New Books in Urban Studies

In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets,
officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors,
they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm local
leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight. And in state
legislatures and Washington, DC, police lobbyists and union leaders
zealously uphold a bipartisan consensus against even mild reform. Yet as recently as fifty years ago, police still served at the pleasure of
democratically elected politicians, not the other way around. In Blue Power: How Police Organized to Serve and Protect Themselves (Basic Books, 2026), Stuart Schrader narrates the rise of a bottom-up movement of rank-and-file officers who lifted policing above the law.

Organizers launched their campaign in the 1960s, courting a public
backlash to urban uprisings and civil rights. City by city, county by
county, they formed unions and other organizations and won control over
working conditions, impunity from oversight, and insulation from lean
budgets. By the 2000s, this movement had triumphed nationally, shoring
up the power of the police to overrule the public interest in the name
of law and order.

Through deep archival detective work, Blue Power reveals how police forced American democracy to back the blue.

Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he is the director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of modern US history at the University of Toledo, specializing in policing and incarceration, urban studies, and social movements.
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Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market (Cornell UP, 2026) is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machine. Urban housing was a socialist benefit in China until the market reforms and privatization in the 1990s. Today, most Chinese citizens consider homeownership a necessity rather than an economic privilege. Wang analyzes the making of homeownership ideologies through "inflexible demand" (gangxu)—a concept that real estate brokers, developers, homebuyers, and the government in China use to craft homeownership as indispensable for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. The ethnography shows that gangxu helps to articulate diverse attempts to accumulate value through housing at China's urbanizing city periphery, while giving shape to a housing-based, postsocialist right to the city. Anxious Homes argues that homeownership does not necessarily engender independence but suggests further inclusion of citizens within the dominant regime of accumulation.

Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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Kate Brown, Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City (W. W. Norton, 2026) on the 300-year history of urban gardening, from feudal England to the Paris Commune, to Berlin’s green shantytowns, to contemporary Amsterdam, Chicago, and beyond. Equal parts history, memoir, and manifesto, Brown’s book weaves in her own gardening experience while exploring the political and practical, painting a picture of the necessity of self-provisioning in an increasingly chaotic world.

Highlights include:

How “tiny gardens” grew as a social practice among English peasants following the enclosure of the commons;

The politics of “tiny gardens,” including the difference between a “gardening” state and a gardeners state;

How Black “tiny gardeners” in DC’s East of the River neighborhood transformed structural racism into vegetable-powered wealth;

A short-but-scathing review of Yuvel Harari’s Sapiens;

How small changes to local ordinances in cities might allow us to reimagine a world of abundance amid contemporary fears of scarcity and instability.

Guest: Kate Brown is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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The Tenement Museum preserves and interprets the personal stories of residents of two buildings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Ninety-seven Orchard Street opened in 1863 and housed a succession of European immigrants until the double blow of the Great Depression and the impact of the 1924 Johnson Reed Act forced the landlord to evict the tenants. Down the block, 103 Orchard, built in 1888, kept its doors open throughout the twentieth century, hosting Jewish and Italian immigrants in its early years, and Holocaust refugees, Puerto Rican migrants and Chinese immigrants in its later years. This program traces how immigration law impacted the residents of these buildings, and how they carved out new lives once they arrived. Census records, newspaper articles and oral histories—with a focus on YIVO primary sources—will be used to bring the families’ situations to life and situate them in their contexts.

This lecture originally took place on June 24, 2021.
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Roads, bridges, a renewable power plant, and an electricity grid: UN peacekeepers might be unusual infrastructure builders, but they’re certainly not unambitious. Since the beginning of the UN’s peacekeeping activities after the end of World War II, the Blue Helmets have cemented streets, constructed bridges, and dug wells in conflict zones. But how did the military arm of the world’s primary diplomatic forum become involved in such activities in its quest for peace, and with what consequences? Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Silvia Danielak analyzes the turn to ever-more-complex infrastructure projects, from early road building via urban community projects to the commissioning of entire renewable power plants, in the context of an evolving understanding of peace “problems” and solutions. Tracing the global travel of policies, technologies, and expertise, Dr. Danielak investigates how the shift toward risk management, legacy, and climate security was driven by, and materialized in, conflict zones, shaping the very idea of peace.The book critically engages with the UN’s ambition to insert itself in the sustainable development of the countries it seeks to assist, arguing that we need to consider peace operations’ spatial, urban, and material ways of engagement—especially in the face of mounting climate risks. Infrastructure is poised to take a more prominent position within peace operations, but a more nuanced understanding that recognizes its opportunities, as well as its potential for violence, is required.

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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