The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways,...

Our nation's transportation system is crumbling: highways are collapsing, roads are pockmarked, and commuter trains are unreliable. But as acclaimed scholar and ACLU president Deborah Archer warns in Dividing Lines, before we can think about rebuilding...

A stunning visual homage to Black bookstores, featuring a selection of shops around the country alongside essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody, with an original foreword by Nikki Giovanni.Black...

Dispatches from the Threshold is an emergent archive of the burgeoning movement for housing justice in North America and beyond. Housing insecurity turned catastrophic during the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing the cruelty of threadbare tenant protections...

How rulers in ancient and medieval Europe expressed their power through cities, buildings, and sitesThe Power of Place explores the nature of power—the power of kings, emperors, and popes—through the places that these rulers created or developed,...

This book is a major survey of urbanization and the making of modern Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the First World War. During these years Europe experienced startling rates of urbanization, with the populations of numerous cities growing by...

A radical history of squatting and the struggle for the right to remake the cityThe Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin,...

Compellingly argues that good health is as much social as it is biological, and that the racial health gap and the racial wealth gap are mutually constitutive.The Danger Zone Is Everywhere shows that housing insecurity and the poor health associated with...

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at one of America’s most controversial experiments in police surveillance.In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department had an aerial surveillance plane that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public view...

A major urban history of the design and development of postwar San FranciscoDesigning San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. In this pathbreaking...

Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environmentFor the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban...

Zoning codes dictate how and where we can build housing, factories, restaurants, and parks. They limit how tall buildings can be and where trees can be planted. They have become the most significant regulatory power of local government, ultimately...

"Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence; in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences,...

A “thrilling” (Financial Times) fly-on-the-wall account of the ferocious ambition, greed, and one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the world: the new Manhattan megatowers known as Billionaires’ Row—from a staff reporter at The Wall...

All aboard for the first comprehensive history of the hard-working and wildly influential Northeast Corridor. Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes...

Highlights how low-wage residents have struggled to live and work in a place usually thought of as affluent: suburbia.There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the...

"Matt Hern's brilliant and captivating Outside the Outside presents an urgently needed, theoretically sophisticated street-level perspective on some of the most pertinent ongoing critical debates about life and politics in our decentered suburban world...