Aging Gang Members in Southern California – A Review of “The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles.”

Randol Contreras. The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. By Dianne Violeta Mausfeld East Los Angeles is an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County with a population that is over 95 percent Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. Mexican immigrants settled in this […]

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Digital Summer School: Sunset over Sunset

If you’ve been to Los Angeles recently and had the opportunity to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), perhaps you were able to drop in on its new exhibit, “Ed Ruscha/Now Then“. Ruscha has long been an observer of the city, especially with regard to its vernacular and commercial architecture. While the […]

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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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Member of the Week: Francesca Russello Ammon

Francesca Russello Ammon Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania @AmmonFrancesca When and where was your first UHA conference? In fall 2006, I presented my first UHA paper at the conference at the University of Arizona. It was a wonderful opportunity to present on a […]

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Images of A Vast and Varied City — A Review of Aperture Magazine’s Mexico City Issue

Aperture 236 (Fall 2019). Reviewed by Brian Harkin The Mexico City issue of Aperture—the glossy photography magazine that publishes a themed issue every quarter—opens with a feature on Graciela Iturbide, the celebrated Mexican documentarian of life in black and white. In one of her photographs from 1972, a car under a flower-print sheet is parked in […]

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The Visual City: Photography, Film, and Postcards

“If the city is the raw material for production, for economic development, and for academic research, it has also been available to artists,” writes Helen Liggett in her 2003 work, Urban Encounters. “Photographs can function as sites of participatory reading that provoke urban encounters, first, in the relationship between the photographer and the city, and, […]

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Review: Iconic Paris and the Lens of History

Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 328 pp. $75.00 U.S. ISBN: 9780190681647. By Sun-Young Park Has ever a modern city been so iconic, so universally recognizable, as the Paris that boomed during the latter half of the […]

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Cityscape Number 2, September 19, 2019

Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Sixteen essays on Arabic poetry and prose which invite a literary exploration of Mosul, Cairo, […]

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Member of the Week: Erika Kitzmiller

Erika M. Kitzmiller Teachers College Columbia University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  My scholarship examines the historical processes and current reform efforts that have contributed to and challenged inequalities in present-day urban spaces. My work leverages quantitative and qualitative data to understand the intersections of educational policy and the lives […]

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