New Books in Urban Studies

Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods—just seven train stops apart—will shape their futures and help determine how long they live. One will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday. The other will die before sixty-five.

This is the death gap: lives lost too soon. Crossing the Gap: Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City (U Chicago Press, 2026) asks how a city with world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of premature death—and tells the story of the people fighting to end it.

In his landmark book The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty shorten lives. He moves beyond diagnosis in Crossing the Gap to explore what happens when a major medical center joins forces with pastors, community organizers, residents, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to redefine what a hospital owes its neighbors. Part medical memoir and part urban chronicle, Crossing the Gap follows groundbreaking initiatives such as West Side United and the Sankofa Wellness Village as they confront decades of disinvestment and work to build healthier communities.

Through stories of collaboration, courage, conflict, and community leadership, Ansell shows how neighborhood voices, rigorous data, and moral imagination can transform health systems from bystanders into partners for change—not just in one city but throughout the nation.

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Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood changes are observed. But what does gentrification sound like?
In Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, (Oxford UP, 2025), author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes.
Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation’s capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.​
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is an assistant professor in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound and power. Her first book, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in the nation's capital. Allie is the director of the Black Sound Lab, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.

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In this episode, James Farrer of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective and Alejandra Dorado-Vinay talk about their introduction to the new special section on migrant foodways and culinary mobilities in Japan. Taking listeners into the neighborhoods of superdiverse Tokyo through everyday experiences of markets, restaurants, and eating out in the street, they discuss how histories of power shape migrant foodways, and how migrants in Japan shape its local culture. Their conversation connects taste, fashion, and power in Japan’s vibrant migrant food scene, shedding light on the culinary imports of curry and ramen, the experience of Peruvian migration, and a cosmopolitan landscape of Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Brazilian, and East African and West African restaurants in a place where migrant foodways can often be largely invisible. The two-part special section in the Fall and Winter 2026 issues of Gastronomica brings together 10 articles on the movement of people, food, and ideas across borders with research on eateries, markets, community gardens, social media, school meals, and holiday rituals in Japan.
Listeners can find "Introduction to Migrant Foodways and Culinary Mobilities in Japan" by James Farrer and Alejandra Dorado-Vinay, and their co-written follow-up piece, “Culinary Regimes: The Political Economy of Foreign Food in Tokyo” in Gastronomica (issues 26.3 and 26.4).
James Farrer is a professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo and a member of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica. He has published numerous books and articles on urban life, globalization, and cuisine and is currently at work on a comparative study of migrant-run restaurants in Japan and Germany.
Alejandra Dorado-Vinay is completing a PhD in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, where her work focuses on Mexican and Peruvian food in Japan. Previously, as a student at El Colegio de México, she conducted research on the history of Japanese restaurants in Mexico City. Beyond her academic work, she also has experience in food and beverage consulting in Japan.
Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies is published by the University of California Press. Quarterly issues are available in print and online.
Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the latest episodes.

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Asia's colonial trade, commerce, and enterprise pivoted on five cities- Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta, and Bombay. Today, among these, only Calcutta no longer plays a significant role in the Asian or global economy. Why? Agents of Inertia: Business, Urban Crisis, and Economic Decline in Twentieth-Century Calcutta (Cambridge UP, 2026) answers this question by investigating how Calcutta's British and Indian businesses have engaged with the city's infrastructural and economic challenges. It throws up a startling result: through the first seven decades of twentieth century, Calcutta's businesses, in contrast to their counterparts elsewhere, staunchly resisted several measures that intended to update and improve the city's infrastructure. It is this resistance, Agents of Inertia argues, that led to Calcutta's postcolonial urban crisis and contributed to capital- flight and economic decline. One of the first full-length monographs on Calcutta's postcolonial urban-economic decline, it shows how big businesses not only make but can also break a city's fortunes.

Gaurav C. Garg is a historian of modern South Asia, cities, mountains, and international development at Ashoka University, Delhi NCR.

Soumyadeep Guha is a fifth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. His prospective dissertation questions are on the pre-history of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Eastern India.

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In 2018, Gyula Remes died in the underpass at Westminster tube station, just steps from the Houses of Parliament and luxury developments worth millions. How could this happen in one of the richest cities on Earth?
Episode one introduces Gyula and the world he died in: a Westminster plagued by the twin crises of homelessness and empty homes. In a London borough where extreme wealth exists alongside extreme poverty, Kojo traces the circumstances of Gyula’s death and a troubling question emerges.
What begins as a local tragedy opens the door to a much larger system, which we open onto a strange land called ‘offshore’.
Kojo Karam is a Professor in Law and Political Economy at the School of Law at Loughborough University.

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