New Books in Urban Studies

Despite the abundance of retirement communities in the US, none compare to The Villages in Central Florida. Home to nearly 150,000 residents and spanning an area larger than Manhattan, it is the world's largest retirement community and the only one that can be considered a city for older adults. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 residents and two months of participant observations, this captivating and insightful book Seniorland: Aging In A Retirement Metropolis (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the aging experience in The Villages. It explores why people move there, their perceptions of its rapid growth, changes in their daily activities upon moving and over time, social involvement and leisure constraints, and their sense of identity and community. In doing so, this book unveils how The Villages' unique characteristics profoundly impact residents' well-being and offers a glance into the future of old age.
Host: Renee Garfinkel
Guest: Galit Nimrod

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On May 3, 1887, an earthquake struck near the U.S.-Mexico border. Forty-three people died in Bavispe, Mexico; sixty miles north in Arizona, buildings swayed and a few collapsed, but no one was killed. Today, every person in southern Arizona lives with the underground aftermath of this earthquake: a drained aquifer.
The estimated 7.4 magnitude earthquake created a sixty-two-mile rupture, the longest known surface rupture by a normal fault. The Quake That Drained the Desert (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) by Mary Elizabeth Reynolds tells the story of the men who investigated the earthquake: a doctor and photographer from Tombstone and an engineer from Mexico. Reynolds retells the terror of the survivors while exploring the ways the earthquake continues to shape water use and legacies in the greater Southwest.
In this rigorous and gripping narrative, Reynolds unearths the aftermath of the quake, showing how it dramatically altered aquifers in southern Arizona and changed rivers that ensured the prosperity of two Mormon communities in southern Arizona and Mexico. With an eye to the present, this book asks us to consider how this underexamined quake marked the beginning of the water crisis in the region today, compacted by a century of groundwater pumping for agriculture, mining, and urban uses. As local governments and nonprofit organizations on both sides of the border now work to restore streams for wildlife habitat and flood control, they also hope to preserve water supplies for future generations.
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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joel Dinerstein's The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (SUNY Press, 2026) is a tragicomic memoir of a dysfunctional, working-class Brooklyn Jewish family that illuminates both the vitality of urban life in the twentieth century and the social turmoil of white flight. As a child of immigrants born to older parents, Dinerstein has a unique perspective on four generations--from his grandparents escaping Russia's pogroms to his parents' embattled marriage to his older Boomer siblings (split between feminist and Republican politics) to his own hippie hopes. As a white teenager in majority Black public schools, Dinerstein's firsthand experience led to his academic career as a scholar of race and music. Yet his family fits no paradigm of Jewish success due to a father with rage and gambling problems, resulting in the four siblings escaping early to the Brooklyn streets. As a family growing up with a diasporic identity, the Dinersteins provide a primer of ethnic Jewish culture through iconic scenes: a selfish Seder, a chaotic Bar Mitzvah, a videotaped bris, an allergy attack at Dachau, a staring contest with the Rebbe. Most of all, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews is a chronicle of lost worlds.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For those concerned with how city hall can shape the look and feel of a neighborhood, the mere mention of zoning may invite denunciation of zoning practices that contributed substantially to the housing crisis and so limited neighborhood development that you have to get in your car to pick up a quart of milk.
In her readable Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton, 2024), Sara Bronin, the Freda Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University, points out if you want to put up a single-family house of around 2,500 square feet, then at a minimum you may be required to purchase a 43,350 square foot (one acre) lot on which you but nobody else can build. No wonder we have a housing shortage. And after you move in, you will likely find yourself living in a neighborhood zoned “residential,” that is without stores or businesses within walking distance. So it will be necessary to own a car for shopping and just about everything else.
In this conversation and in Key to the City, Professor Bronin suggests addressing the housing shortage by amending local zoning to make it possible to build several houses per acre. Then too neighborhoods currently zoned “residential” might re-designated for “mixed uses” so that one might walk to stores and restaurants. But Bronin cautions that however inviting the notion of strolling over to the grocery, café or bookstore, how would you feel if a gas station, used car lot or strip joint opened in your neighborhood?
By no means confined to the ivory tower, Professor Bronin, who served for seven years on Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission, recognizes that the underlying purpose of zoning––to protect the homeowner from unwanted intrusions––remains valid. And after showing how Hartford, Minneapolis, Tucson, and Baltimore went about revising their zoning ordinances, she concludes that zoning remains an essential tool for developing decent neighborhoods. She then implicitly invites us to take a walk around the block to consider what might be done to make our neighborhood all the better. 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As affordability crises once limited to coastal cities have spread across the broader United States, the history of home and land ownership has never been more relevant. In Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner (Princeton University Press, September 2026), Dr. Joshua Specht traces how ownership has challenged the nation’s politics and promise from the founding to the present day.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.