipality in Ottoman history, the first agricultural credit cooperatives, a bilingual newspaper, secular mixed schools, and elected councils in which Muslim and Bulgarian Christian representatives sat side by side. Çelik shows that the Ottoman Empire, at its most ambitious, offered Bulgarians a genuine political alternative to nationalism — and that many took it, among them the chorbaci, the Bulgarian Christian notables who invested in and co-governed the Ottoman system, and who have been largely written out of Bulgarian national memory ever since.
When Russia invaded in 1877–78, Rusçuk surrendered peacefully — a telling sign of how deeply the city's diverse population had been woven into the Ottoman fabric. What followed was equally surprising: the Russian provisional government preserved the Ottoman institutional framework almost entirely, relabeling its councils and offices rather than dismantling them. The Bulgarian national government that came next did much the same, adopting Ottoman tools of minority management — including the military exemption tax and millet-style community administration — at the very moment it was defining itself in opposition to the Ottoman past.
Çelik also uncovers a remarkable story of religious conversion under Bulgarian rule: while some Muslims and Catholics converted pragmatically to Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity to secure the rights of the dominant group, Protestant conversion driven by the long-standing American Methodist Episcopal mission quietly gained new ground. In one of the book's most unexpected findings, a small community of Orthodox Bulgarians, Muslim Turks, Jews, and Armenians formed a lasting bond through their shared Protestant identity.
Drawing on Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, British, French, and Austrian archives — as well as prison registers, consular reports, missionary records, and the bilingual provincial newspaper Tuna/Dunav — Çelik bridges two historiographies that rarely speak to each other. Ottoman historians tend to stop at 1877; Bulgarian historians tend to start there. Empire and Nation in the City insists on the continuity that both fields have missed.

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Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In her compelling and textured history, Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles, Dr. Isabela Seong Leong Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents.

In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives.

Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship. She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more.

Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute.

What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more.
Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.
Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.
This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute.

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