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Metropolitics

Interviews

What Is Worth Asking About Our Cities?

Naomi Adiv & Anant Maringanti & Harikrishnan Sasikumar - 3 March 2026

What is the state of urban theory from the Global South and how can local research simultaneously advance scholarly research and be a vehicle for advocacy? Dr. Naomi Adiv and Dr. Hari Sasikumar explore these questions in their conversation with Anant Maringanti.

Reviews

A Masterpiece in Peril: The Garden Suburb of La Butte-Rouge

Renaud Epstein & translated by Oliver Waine - 24 February 2026
La Butte-Rouge, built in the mid-20th century in Paris’s southern suburbs, is the archetypal example of a French...
Reviews

Useful Transgressions: Informality, Power, and Urban Life in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

Ryan Thomas Devlin - 17 February 2026
Urban informality has been theorized as a process operating at the edges and margins under capitalist urbanization....
Focus
Series

Provincializing the “Real‑Estate Turn”

Sai Balakrishnan & Llerena Guiu Searle - 7 November 2025
The papers in this collection “think against” the concept of real estate, starting with—and generating—grounded questions about particular places. ---- ▼ Jump to the list of articles in this series ▼ Standing in front of Trump Tower’s gold and bronze facade in Lower Parel Mumbai (formerly Bombay), real estate...
From the Field

The Making of City Digital Twins: The Case of Dassault Systèmes

Oskar Steiner - 3 February 2026
With their origins in manufacturing and heavy industry, “digital twins” are increasingly being applied to urban...
Essays

Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Renugan Raidoo - 20 January 2026
Some of the gated estates in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria sell residents a settler colonial fantasy of a...
Series

Post-Covid Mobilities: A Greener World for Tomorrow?

Thomas Évariste & Jean-Baptiste Frétigny & Anne Fuzier & Christophe Gay & Maxime Huré & Thomas Pfirsch - 13 January 2026
Against the backdrop of the growing climate emergency, Covid-19 radically altered the way mobility is organized. But...
Essays

On the Land Question in India: The Case of Sriperumbudur Industrial Region in Peri-Urban Chennai

V. Gajendran - 23 December 2025
Amidst intense demand for land, farmers near Chennai, India face dispossession by neglect. ---- Series:...
Essays

Unexpected Outcomes: Land Ceilings, Rent Control, and the Rise of Real Estate in Bombay

Nikhil Rao - 9 December 2025
Paradoxically, Mumbai’s neoliberal real-estate system has its origins in progressive legislation. ---- Series:...
Essays

Urban Public Transit: A Choice Between Two Models

Arnaud Passalacqua & Philippe Poinsot & translated by Oliver Waine - 2 December 2025
Public transportation has a decisive role to play in any meaningful ecological transition. And yet key players in the...
Essays

“The Apartment You Can Own with Pride”: Federally Insured Black Housing Cooperatives, 1950–1955

Nicholas Shatan - 25 November 2025
Postwar Black cooperatives insured by the federal government trouble the binary of public and private in housing...
Essays

Urban Theory and the Cold War: Reflections on the Political Economy of Urban Land and Real-Estate Development in Southeast Asia

Gavin Shatkin - 7 November 2025
The Cold War’s repressive politics of land and law still underpin the region’s contemporary struggles over land...
From the Field

An Unexpected Victory in the Fight to Save Philadelphia Chinatown

Andrew Lee - 14 October 2025
Grassroots efforts to counter gentrification-inducing megaprojects often fail as elected officials negotiate various...
View all articles

Series

Post-Covid Mobilities: A Greener World for Tomorrow?
Provincializing the “Real‑Estate Turn”
Horizons in the Housing Struggle
Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces
Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy

Featured

From the Field

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Ivana Mellers - 5 October 2021
Ivana Mellers analyzes how New York’s destination markets—key spaces of economic and social interactions—coped during...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of New...
Reviews

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Stéphane Tonnelat & translated by Christina Mitrakos - 21 October 2016
Frederick Wiseman’s fortieth documentary film, In Jackson Heights (2015), returns to an urban theme explored in...
From the Field

Looking Inward, Across the Border

Harel Shapira - 19 April 2016
In the constellation of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, groups like the Minutemen, civilians who patrol...
Essays

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka McGlotten - 13 October 2015
Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral...
Debates

Disarm the Police

Gregory Smithsimon - 29 September 2015
In the current political debates about discriminatory policing, there has been a lack of serious discussion of...

Other resources online

For These Old Bus Stations, It’s Not the End of the Line

CityLab
The streamlined depots built by Greyhound in the middle of the 20th century reflected a more optimistic era for bus...

Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem. The Housing Crisis and...

Spectre Journal
It’s Tuesday, November 4: Soon-to-be mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announces—after weeks of ducked questions—that he is...

Congestion Pricing’s Unexpected Winners: Suburban Drivers

CityLab
NYC’s controversial toll program hasn’t just sped up trips inside Manhattan, a new paper finds. It’s easing traffic...

DOT wants to prohibit free buses. That could be a problem for...

Politico
A proposal from the Trump administration would restrict federal funding for cities that don’t charge fares.

‘Exclusively for the elite’: why Mumbai’s new motorway is a symbol...

The Guardian
With 64% of the city’s residents relying on buses and trains so overloaded that up to 10 passengers die a day, anger...

In Somerset, I found glorious proof that the UK can build great...

The Guardian
It was life-affirming to meet the residents of Rainbow Way in Minehead. But so much still stands in the way of...

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Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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