Science and the City: An Overview and Bibliography

A sepia-tone image showing a lab with two large, curtained windows, a clock hanging on the wall between them, and desks dotted with lab equipment. A desk in the foreground has a tray with a rabbit-sized animal lying belly-up. It is set in a decorative frame and has a black university stamp on the lower right-hand corner

Editor’s note: This is the first post in our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Can Gümüş-İspir and Marianne Dhenin When Egyptian engineer and administrator Ali Mubarak traveled to Paris in the 1860s, he took a much-anticipated tour […]

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City of Empire: An Overview and Bibliography of Istanbul

Editor’s note: Istanbul is the Metropolis of the Month for September. This overview is the first entry for the month, you can read additional entries in this series, as they are published, linked at the conclusion of this post. I’ve only been to Istanbul once in my life, during the summer of 2003, just before […]

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Driving into Environmental Law: Thurgood Marshall, Highway Construction, and the Overton Park Case

Editor’s note: We kick off our January 2022 theme month on Urban Environmentalism with an exploration of how opposition to interstate highway construction through Overton Park in Memphis, Tennessee, provides a window into the nation’s development of environmental law. It is followed by a bibliography on urban environmentalism. “We stand now where two roads diverge. […]

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Magic City and Fairyland: Miami’s 20th Century, an Overview and Bibliography

Editor’s note: March kicks off The Metropole’s coverage of its Metropolis of the Month: Miami. We begin with our usual overview/bibliography to be followed each week with at least one article on the city for the month. In Michael Mann’s 2006 film, Miami Vice, detectives Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs jump from pastel-hued 1980s television […]

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Urban Disaster and Recovery: An Overview and Bibliography of the Resilient City

Catastrophe has long shaped cities. Calamities have come in many forms and for varying durations; they have inflicted great costs in lives, suffering, and wealth. Different sorts of urban disasters—terrorist attacks, floods, earthquakes, diseases—have elicited different responses, policy prescriptions, and behaviors. Cities cannot be reduced to capital flows; they are more than built environment. “[T]hey […]

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Beyond the Urban Undead: A Bibliography of the Motor City

[Editor’s note: In anticipation of UHA 2020 to be held in Detroit, October 8-11, 2020, The Metropole is featuring Detroit as our Metro of the Month for January. See here for the CFP and here for info about and link to the UHA spreadsheet. The latter is meant to help urbanists find prospective panels and […]

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Accra, an Archive of Mobility: A Bibliography of the West African Metropolis

Movement, both unfettered and brutally curtailed, has long been central to Accra’s urban culture. From its days as a slave entrepot, through its decades as a colonial possession, well into its car-driven post-independence boom years, Accra has always been defined by movement–of the enslaved, by colonial administrators, of goods, and of postcolonial citizens. Take for […]

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The Indigenous City: Indigeneity and Toronto’s Past and Present

“We had a beautiful day; the eagles came, and we couldn’t have asked for a better day to do what we had to do,” Konrad Sioui, grand chief of the Huron-Wendat Nation, told a 2013 audience after laying to rest 1,760 of the tribe’s ancestors in their final resting place at the University of Toronto. Dug […]

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Nollywood Dreams, Lagosian Realities: A Bibliography for the Capital of West Africa

In its section on Nigeria, Lonely Planet’s 1995 edition of its Rough Guide to West Africa advised that getting the most out of one’s visit to the country depended on avoiding “Lagos and the sprawling congested cities of Ibadan, Port Hartcourt, Enugu, and Onitsha.” Several years later, a 30th anniversary edition offered a more nuanced […]

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The Complexities of Brotherly Love: Frank Rizzo, Blue Collar Conservatism and LGBTQ Rights in 1970’s Philadelphia

Editor’s note: In anticipation of next’s month’s #OAH2019/#OAH19 in Philadelphia, the March Metro of the Month is the City of Brotherly love. To get more info about the conference click over to the organization’s website, where you can also download the OAH’s program for the event. “You know how it works in South Philly. Our strength has always […]

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