New Books in Urban Studies

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.
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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).
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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.
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Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography.

From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Dr. Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized.

Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.

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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Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume calls the “unfinished revolutions” of the Empire State. In sixteen essays by a varied cast of authors, the book explores efforts to achieve what the editor describes as the full promise of the revolution. Central to the book are ordinary New Yorkers who faced great challenges, such as the Oneida who tried to maintain sovereignty in the era of the American Revolution, women winning the vote, and African American soldiers who served in the United States Army in World War I. Together, Dearstyne writes, they tell a story of “the two-and-a-half century struggle to realize the Revolution’s ideals and bring increased freedom and opportunities to marginalized populations.”

Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era.

Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. rwsnyder@rutgers.edu
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