Adopting a perspective inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this book considers the spread of multiculture from the central city to the periphery and considers the role that 'race' continues to play in structuring the metropolis, taking London, New York and Paris as examples.

Paris Noir fills a grievous gap in the absorbing chronicle of American expatriates who chose to live in Paris in the twentieth century. For alongside Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller was an avant-garde and tightly knit community of black American writers, artists, musicians, and political exiles who found in Paris the creative and personal freedom denied them back home.

Urban Renewal and Resistance: Rhetorics of Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to Early Twenty-First Centuries examines how urban spaces are rhetorically constructed through discourses that variously justify or resist processes of urban growth and renewal.

The contributions collected in this volume are devoted to the three markers of identity that cultural studies has recognised as paramount for our understanding of difference, inequality, and solidarity in modern societies: race, class, and gender. These categories, tightly linked to the mechanics of power, domination and subordination, have often played an eminent role in contemporary struggles and clashes in urban space. The confluence of people from diverse ethnic, social, and sexual backgrounds in the city has not only raised their awareness of a variety of life concepts and motivated them to negotiate their own positions, but has also encouraged them to develop strategies of resistance against patterns of social and spatial exclusion.

This timely study engages in the Afropolitan debate via the streets of the literary city. It first provides a historical and theoretical framework to illustrate how the literary flâneur--an aimless wanderer of the city--migrated from Europe to Africa and the diaspora, and how this figure is to be understood in relation to current considerations of Afropolitanism. The literary analysis focuses on texts set in three cities in Africa (Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Lagos), as well as three global north cities (New York, Paris, and London), considered through the eyes of various types of Afropolitan flâneur. By problematising the binaries of local/global, national/transnational, black/white, and slum/paradise, this book addresses issues of belonging or not belonging, and gestures towards new ways of understanding what it means to be an African in the world today.

Sociologists have long been curious about the ways in which city dwellers negotiate urban public space. How do they manage myriad interactions in the shared spaces of the city? In Urban Nightlife, sociologist Reuben May undertakes a nuanced examination of urban nightlife, drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a Deep South college town to explore the question of how nighttime revelers negotiate urban public spaces as they go about meeting, socializing, and entertaining themselves.    May's work reveals how diverse partiers define these spaces, in particular the ongoing social conflict on the streets, in bars and nightclubs, and in the various public spaces of downtown. To explore this conflict, May develops the concept of "integrated segregation"--the idea that diverse groups are physically close to one another yet rarely have meaningful interactions--rather, they are socially bound to those of similar race, class, and cultural backgrounds. May's in-depth research leads him to conclude that social tension is stubbornly persistent in part because many participants fail to make the connection between contemporary relations among different groups and the historical and institutional forces that perpetuate those very tensions; structural racism remains obscured by a superficial appearance of racial harmony.

Winner, 2019 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo What's it like to be stopped and frisked by the police while walking home from the supermarket with your young children? How does it feel to receive a phone call from your fourteen-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD's controversial "stop and frisk" policing methods were a violation of rights. Through riveting interviews and with a humane eye, Jan Haldipur shows how a community endured this aggressive policing regime. Though the police mostly targeted younger men of color, Haldipur focuses on how everyone in the neighborhood--mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, even the district attorney's office--was affected by this intense policing regime and thus shows how this South Bronx community as a whole experienced this collective form of punishment. One of Haldipur's key insights is to demonstrate how police patrols effectively cleared the streets of residents and made public spaces feel off-limits or inaccessible to the people who lived there. In this way community members lost the very 'street corner' culture that has been a hallmark of urban spaces. This profound social consequence of aggressive policing effectively keeps neighbors out of one another's lives and deeply hurts a community's sense of cohesion. No Place on the Corner makes it hard to ignore the widespread consequences of aggressive policing tactics in major cities across the United States.

Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

On sidewalks, decade after decade, urbanites have socialized, paraded, and played, sold their wares, and observed city life. These many uses often overlap and conflict, and urban residents and planners try to include some and exclude others. In this analysis of the sidewalk as a distinct public space, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht examine the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and trace conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples as well as case study research and archival data from five cities-Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle-they discuss the characteristics of sidewalks as small urban public spaces, and such related issues as the ambiguous boundaries of their "public" status, contestation over specific uses, control and regulations, and the implications for First Amendment speech and assembly rights.