Demystified Tokyo Offers an Alternative Paradigm of Urban Planning—A Review of “Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City”

Almazán, Jorge and Studiolab. Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2022. Reviewed by Eric Häusler Emergent Tokyo is the result of the collaborative effort of Studiolab, an architecture studio at Keio University that combines interdisciplinary research with socially conscious architectural practice. Emergent Tokyo’s authors argue that Tokyo is a vibrant and […]

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Suburban, Conservative, and Latino: A Transnational Story from Chicagolandia

Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our second post in the series. by Antonio Ramirez My community college students and I have been documenting the history of Latinx people in Chicago’s suburbs since 2015. We call these sprawling, Latino-dense communities on the outskirts of […]

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The Metropole Bookshelf: Stephen Robertson Discusses “Harlem in Disorder”

The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. by Stephen Robertson I was not intending to write Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 when my University of Sydney colleagues […]

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The Metropole Bookshelf: Jacek Blaszkiewicz and “Fanfare for a City”

The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. My new book, Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris, begins and ends with boulevard inaugurations. I don’t mean inaugurations taking place on […]

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Jobs Jobs Jobs – The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board

It’s no secret that the job market for Americanist historians of the twentieth century in academia is somewhere between a tire fire and hot garbage ablaze on a random barge floating across the ocean. While The Metropole is not a jobs board, it doesn’t hurt to shine a light on lesser known, but very good, […]

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San Diego’s South Bay Annexation of 1957: Water Insecurity, Territorial Expansion, and the Making of a US-Mexico Border City

Editor’s note: In anticipation of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History’s (SACRPH) 2024 conference to be held in San Diego on the campus of the University of California San Diego, The Metropole’s theme for February is San Diego. This is the third of four entries for the month. For more information about […]

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Revitalizing Cities Beyond the Center—A Review of “A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal Since 1945”

Rose, Mark H. and Roger Biles. A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal Since 1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. Reviewed by David Goodwin As public concern over the COVID-19 pandemic shifts from a guiding fear to a collective memory, American urban centers struggle to reimagine and restructure themselves to an […]

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