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Stational liturgy and the minority right to the city City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-08-13 Christopher Sheklian
Armenian Apostolic Christians in Istanbul implicitly assert their “right to the city” through the liturgical itinerary that moves around the megalopolis of Istanbul. Though the right to the city has been taken up in a plethora of ways, its applicability to religion and religious practices is underexplored. While many Armenians in the Republic of Turkey explicitly take up the language of rights, the
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The formation of a “model city in the Anatolian steppes”: Leapfrogging effects of spatial fix in Eskişehir, Turkey City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-07-13 Cansu Civelek
The prevalence of neoliberalism has produced varied effects on cities ranging from rapid growth to gradual disempowerment. Instead of considering neoliberal urbanization as a fixed, predetermined process, I discuss the possibility of leapfrogging in urban repositioning. Particularly, I examine Eskişehir's repositioning process in response to disempowerment, placing particular emphasis on the “spatial
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Scarcity amid abundance: Navigating the waters of neoliberal austerity in Detroit City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-22 Thomas Abowd
This article explores water politics, neoliberal austerity measures, and racial capitalism in contemporary Detroit. I detail how a city campaign of mass residential water shutoffs, begun in 2014 and effecting tens of thousands of Detroit households, has served as a weapon against poor communities of color to produce economic outcomes favorable to corporate creditors and political elites. I argue that
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Sensing insecurity as skill: Urban violence and the politics of sensorial enskilment City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Alana Osbourne, Carolina M. Frossard
This special issue departs from the premise that the sensible dimensions of urban (in)security shape lived and embodied experiences of the city in ways that reflect and affect social and spatial forms of control, belonging, and inequality. As visceral as they may seem, we also contend that these sensorial registers of (in)security are far from given: they are learned and taught, whether consciously
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Seeing like police: Surveillant practices and scopic skills in Recife, Brazil City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Carolina M. Frossard
Drawing on public–private circuits for urban surveillance in Recife, Brazil, this article unpacks how camera operators and ordinary residents are sensorially attuned to what constitutes a threat to urban order, from the perspective of state security governance. Through the notion of sensory enskilment, the piece delves into how surveillant civilians learn to distinguish such threats in digitally mediated
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Prosthetic species: Security dogs and the more-than-human sensing of urban danger City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Rivke Jaffe
Focusing on human–dog relations, this article develops a more-than-human approach to the sensing of urban insecurity. Extending work on the embodied, sensory dimension of fear and other security affects, it centers the role of non-human, canine bodies in processes of risk assessment. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how a range of city dwellers learn to sense danger with and through
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Tuning into HEAT: Thermoceptive enskilment and insecurity City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Alana Osbourne
In this article, I address how discernments of alterity as insecurity are intimately connected to bodily perceptions and cultural elaborations of heat. Focusing on the interplay of temperature and danger, I look at the role of thermoception—as sensation, as ambient quality, as idiom, and as technology—in experiences and retellings of (in)security. These are themes I explore in relation to and beyond
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Introduction: Perceiving and conceiving the Asian city1 City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Pablo Holwitt
Asian cities are the setting of a vast agglomeration of transportation devices and services. These means of transport are inseparable from distinct concepts and images of the city. Interventions into modes of urban transport are inspired by visions for the future of urban life and quotidian practices of traversing urban space foster particular experiences that produce distinct ideas about the city
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Fruit production and exploited labor in northern Italy: Redefining urban responsibility toward the agrarian ground City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Francesca Uleri, Franca Zadra, Alessandra Piccoli, Daniel J. Durán Sandoval, Susanne Elsen
Immigrants play a crucial role in the development of capital-intensive, industrialized agriculture and often find themselves living in derelict, stigmatized neighborhoods where they become not only objects of fear and exclusion but also objects of racketeering, exploitation, and profit-making dynamics. Global trends and migration flows trigger new concerns among policymakers who realize that food production
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Staging the New City: Urban spectacles and the ecological origins of Nayib Bukele's authoritarian populism City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Julio Gutiérrez
This paper analyzes the connections between real estate speculation and authoritarian populism in El Salvador. Focusing on president Nayib Bukele's term as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán (2012–2015), I examine the role speculative urbanism played in the crafting of his profile as a promising politician in the early years of his career. I trace how Bukele instrumentalized the ecosystem of Nuevo Cuscatlán's
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Reciprocal spaces: The socio-material life of balconies in urban Egypt City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Farha Ghannam
“Reciprocal spaces,” such as windows and balconies, connect the vertical and the horizontal, enable the flow of meanings and feelings, and join with other material artifacts to unite emotionally and socially those who are spatially distant, and socially and emotionally distance those who are spatially proximate. Cairo's balconies reveal that reciprocal spaces allow the gaze to be reoriented, the meaning
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Navigating danger through nuisance: Racialized urban fears, gentrification, and sensory enskilment in Amsterdam City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Elisa Fiore
In this article, I employ the notion of sensory enskilment to investigate the embodied relations through which White Dutch middle-class residents of the Indische Buurt, a rapidly gentrifying multicultural neighborhood in the east of Amsterdam, learn to tune in to sensory nuisance to discern safe and unsafe bodies and places in their surroundings. The analysis involves examining those institutional
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Displacement through the Commons: Community and Spatial Order in Bangkok City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Hayden Shelby, Trude Renwick
This article investigates the relationship of discourses around community to larger urban processes of development and displacement in Bangkok, Thailand. It focuses on two sites located along a major commercial corridor. The first, undergoing a process of relocation that involves establishing collective land tenure, goes by the Thai term for community, chumchon, though architects and planners frequently
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The urban poor and everyday states in an Indian metropolis City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-19 Bhawani Buswala
This article examines an incident of fire in a squatter settlement in Delhi to understand the interaction between the urban poor and the state. Following the incident, the Delhi government undertook different welfare measures for the affected residents. These included immediate relief in the form of temporary tents for the families, a proposal to build proper houses for them, and compensation checks
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Of cebras and citizens: Kinesthetic politics in Bolivia’s transport cities City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-19 Susan Helen Ellison
Urban planners and foreign donors have long agonized over how politics, movement, and transportation infrastructure collide in the conjoined cities of El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. As displaced tin and silver miners migrated to El Alto in droves during the 1980s and 1990s, they banked on that transportation sector to remake their lives, investing their severance packages in the lumbering “Micro” buses
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On how to live while being thrown away: Black people who use drugs and the politics of anti-disposability, North Philadelphia, circa 2007 to 2010 City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot
Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork (2007–2010) in North Central Philadelphia with homeless and transiently-housed Black people who use drugs, this article explores the politics of mutual aid and community survival during a period of city-sponsored redevelopment. Drawing on Black feminist theory, I show how this community responded to and resisted their marginalization from urban space and Philadelphia
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Afterword: Moving Along City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Rashmi Sadana
In Kevin Lynch's (1960) classic formulation of the image of the city, he asks us to think about urban environments as a series of topographic registers on the landscape, from monuments to mountains, paths to edges, nodes, and junctions. There is a human element to this vision, with its concentrations and convergences in social space; think of the hangout value of a street corner or how the cut of a
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City Rhythms: Urban Mobility Relations in Ho Chi Minh City City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Catherine Earl
Moving beyond a rhythmanalysis approach to banal mobilities and diurnal journey making – commuting, visiting, shopping, leisure – this paper explores how place-dependent forms of transport shape the feel and flow of the city. Theorizing the city as polyrhythmic reveals multiple traces of local/global and past/present in the socio-historically situatedness of urban mobilities. Based on 20 months of
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Neither dead nor alive: Participatory slum governance as a zombie program City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Sven da Silva, Martijn Koster, Pieter de Vries
This article focuses on PREZEIS, an internationally acclaimed participatory slum governance program in Recife, Brazil. PREZEIS was implemented in 1987 and emerged out of a strong popular movement that resisted forced evictions of squatter settlements under the military regime (1964–1985). To date, however, its main objectives—upgrading slums and regularizing land rights—have not been achieved, and
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Making paths and doing bazaar: Rhythms and techniques of walking-as-dwelling City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Samprati Pani
This article posits the concept of “walking-as-dwelling” as a critical analytical frame to counter the dominant Western conceptualization of walking as an event or novel experience that is set apart from ordinary life. Walking-as-dwelling refers to how walking is bound with routines of work, domesticity, and leisure, through which people inhabit and make places. Drawing attention to the situatedness
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Navigating precarity in everyday (sub)urban space in Helsinki, Finland City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Mia Jaatsi, Päivi Kymäläinen
This article addresses the everyday forms of urban precarity, which is under-studied in the context of Finnish cities. We examine how urban precarity becomes lived, practiced, and resisted in the case of a suburban open-air shopping center in Helsinki, Finland. Referring to precarity as a socio-spatial condition that reveals the precariousness of urban people and places, this study discovered everyday
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The Collective Image of the City: Informal Taxis and the Production of Vernacular Toponyms in Tashkent, Uzbekistan City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Nikolaos Olma
Decades of politically motivated place renaming have prompted the population of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, to adopt a bottom-up vernacular toponymic register, wherein locations are indicated in relation to points of reference known as orientiry. Orientiry take cues from the built environment and are generated through the population's affective pluritemporal engagements with the city. Accordingly
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Enforcing Trust: Race, gender, and the policing of citizenship in Rio de Janeiro City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Marta-Laura Haynes
Policing in Rio de Janeiro is notorious for its brutality. For Unidades da Policía Pacificadora (UPP), a proximity policing program marked by less overt violence, the forging of trust became a strategy for reshaping the image of police and favelas. Yet, this policing model reproduced racial and gender bias that was persistent in broader Brazilian society where trust is coded as white and female while
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Fast Futures and Everyday Endurance: Mobility, Temporality, and Cycle-Rickshaws in Dhaka City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Annemiek Prins
This article takes the cycle-rickshaw industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as a point of departure for examining the discrepancy between the everyday rhythms and embodied realities of Dhaka traffic and the idealized image of mobility that drives imaginations of the urban future. The cycle-rickshaw is often excluded from such imaginations, as the vehicle is not only blamed for obstructing the flow of traffic
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Guarding the Urban Elite: Hospitality Security in São Paulo City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Erika Robb Larkins, Susana Durão
In the past decade, Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, has witnessed an exponential growth in private security. In this article, we contribute to understandings of how security shapes urban life by focusing on what we call hospitality security, which takes place in elite spaces of residence and leisure such as high-end neighborhoods, gated communities, and shopping malls. Drawing on long-term ethnographic
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In, Of, and For the City: Acknowledging the 2022 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 David Boarder Giles
For as long as I have been writing anthropology, Anthony Leeds Prize honorees have been among my compass points. When A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People was just a sketch in my grad school notebooks, they helped me imagine the “field” for an ethnography of the crabgrass-like phenomenon that is Food Not Bombs (FNB), a transnational web of anarchist soup kitchens that recover discarded food (via donation
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The U.S.-Mexico border as a model for social-cultural theory: A brief discussion City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Josiah Heyman
The US–Mexico border has influenced social-cultural theory by drawing attention to hybrids that stand apart from supposedly cohesive wholes. This point, albeit important, does not exhaust the lessons to be learned from the US–Mexico border region. It also displays highly unequal power relations. Adjacent, interactive, but profoundly asymmetrical border city pairs are key sites for analyzing unequal
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“Joy”: Murals and the Failure of Post-politics After the Morandi Bridge Collapse City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-01-15 Emanuela Guano
In 2018, the Morandi bridge collapsed, killing 43 people and displacing 600 from their homes in Genoa's postindustrial outskirts. Almost entirely isolated after the collapse, Certosa bore much of the brunt of the disaster. This is when Genoa's conservative administration launched On the Wall, a street art project meant to assuage residents’ anger; the theme chosen for the murals was “joy.” Drawing
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Un-Fare: “Local” Share-Auto Rickshaw Drivers and the Work of Belonging in the Midst of Urban Change in India's “IT Capital” City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Jananie Kalyanaraman
In Bengaluru, India's “IT capital,” global capital and processes of world city-making valorize specific kinds of work and workers as “formal” while categorizing others as “informal,” “chaotic” and “unregulated.” This article draws attention to the work of share-auto rickshaw driving among local men from formerly farmland-owning households in a rapidly urbanizing pocket in peripheral Bengaluru. Why
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Staging Arts in the Historic City: Development Funding, Social Media Images, and Tunisia's Contemporary Public Art Scene City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Justin Malachowski
In this paper, I examine how public art projects in the Medina of Tunis “stay in the game,” a reference to the (social) media management strategies that projects pursue to attract and keep funding. Following the 2011 “Arab Spring,” revolution, known locally as the thawra, a vibrant public art scene has formed centered in the Medina of Tunis, the highly visible but economically marginalized historic
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A Heterotopology of Urban Margins: Publicness in the Space of the City City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-08-17 Yvonne Wallace, Meg Stalcup
Urban marginality is generally considered through the lens of exclusion. Policing and public policies, underpinned by private NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) attitudes and actions, aim to remove marginalized individuals from urban spaces. Yet they remain and are visible. As such, individuals across the urban margins share in publicness, which is the connection between strangers unique to cities borne from
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What is Critical About Critical Urban Anthropology? City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Suzanne Scheld
In 2021, the Society for Urban, National, Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA), a section of the American Anthropological Association, changed its name to Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA). This essay addresses the question “What is Critical About Critical Urban Anthropology?” by reflecting on problematic assumptions about African cities that are perpetuated over time and the need
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Chasing World‐Class Urbanism: Global Policy versus Everyday Survival in Buenos AiresJacobLedermanMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 280 pp. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-03-08 Sarah Muir
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Concrete Blocks, Bollards, and Ha-ha Walls: How Rationales of the Security Industry Shape Our Cities City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-03-08 Stine Ilum
Security measures take up more and more space in our cities. In parallel, the security industry is growing. To understand these developments, we must take a step back and unfold the rationales and theories that lie behind such security measures and their materiality, specifically in the security industry. This article uses the case of the newly developed counterterrorism industry in Copenhagen to unpack
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Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary YucatánMatildeCórdoba AzcárateBerkeley: University of California Press, 2020, 316 pp. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 Zhiyi Wang
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Bombay BrokersLisaBjörkman (ed.), Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 472 pp. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 Andrew McDowell
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What is Critical—and Anthropological—about Critical Urban Anthropology? City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Christina Schwenkel
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Toward a Certain Kind of Critical Urban Anthropology City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 John L. Jackson
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CUAA: We Have Always Been Critical Engaged Urbanists City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Setha Low
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Dragging Anthropology Towards a Just and Egalitarian Future City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Jeff Maskovsky
I propose a dialogue between new abolitionist approaches and black feminist theory on the one hand and anticapitalist critical urban social theory on the other. This dialogue has great potential to advance approaches that unhide the death dealing logics that shape city-making and also to identify and amplify the emancipatory potentialities and forms of cultural, social, economic, and political improvisation
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The Critical as an Intellectual Space City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Matilde Córdoba Azcárate
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Anthony Leeds Prize for Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip‐Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Maurice Rafael Magaña
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Anthropology at the Ends of the Lines City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Rashmi Sadana
I have been thinking about what a critical urban anthropology does and means for the last ten years or so, as I have been researching Delhi’s new and massive urban rail system. The research is over, the book – The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (2022) – is out, but I am realizing more and more that this work has re-wired my brain in terms of how I think
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Blaming Kehl: Muslim Turkish Men and their Moral Journey in the Franco-German Borderland City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2022-01-09 Oğuz Alyanak
Geographical space is more than a Cartesian plane where actors move across coordinates. It has a moral weight that renders each move subject to moral discourse. Yet, rarely does this premise prevent people from exploring spaces that are associated with anything wrong or bad. In fact, we continue to find people in places where they should not be, and doing things that are not just communally shunned
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Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics in Los Angeles City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Sayd Randle
In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling (“greywater”) systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city’s water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city’s water
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Labour Migration and Dislocation in India’s Silicon Valley City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-11-14 Rebecca Bowers
The migrant families who build India’s cities do so to meet practical and ritual aspirations rooted in the village, undergoing spatial and temporal fragmentation to maintain rural longevity and the possibilities of ritual time. This article contributes an alternative position to linear-framed presumptions of migration and urbanity, illustrating instead how everyday experiences of dislocation can be
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Walking a Fine Line: The Struggle for Parent Advocacy in the NYC Child Welfare System☆ City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-11-09 Viola Castellano
This article investigates parent advocacy in the child welfare system amongst families living in low-income and racialized urban areas, those most impacted by this system. Drawing from my fieldwork experience at the community-based organization Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in East Harlem, New York, I interrogate the political trajectory of the organization, its practices, and its purpose
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Idol Ads in the Seoul Metro: K-pop Fandom, Appropriation of Subway Space, and the Right to the City City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-29 Olga Fedorenko
In the 2010s, a new phenomenon was spotted in the Seoul Metro. K-pop fans began adorning subway stations with large ads congratulating their heroes—so-called K-pop idols—on their birthdays and other anniversaries. Not only have these fandom-produced ads transformed the visual landscape of the Seoul Metro, they also invited novel spatial practices when fans, primarily young women, toured the ads to
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Concrete Dreams: Practice, Value, and Built Environments in Post‐Crisis Buenos AiresNicholasD'AvellaDurham: Duke University Press, 2019, 312 pp. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Emanuela Guano
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Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in BeirutGhassanMoussawi, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020, 210 pp. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Kristin V. Monroe
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The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai's Edge. MinhuaLing, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020, 288 pp. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Lihong Shi
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Ho Chi Minh City during the fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam. City & Society (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-22 Rachel Tough