Majoritarian Cities

Popular public policies often fail to address the needs of the disadvantaged in American cities

A journey through unexplored spaces that foreground new ways of inhabiting the urban One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Today domestic animals make up more than twice the biomass of people on the planet, and cities are replete with nonhuman life. Yet current accounts of the urban remain resolutely anthropocentric. Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. From macaques and cattle in Delhi to the invasive parakeet colonies in London, Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. He reconceptualizes several key themes in urban thought, including infrastructure, the built environment, design, habitation, and everyday practices of dwelling and provides a critical intervention in animal and urban studies. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how human and nonhuman actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. Through novel combinations of ethnography and ethology, and focusing on interlocutors that are not the usual suspects animating urban theory, Barua’s work considers nonhuman lifeworlds and the differences they make in understanding urbanicity. Lively Cities is an agenda-setting intervention, ultimately proposing a new grammar of urban life.

Approaches contemporary Hindutva as an example of a democratic authoritarianism or an authoritarian populism.

"How civic literacy underpins effective democracies." - cover.

Colin Clarke investigates the role of class, colour, race, and culture in the changing social stratification and spatial patterning of Kingston, Jamaica since independence. He concludes with a comparison with the post-colonial urban problems of South Africa and Brazil.Includes multiple maps produced and compiled using GIS.

In Canada, the quality of municipal democracy has been questioned due to three crucial factors. First, voter turnout tends to be significantly lower for municipal elections than it is for other levels of government. Second, the re-election rate of incumbent candidates is higher compared to provincial, territorial, and federal elections. Third, corruption and other scandals have tarnished the image of local democracy. Are cities sufficiently capable of responding to crises and representing the interests of their residents? Accountability and Responsiveness at the Municipal Level addresses these issues through qualitative and quantitative analysis, focusing on some of the most important characteristics of the Canadian municipal scene, including the contexts of partisanship and non-partisanship, the careers and daily work of municipal officials, and multilevel governance. This volume also assists directly in the collection and dissemination of data about cities as there is currently no centralized system for capturing and organizing electoral statistics at the municipal level. Municipal democracy in Canada suffers from a representation deficit. Accountability and Responsiveness at the Municipal Level is an important first step in building high-quality comparative information on the politics of Canada’s cities.

In this unique book Scott A. Bollens combines personal narrative with academic analysis in telling the story of inflammatory nationalistic and ethnic conflict in nine cities – Jerusalem, Beirut, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Reporting on seventeen years of research and over 240 interviews with political leaders, planners, architects, community representatives, and academics, he blends personal reflections, reportage from a wealth of original interviews, and the presentation of hard data in a multidimensional and interdisciplinary exploration of these urban environments of damage, trauma, healing, and repair. City and Soul in Divided Societies reveals what it is like living and working in these cities, going inside the head of the researcher. This approach extends the reader’s understanding of these places and connects more intimately with the lived urban experience. Bollens observes that a city disabled by nationalistic strife looks like a callous landscape of securitized space, divisions and wounds, frozen in time and in place. Yet, the soul in these cities perseveres. Written for general readers and academic specialists alike, City and Soul in Divided Societies integrates facts, opinions, photographs, and observations in original ways in order to illuminate the substantial challenges of living in, and governing, polarized and unsettled cities.

A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography. In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.