THE CITIZEN, FILM, AND INDIA’S NATION-BUILDING PROJECT: A QUEST FOR MODERNITY

February 25, 2025.Reading time 28 minutes.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in our theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here. By Shruti Hussain We lock eyes with a stream of children, of women and men, peering straight at the camera […]

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

December 16, 2024.Reading time 22 minutes.

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 […]

Magical and Exiled Urbanisms in Miami

November 25, 2024.Reading time 23 minutes.

Editors note: This is our final entry in our theme month on The Latinx City. You can see all other entries for the theme month here. Additionally, readers interested in more on Miami can see other posts on the city published at The Metropole here. By Daniel Richter In 1987, Joan Didion published her book […]

The “World City” at Work: How Street Vendors Transformed Global L.A.

November 13, 2024.Reading time 29 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the third post in our theme for November, The Latinx City. By David Helps Jorge Cruz Cortes was still a teenager when the Los Angeles Police Department arrested him for selling household goods without a license in 1989. The eighteen-year-old from Oaxaca, Mexico had been in L.A. long enough to know […]

Chicago Americans: The City of the Second Generation

November 6, 2024.Reading time 20 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the second post in our theme for November, The Latinx City. By Andres Villatoro A friend from graduate school recently visited Chicago for the first time ever to present at a large annual academic conference. As an international student from Santiago, Chile and a lover of cities, I was excited for […]

Where Do You Summer? How the Urban Elite Forged Connections While Escaping the City

September 26, 2024.Reading time 27 minutes.

This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.” by Matthew Adair For many Americans, summer is a season of travel. The ritual of leaving home for somewhere more relaxing (or invigorating) has a long history. Since at least antiquity, “escaping the city” has been a common tradition among the […]

BART (Dis)Connects the San Francisco Bay Area

September 12, 2024.Reading time 23 minutes.

This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.” by Andrew Allio The camera pans along the street, highlighting the abandoned buildings. Midway down the block, a bulldozed lot is littered with broken concrete, plywood, and other construction debris. It is May 9, 1967, and Ben Williams of KPIX News […]

From the Railway to the Highway: The History of (Un)Free Movement in the Arab Mediterranean

May 30, 2024.Reading time 29 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the final entry in our theme for the month, Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean by Ingy Higazi In September 1923, Egyptian writer al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Mu‘min Kamil al-Hakim set out on a journey from al-Qantara, east of the Suez Canal on Egypt’s northeastern border, to Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. His month-long journey […]

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

February 21, 2024.Reading time 43 minutes.

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 […]

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

February 14, 2024.Reading time 8 minutes.

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 […]