Essays

• Bargain hunting in the “small-commodity city” of Yiwu, China

  
  10 November 2015, by Alison Hulme
  China’s rise in the global economy has been largely based on the manufacturing of both cheap and expensive goods. Focusing on the growth of “function spaces” of mass production in Yiwu, Alison Hulme 

• Thirty Years of Urban Sociology

  
  30 October 2015, by Christian Topalov & translated by Oliver Waine
  What is urban sociology in France? Christian Topalov, one of the key players in the history of this discipline, looks back on the two key periods during which the label “urban sociology” came into 

• The “Dozois Plan”: lessons learned from urban-renewal policies and the history of urban planning in Montreal

  
  23 October 2015, by Frédéric Mercure-Jolette & translated by Oliver Waine
  Urban-renewal policies justify their actions by decrying neighbourhoods earmarked for demolition. Frédéric Mercure-Jolette seeks to demonstrate this via the little-studied example of the massive 

• Managing New York City’s Rental Housing Catastrophe: The Once and Future Potential of Tax-Foreclosed Properties

  
  20 October 2015, by John Krinsky
  New York City faces a rental housing crisis, with homelessness at record levels, more than a million households spending over 30% of their incomes on rent, and the number of apartments renting 

• The Political Aesthetics of Drag

  
  13 October 2015, by Shaka McGlotten
  Drag, or the diverse art form and culture of performance that typically plays with gender and sex, is an integral part of vibrant urban life. It is also often decidedly activist and provocative. 

• What we can learn from babies’ sociability

  
  9 October 2015, by Carole Gayet-Viaud & translated by Oliver Waine
  The sociability of very young children reveals a neglected dimension of relations and interactions in public, and highlights issues associated with ordinary urban contact that often go unnoticed. 

• After Fukushima: The Silence of Environmental Organizations on Nuclear Catastrophe

  
  22 September 2015, by Michael Dreiling & Nicholas Lougee & Tomoyasu Nakamura
  The nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima plants in Japan in 2011 raised global awareness of the massive dangers inherent in nuclear energy and led to the shutdown of almost all reactors in the 

• Transition towns, or the desire for an urban alternative

  
  15 May 2015, by Adrien Krauz & translated by Oliver Waine
  The entry of the term “transition” into the vocabulary of public action shows that questions regarding how to build more sustainable models for society are still relevant. The response offered by 

• In Cathedrals of Craft: Workplaces for the New Elite Service, Retail, and Manual Labor Jobs

  
  12 May 2015, by Richard E. Ocejo
  As artisanal economies emerge in postindustrial cities, the symbolic language and craft culture of the industrial city remain strikingly apparent; a prime example of this is the growth, in 

• A Right to the City in the Global South?

  
  17 April 2015, by Marianne Morange & Amandine Spire & translated by Oliver Waine
  The idea of the right to the city has been the subject of strongly renewed interest in academic milieux, activist circles and among public stakeholders. This idea, far from the definition 

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