Select Faculty Publications
The following publications are work from current Urban Studies affiliated faculty. The purpose of this page is to demonstrate the breadth of work and research interests of the department. Please reach out to faculty if you want to learn more about their research.
“We know what’s going on in our community”: A qualitative analysis identifying community assets that deter gun violence coauthored by Professor Stephane D. Andrade
Description: This study essentially shifts the focus from traditional law enforcement solutions to community-led assets-based solutions for gun violence. The goal was to understand community perspectives on the root causes of gun violence and identify local “assets” (e.g. social structure, people, or organizations) that help prevent it. We conclude that reducing community gun violence requires investments in stable housing, efforts to build social cohesion, access to mental health services, and engaging youth activities. Our findings suggest that addressing structural determinants, such as housing stability and community resources, is vital for prevention.
Departments: Africana Studies, Sociology, Urban Studies
Interboro Partners website of Professor Tobias Armborst
Description: Professor Armborst is a Principal and Co-founder of Interboro. Interboro is a WBE-certified, multi-disciplinary firm offering inventive and inclusive planning, urban design, and architectural design services. Our work is founded on good listening, keen observation, and productive community engagement. We use a participatory, place-specific approach to create consensus around complex projects ranging from buildings, parks, and open spaces to neighborhood, city, and regional plans.
Departments: Art, Urban Studies
Marching into Rome: The Gateway to the Eternal City by Professor Yvonne Elet
Description: The entrance zone to Rome has, for millennia, been the setting for entries and marches, welcomed or contested. It is a symbolic precinct, and a palimpsest of toponyms, extant or remembered, connected with Augustus, Constantine, Pope Leo X Medici, and Mussolini. Drawing on new material from private archives, this article traces the interwar development of this zone, revealing an unknown story of the synergy among several projects: the restoration of Villa Madama (Raphael’s villa and papal welcoming center for the Medici), the coeval construction of the neighboring Foro Mussolini, and the siting nearby of the Palazzo Littorio (conceived as the Fascist Party Headquarters but subsequently realized as the Foreign Ministry). Fascist planners conceived this forum as a new gateway to Rome, and a staging ground for Fascist ideology and mass spectacle.
It emerges that Raphael’s villa was a significant node of the plans; its site, form, function, and symbolism were tied to the forum, which grew to englobe the villa and the Ministry palace within a verdant park. Moreover, the appropriation of the so-called Renaissance garden as an emblem of italianità provided the context for both the creation of the villa’s gardens and the design of Mussolini’s forum—itself presented as an Italian garden, an unexplored instance of the mythologizing and manipulation of Renaissance heritage by Fascist ideologues. The development of this zone constitutes a kaleidoscopic case study for the construction of political and cultural identity through urban design and landscape. Dismembered and partially neutralized post-war, the area currently represents a challenging entanglement of memory, heritage, politics, and aesthetics. And though the function and meaning of a city gateway have fundamentally changed over time, the long history of this topography—both real and metaphysical—is ingrained in the identity of modern Rome.
Departments: Art, Environmental Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Urban Studies
The color of preservation: Black historic placemaking in New York City by Professor Brian J. Godfrey
Description: Since 1965, New York City’s Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) has listed over 37,900 buildings and sites, overwhelmingly located in 156 historic districts. While official landmark criteria have not changed, designation reports reveal shifting narratives of place and race. I examine historic placemaking in Black-identified districts, focusing on how designation rationales have evolved. Evidence comes from four predominantly Black historic districts, contextualized by comparison with similar cases. In 1967, the designation of St. Nicholas or ‘Striver’s Row’ stressed notable architectural histories while regarding race as a secondary issue. After memorializing the African Burial Ground in 1993, Black district reports increasingly included cultural histories of racial justice.
In 2011, Addisleigh Park illustrated the broadened approach, featuring the distinctive single-family homes and the Black celebrities who challenged restrictive racial covenants to live there. In 2018, another shift began with Central Harlem’s extensive report and online story map, juxtaposing the built heritage with the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights movements. This designation foreshadowed the LPC’s ‘equity framework’ of 2021, prioritizing racial inclusion and civil rights. Thus, I argue that antiracist activism has repeatedly driven LPC policy shifts toward greater social diversity in the historic places of New York City.
Departments: American Studies, Environmental Studies, Geography, Latin American and Latinx Studies, Urban Studies
What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Professor Lydia Murdoch
Description: This book examines the effects of urbanization and industrialization on child mortality and the state, with a focus on factory reform, public health, and housing.
Departments: Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, History, Urban Studies, Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies
Utopia Station curated by Professor Molly Nesbit
Description: A collective book, exhibition, seminar, web, and street project.
Departments: Art, Media Studies, Urban Studies
Small-City Dualism in the Metro Hinterland: The Racialized ‘Brooklynization’ of the Hudson Valley coauthored by Professor Leonard Nevarez
Description: This article analyzes demographic and economic changes in the Hudson Valley region over the 21st century that have emphasized amenity developments consumed by metro New York residents in smaller riverfront cities and rural towns, supported by foreign-born immigration in the larger riverfront cities (including Poughkeepsie).
Departments: Sociology, Urban Studies
Pipes, Provision, Profits, Privatization by Professor Jonah Rowen
Description: This article is a comparative history of the construction of water supply infrastructure in London, U.K., and Kingston, Jamaica.
Departments: Art, Urban Studies
Pretending the city: Cinema as urban planning tool by Professor Erica Stein
Description: Rose’s connection of the City Digital Twin and its visual logics and ideologies to the disaster film is an illuminating one, but is articulated through the intensive usage of CGI, formal and stylistic strategies, and narrative and thematic content closely affiliated with the disaster film and other subtypes of the action film genre. If we move beyond the confines of a generic exploration and instead approach the CDT through an ontological model of cinema and cinematic-descended screen media in general, other facets of not only the CDT, but also the city’s relationship with image and representation, emerge.
Department: Film, Urban Studies
Urban China through the lens of neoliberalism: Is a conceptual twist enough? coauthored by Professor Yu Zhou
Description: Neoliberalism, as a hegemonic global ideology and framework of governance, has been the subject of extensive critical analyses in geography and urban studies. Despite the conceptual difficulties involved, a growing number of scholars have attempted to apply this critical discourse to China. In this commentary, we critically interrogate the urban China literature that deploys the neoliberal lens, mostly authored by scholars outside China, and we raise the fundamental question as to whether this discourse can ever capture the central stories or trajectories of China’s urban transformation. We examine the interpretations of China’s urban land property market, urban inequality and its spatial manifestation, and the emerging urban governmentality—the areas in which neoliberalism has been most often invoked—to highlight the utility and limitations of a neoliberal treatment of China.
We argue that the neoliberal representation of China’s urban (re)development, with its preoccupation with capital and class interests, is unable to effectively capture the distinctive nature of entanglement of capital, state, and society in China, and thus obscures the driving role and the competing rationalities of the authoritarian state, and the rapid reconfiguration of urban society. By citing examples of recent urban China research, we show that the neoliberalism framework, even in its ‘variegated’ or ‘assemblage’ versions, tends to trap China’s analysis within a frame of reference comfortable to Western researchers, and ultimately hinders the development of diversified, potentially more fruitful inquiries of the urban world.
Departments: Asian Studies, Environmental Studies, Earth Science and Geography, International Studies, Urban Studies