C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century (Penn Press, 2025) brings to the public an up-to-date, diverse history of Philadelphia across its many dimensions. Volume 1 adopts "Greater Philadelphia" to indicate a regional scope, but not one limited by a fixed geographical boundary. Instead, "Greater Philadelphia" refers to the interdependence between the city and its periphery across parts of three states: southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. The Greater Philadelphia Region represents a collection of stories fundamental to the Philadelphia area's history and evolution based on the belief that regions work best when residents, divided in space but linked in multiple ways through social and economic connections, possess shared knowledge about the people and the places that surround them. Volume 2 begins with Philadelphia's role during the American Revolution, as the nation's first capital until 1800, and as home to one of the North's largest free African American communities in the antebellum period. From the Civil War to woman suffrage, from the Lenape people to the Gray Panthers, from Black Power to Occupy Philadelphia, the book chronicles the ongoing dynamics of citizenship and nationhood as they unfolded in the Philadelphia region from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Greater Philadelphia and the Nation demonstrates how Philadelphia, and its periphery across southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware, create, challenge, and sustain the nation. Volume 3 reveals the influence of empires and nations on Greater Philadelphia while also emphasizing the dynamic role the region and its people have played in shaping the modern world. Exploring the immigrants who peopled the Delaware Valley, the faiths they practiced, the environment they shaped, the wars they waged, and the global connections they forged, Greater Philadelphia and the World reveals a city and its surroundings that has been continually molded by its links to the Atlantic, the Americas, and the Pacific. Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD Candidate in History & African American Studies at UC-Davis. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the author's site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), Ihnji Jon's Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics (Pluto Press, 2021) tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics. National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of 'nature' in the everyday functioning of our urban life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and the expert knowledge associated with managing the countryside in colonial India opened paths for urban concepts and forms to permeate agrarian settings where they were previously thought to have little relevance. This process indelibly shaped idioms and modes of agrarian life, just as it gave rural problems and processes a structural role in urban discourse. By illuminating the intellectual paths by which agrarian and urban processes came to be understood as co-constituting, and exploring multiple vivid, empirically rich case studies of projects where those relations were made evident, this book presents a compelling case to move beyond traditional intellectual silos and enter new theoretical territory to understand processes of urban and rural transformation. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Cynthia Paces to talk about her new book, Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford UP, 2025). Prague is the first English-language book to trace the history of the city from the tenth century to the present. Cynthia discusses her personal connection to Prague, highlights key moments in the city’s history, and shares a few tips for those planning to visit. You can purchase the book from Oxford University Press here. The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We showcase the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions. At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate. Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema and the city as two institutions which co-constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by politics of cinema, in the site of Hyderabad. It traverses through the makings and remakings of Hyderabad as princely city, linguistic capital city, and global city, studied through capital, labour, and organization of the film industry. It brings together diverse, and rich historical material to narrate the social history of Hyderabad, over a hundred years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda’s existing “informally” constructed neighborhoods, or musseques. The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Dr. Claudia Gastrow’s archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Dr. Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016). Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"? But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps. Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia. Mentioned in the Episode “Love poetry: the RUC and Me” was Glenn's first nonfiction piece back inthe late 1980s. Robert McLiam Wilson: Glenn's friend and fellow Troubles novelist, whose work includes Ripley Bogle (1989). Eoin Macnamie's work includes Resurrection Man (1994). “The C-word” (2014) Glenn's wonderful essay on the trouble that starts when the word "community" gets subdivided into "communities." Padraic Fiacc, sometimes called ”the Poet oft he Troubles” finally has a blue historical marker. That makes Glenn ask why are there are so many "blue plaques" for combatants, so few for non-combatants? The interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman, Glenn compares Civil Rights in Northern Ireland in the 1960s with the US Civil Rights movement and with Paris 1968; the 70’s bombing campaigns lines up with the actions of the Red Army Faction in Germany. Recallable Books Glennn says his inspiration to write on partition comes from reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children. He also praises John Dos Passos USA trilogy. David interested in the long tail of a conflict and aingles out Glenn Patterson’s own novel, The Northern Bank Job as well as Eoin McNamee The Bureau. Inspired by Glenn's account of how resident learn to see and unsee portions of Belfast, John praises Kevin Lynch's 1960 The Image of the City. Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading modernist architect and landscape designer working with the dancer, then the aesthetic imprint is amplified. Dance innovation becomes pressed into dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas. The Choreography of Environments builds on this premise to consider the use of ordinary objects from a private residence as lenses into viewing dance innovation. Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving. These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that followed not only launched the careers of some of London’s most famous architects, but also transformed Londoners’ relationship to their city by underscoring the ways that people could shape a city’s spaces—and the ways that a city’s spaces could shape its people. Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Julia Fawcett looks to the Restoration theater to understand how the dispossessed made London into a modern city after the Great Fire of 1666 and how the introduction of changeable scenery in theaters altered how Londoners conceptualized the city. Dr. Fawcett makes a claim for the centrality of unplanned spaces and the role of the Restoration theater in articulating those spaces as the modern city emerged and argues that movable scenery revolutionized London’s public theaters, inviting audiences to observe how the performers—many of them hailing from the same communities as their characters—navigated the stage. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices