Seeing Race in Architectural History — A Review of Race and Modern Architecture

October 27, 2020.Reading time 9 minutes.

Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Reviewed by Vita Baselice When I proposed to organize a symposium on the topic of race and architecture, I received some resistance. One colleague asked […]

The First UHA Virtual Roundtable – “Police Violence in the United States: How Did We Get Here?” – Is In The Books!

July 2, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

Last night The Metropole‘s Disciplining the City editors Matthew Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen (click those links to read their most recent work) moderated a panel on “Police Violence in the United States: How Did We Get Here?” It was the first in a series of three virtual discussions between experts of the carceral state convened […]

UHA Summer 2020 Virtual Roundtables on Race, Policing and Abolition

June 26, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

Conversations on Race, Policing, and Abolition Although the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade triggered a recent wave of Black-led urban uprisings against racist police brutality, these uprisings, and the police repression that has been unleashed in response, are not unique to this moment. Drawing on a long legacy of abolitionist […]

Campaigning for Segregation: A Review of Threatening Property: Race, Class and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods

May 20, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

Herbin-Triant, Elizabeth A. Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. By Paige Glotzer When such an enormous percentage of urban history grapples with the legacies of housing discrimination in the United States, it can be easy to overlook the efforts to segregate that did not […]

Street Privilege: New Histories of Parking and Urban Mobility

April 29, 2020.Reading time 31 minutes.

By James Longhurst In 1979, a plainclothes police officer assaulted a uniformed parking agent in broad daylight on the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan. The New York Times summarized the fight between the policeman and the female parking enforcement agent, declaring that “the two were screaming at the top of their lungs. There […]

Documenting Moynihan: Charlotte Rosen Reviews the 2018 Documentary about the Late New York Senator

March 11, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Charlotte Rosen There is no dearth of historical scholarship demonstrating the dangerous afterlife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” or what would become commonly known as the “Moynihan Report.” An internal document written when Moynihan was the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson, the report argued […]

The Metropole Bookshelf: Boston University’s Paula Austin Discusses How African American Washingtonians Navigated the City in Her New Book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC

February 4, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

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. Austin, Paula. Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C. Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2019. By Paula Austin Coming of Age […]

Remaking Urban History

January 8, 2020.Reading time 15 minutes.

[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 […]

The Metropole Bookshelf: Historian Genevieve Carpio discusses the intersection of mobility and ethnic studies in her new work, Collisions at the Crossroads

June 20, 2019.Reading time 7 minutes.

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. Genevieve Carpio. Collisions at the Crossroads: How How Place and Mobility Make Race. University of California Press, 2019. By Genevieve Carpio Collisions at the Crossroads seeks to bring […]

The One-Way Street of Integration: Edward Goetz Responds

December 10, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Edward G. Goetz I want to thank Eric Michael Rhodes for his thoughtful read of my book, The One-Way Street of Integration. The great challenge of writing the book, which Mr. Rhodes seems to have sensed in his remarks at the end of his review, was in articulating a vision for how to use […]