Skip to main content

Are Urban Planners Partly to Blame for Gentrification?

Tanner Howard CityLab
The world’s real estate is worth an estimated $217 trillion, making up more than 60 percent of global assets. Even though three-quarters of that amount is tied up in housing, it hasn’t translated to secure shelter or prosperity for many...

The Cities Refugees Saved

Tanvi Misra CityLab
In the cities where the most refugees per capita were settled since 2005, newcomers helped stem or reverse population loss. Donald Trump lowered the maximum number of refugees it takes in for the third year in a row—to 30,000, lowest in three decade

Unions and the Gig-Economy: The Case of AirBnB

Steven Tufts Socialist Project
The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions for workers. Do emerging ‘sharing-economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb mark a significant shift in production and distribution systems? Are they emancipatory or exploitive?

The Rebellion in Newark

Junius Williams New Jersey Monthly
In the summer of 1967, the streets of Newark exploded in violence. Here is a first-hand account of the tragic events that changed the city, and the country forever. Newark’s population is still exceedingly low income. Crime, gang warfare, drugs, joblessness and failing schools are still facts of life in some Newark neighborhoods. But the cultures of many ethnic groups continue to lift the spirit of its many peoples. Increasingly, Newark is a good place to call home.

books

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: On Locking up Our Own

Adam Shatz London Review of Books
If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.

books

Matthew Desmond's `Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City'

Barbara Ehrenreich New York Times Book Review
Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.
Subscribe to urban cities