Almazán, Jorge and Studiolab. Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2022. Reviewed by Eric Häusler Emergent Tokyo is the result of the collaborative effort of Studiolab, an architecture studio at Keio University that combines interdisciplinary research with socially conscious architectural practice. Emergent Tokyo’s authors argue that Tokyo is a vibrant and livable city and that its development offers an aspirational concept for urbanists and cities across the globe. What exactly is a “city”? What characterizes a thriving city? How do cities develop? Can cit ..read more

Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our third post in the series. by S.D. Hodell There are two main waterways in the Washington, DC, metro area: the Potomac and the Anacostia. The two rivers are a study in contrasts. The Potomac separates Maryland and DC from Virginia, flowing from Harpers Ferry, where Thomas Jefferson called its confluence with the Shenandoah River “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature,” to a crescendo at Great Falls, just ten miles west of the DC line. The long-polluted Anacostia bisects the District’s P ..read more

Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our second post in the series. by Antonio Ramirez My community college students and I have been documenting the history of Latinx people in Chicago’s suburbs since 2015. We call these sprawling, Latino-dense communities on the outskirts of the city “Chicagolandia.” Today, the majority of the Chicagoland’s Latinx population lives in these suburbs, not the city of Chicago. This massive Latinx suburbia has been dubbed by one scholar as “the Latino capitol of the Midwest.”[1] Over the years, our or ..read more

Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our first post in the series. by Vincent Femia It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to be respectable. It is contentment…the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping ta ..read more

The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. by Stephen Robertson I was not intending to write Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 when my University of Sydney colleagues Shane White and Stephen Garton and I returned to the basement of New York City Municipal Archives in 2010 to examine the District Attorney’s files. While this rich collection has not been widely studied, we knew the records well: Shane had scoured files from the early ni ..read more

by Jacek Blaszkiewicz My new book, Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris, begins and ends with boulevard inaugurations. I don’t mean inaugurations taking place on boulevards, but the rather quasi-spiritual consecrations of the roads themselves. As a historical musicologist, I wanted to write about the soundscapes of these events: the din of the speeches, the horn calls, the symphonic and choral renditions of works by Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Handel, and Beethoven. I share some details of that din below, but I want to think through something here that I did not in ..read more

It’s no secret that the job market for Americanist historians of the twentieth century in academia is somewhere between a tire fire and hot garbage ablaze on a random barge floating across the ocean. While The Metropole is not a jobs board, it doesn’t hurt to shine a light on lesser known, but very good, job opportunities for historians outside the shrinking Ivory Tower. In fact, one of our senior co-editors currently holds such a position and has written about his journey to it, which you can check out here, but more importantly is the here and now. Staff historian for The Civil Rights and Re ..read more

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 final entry. For more information about SACRPH 2024, see here. For previous entries in the series click here. By John C. Arroyo For nearly 115 years, Barrio Logan has been the oldest epicenter of Chicano/a/x (Mexican American) and Mexican community in San Diego, a region rich with Mexican history and culture, given its border proximit ..read more

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 SACRPH 2024, see here. For previous entries in the series click here. By Kevan Q. Malone In July 1953 the president of the San Ysidro Chamber of Commerce, James R. Johnson, wrote to Congressman Bob Wilson regarding a recent proposal to expand the capacity of customs and i ..read more

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 emerging and presumptive new normal: downtowns with fewer white-collar workers and with more underutilized office buildings. This quieting of commercial districts results in shorter morning lines at cafes, smaller crowds of lunchtime shoppers, and em ..read more