Hot off the Press
About the event
In our 'Hot off the Press' series, urban studies scholars present their recent publications in live online webinars. After the presentation and discussant comments, participants are invited for a Q&A session.
Past events
Below you find the past events of the 'Hot off the Press' book presentation series.
Hot off the Press recordings are available on YouTube!
Recordings of most of the events are available to rewatch on YouTube. If available, the recording of the event is linked below.
2025
This event took place on 3 December 2025. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: With a focus on the social, critical and situated dimensions of urban life, this comprehensive Research Handbook offers a distinctive collection of theoretical and empirical insights into urban sociology. Bringing together expert contributors from around the globe, it offers an in-depth overview and research agenda for contemporary urban sociological scholarship.
About the editor: Miguel A. Martínez is Professor of Housing and Urban Sociology at Uppsala University at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research in Sweden.
Discussant: Yuri Kazepov (University of Vienna)
This event took place on 21 October 2025. Visit the books website here.
About the book: Since the birth of Airbnb in 2008, many of the world's cities have been transformed by platform-mediated short-term accommodation—a phenomenon suspected of disturbing local life and removing dwellings from local housing inventories. Drawing on mixed-method, multi-level comparative research in twelve large European cities, coauthors Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli, and Claire Colomb show that strikingly different regulatory regimes have emerged around short-term rentals.
In some cities, policies aim to curb this practice; in others, regulations are simply meant to support the market. These responses are motivated by a variety of political choices and pressures, from grassroots movements to property interests, the tourism industry, and municipal welfare and housing systems. This book makes a crucial contribution to comparative urban politics in the twenty-first century, investigating the capacity of local states to govern housing markets and platform capitalism in an era of globalized human and capital flows. In the face of this worldwide shift, Housing Under Platform Capitalism insists that institutions and regulations can champion the public good by protecting the right to housing and ultimately limiting corporate power.
About the authors: Thomas Aguilera is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Rennes. Francesca Artioli is Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning and Urban Policies at the Université Paris-Est Créteil. Claire Colomb is Professor of Land Economy (Planning, Public Policy, and Urban Studies) at the University of Cambridge.
Discussant: Agustín Cocola-Gant (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
This event took place on 18 June 2025.
About the book: This book investigates urban development and governance in China, exploring how state-centered governance shapes planning, redevelopment, innovation, and environmental policy. Introducing the concept of state entrepreneurialism, authors Fulong Wu and Fangzhu Zhang bridge theory and practice to explain China’s distinct path in governing its rapid urban transformation. Essential reading for scholars of urban studies, geography, and China’s political economy.
About the authors: Fulong Wu is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London. Fangzhu Zhang is a professor of China planning and a joint coordinator for the China Planning Research Group at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.
Discussant: Xuefei Ren (Michigan State University)
This event took place on 7 May 2025. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: Based on extensive fieldwork, the book explores why some cities are more effective than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment. Through a comparative study of São Paulo and Johannesburg — two megacities emerging from authoritarian rule with similar policy goals — Bradlow reveals how relationships between local bureaucracies and urban social movements shape access to housing, infrastructure, and essential services.
Urban Power offers a new theoretical lens for understanding urban governance and the coordination of local governing power in young democracies.
About the author: Benjamin H. Bradlow is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Discussants: Alan Mabin (University of the Witwatersrand) and Eduardo Marques (University of São Paulo)
This event took place on 9 April 2025. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: Many planning systems are currently locked into growth-dependence, encouraging market-led development which can widen social inequalities and produce adverse environmental outcomes.
This accessible book introduces students to the debates around growth and planning and sets out the solutions to promote genuinely sustainable communities. It includes:
- a positive proposal for reform of the planning system;
- focused discussions from the UK and Europe providing lessons for future planning;
- analysis of the challenges of implementing reform.
Covering chapters on cooperatives, community land trusts, local economic development and community assets and infrastructure, as well as commoning, it provides a roadmap for planning system reform with social justice and sustainability at its heart.
About the author: Yvonne Rydin is Professor of Planning, Environment and Public Policy at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.
Discussants: Federico Savini (University of Amsterdam) and Christian Lamker (University of Groningen)
2024
This event took place on 13 November 2024.
About the book: Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly being adopted to address climate change, health, and urban sustainability, yet ensuring they are effective and inclusive remains a challenge. Addressing these challenges through chapters by leading experts in both global south and north contexts, this forward-looking book advances the science of NBS in cities and discusses the frontiers for next-generation urban NBS.
About the authors: Nadja Kabisch is Professor for Digital Landscape Ecology at the Institute for Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology, Leibniz University Hannover. Niki Fantzeskaki is Professor of Regional and Metropolitan Governance and Planning at the Geosciences Faculty of Utrecht University.
Discussants: Kerstin Krellenberg (University of Vienna) and Carmen Pérez del Pulgar (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ)
This event took place on 19 June 2024. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: On Display is a book about how people remake their worlds through social media. John D. Boy and Justus Uitermark provide an encompassing account of how a platform that is unfailingly polished and ruthlessly judgmental shapes us and our environments. They examine how personalities, relations, social movements, urban subcultures, and city streets change as they are represented on Instagram. Interviews and ethnographic vignettes render an intimate account of the desires and anxieties that animate the platform. Just as importantly, Boy and Uitermark reveal how Instagram is implicated in social inequalities.
Drawing on sociological theory, long-term qualitative inquiry in Amsterdam, and computational analyses, Boy and Uitermark argue that grasping the power of Instagram—and other social media platforms—requires seeing them not as digital networks of communication and sharing, but as a stage for the expression and affirmation of social status.
About the author: Justus Uitermark is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam.
Discussants: Jan Üblacker (EBZ Business School, Bochum) and Sharon Zukin (City University of New York)
This event took place on 23 June 2024. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: This volume examines how cities, migration, and urban governance are intertwined. Questioning and re-working the conceptual reliance on “scales” and “levels”, it draws on examples from both Europe and North America to conceptualize the variety of cities as re-active and pro-active within “glocal” and “socio-territorial dynamics”.
The book covers the governance of the myriad dimensions of urban life, such as work, housing, racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, the arts, leisure, and other cultural practices, political participation, social movements, and “contentious politics” in North American and European cities. While cities might implement “integration policies,” the chapters do not necessarily assume that migrants live with the telos of “integration”, but rather conduct their lives as anyone else would, making meaning and voicing concerns under often difficult material conditions, strewn with the markers of race, religion, gender, sexuality, age, and often illegality.
About the authors: Felicitas Hillmann is Professor at the Institute of Vocational Education and Work Studies at the Technical University Berlin. Michael Samers is Professor of Economic and Urban Geography at the University of Kentucky.
Discussants: Tiziana Caponio (University of Torino) and Hilary Silver (Brown University)
This event took place on 24 April 2024. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: "The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies is a timely intervention into the field of global urban studies, coming as comparison is being more widely used as a method for global urban studies, and as a number of methodological experiments and comparative research projects are being brought to fruition.
It consolidates and takes forward an emerging field within urban studies and makes a positive and constructive intervention into a lively arena of current debate in urban theory. Comparative urbanism injects a welcome sense of methodological rigor and a commitment to careful evaluation of claims across different contexts, which will enhance current debates in the field. Drawing together more than 50 international scholars and practitioners, this book offers an overview of key ideas and practices in the field and extends current thinking and practice."
About the authors: Patrick Le Galès is a CNRS Research Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Urban Studies at Sciences Po. Jennifer Robinson is a Professor of Human Geography at University College London.
Discussants: John Mollenkopf (CUNY Graduate Center), Shalini Randeria (Central European University) and Bas van Heur (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
This event took place on 20 March 2024. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: This 2023 Edward Elgar Advanced Introduction explores urban segregation on an international scale, offering expert analysis on pressing and theoretical debates and key contemporary issues relating to this interdisciplinary field of study. It provides detailed insights into the various dimensions and domains of urban segregation, the range of methods used for measuring segregation, and the effects it can have on neighbourhoods and individuals. Recognising variations in the patterns of segregation from country to country, the book further discusses the different approaches and challenges affecting policy interventions.
About the author: Sako Musterd is Professor Ermeritus of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam.
Discussants: Szymon Marcińczak (University of Lodz) and Costanzo Ranci (Politecnico di Milano)
2023
This event took place on 13 December 2023. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: Over the past decades the nation state lost its political primacy by processes of devolution, Europeanisation and globalisation, which in turn enhanced municipal autonomy. Why do some cities seek to sidestep the state and widen their sphere of action?
Bridging political geography, local politics and urban sociology, this book gives a new perspective on the state’s weakening authority and the parallel rise of cities as political actors. The author considers the tensions between central states and European cities, giving a new perspective to students and researchers in the social sciences.
About the author: Elisabetta Mocca is an urban reseacher at the University of Salamanca.
Discussants: Justus Uitermark (University of Amsterdam) & Jaime Palomera (IDRA, Universitat de Barcelona)
This event took place on 22 November 2023. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: Exploring the social implications of dense and compact cities, this enlightening book looks at micro-scale segregation through several lenses. These include the ways that the housing market constantly reconfigures social mix, how the structure of the housing stock shapes it, and the ways that policies are deployed to manage these effects.
Taking a deep dive into micro-segregation in the socially mixed and dense centres of compact cities, the authors investigate the form and content of social and ethno-racial hierarchies at the micro-scale of different cities around the world and the ways these have evolved over time. Vertical Cities considers the ways the materiality of such hierarchies affects the reproduction of social inequalities in today’s large cities.
About the author: Thomas Maloutas is Researcher Emeritus at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Geography, Harokopio University.
Discussant: Roberta Cucca (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)
This event took place on 14 June 2023. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: 'Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu's topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape.
Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory.'
About the author: Loïc Wacquant is a french sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Discussants: Bruno Cousin (SciencesPo) and Christoph Reinprecht (University of Vienna)
This event took place on 10 June 2023. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: 'This book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives.
To reduce the dramatic social and environmental impact of urbanization, this book offers both a critique of growth-led urban development and a prefiguration of ecologically regenerative and socially just ways of organizing cities and regions. It uncovers emerging possibilities for post-growth planning in the fields of collective housing, mobility, urban commoning, ecological land-use, urban–rural symbiosis, and alternative planning worldviews. It provides a toolkit of concepts and real-life examples for urban scholars, urbanists, activists, architects, and designers seeking to make cities prosper within planetary boundaries.'
About the author: Federico Savini is Associate Professor in Environmental Planning, Institutions and Politics at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
Discussants: Yvonne Rydin (UCL) and Elisabetta Mocca (University of Vienna)
This event took place on 19 April 2023. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: ‘In an elegant and careful theoretical analysis, this book demonstrates how gentrification is always entwined with institutions and distinctive contextual processes. Matthias Bernt develops a new concept, the “commodification gap”, which is tested in three richly researched cases. With this, the concept of gentrification becomes a multiplicity and the possibility of conversations across different urban contexts is expanded. A richly rewarding read!’
About the author: Matthias Bernt is the acting head of the research focus "Politics and Planning" at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space and an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Social Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Discussants: Justin Kadi (University of Cambridge) and Anna Zhelnina (University of Helsinki)
This event took place on 15 March 2023. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: ‘Comparative Urbanism fully transforms the scope and purpose of urban studies today, distilling innovative conceptual and methodological tools. The theoretical and empirical scope is astounding, enlightening, emboldening. Robinson peels away conceptual labels that have anointed some cities as paradigmatic and left others as mere copies. She recalibrates overly used theoretical perspectives, resurrects forgotten ones long in need of a dusting off, and brings to the fore those often marginalised. Robinson’s approach radically re-distributes who speaks for the urban, and which urban conditions shape our theoretical understandings. With Comparative Urbanism in our hands, we can start the practice of urban studies anywhere and be relevant to any number of elsewheres.’
About the author: Jennifer Robinson is the Chair of Human Geography at the Department of Geography at the University College London.
Discussants: Tauri Tuvikene (Tallinn University) and Julie Ren (University of Basel)
2022
This event took place on 22 June 2022. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley’s urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.
About the author: Hillary Angelo is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Discussant: Stefan Höhne (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI))
Moderation: Roberta Cucca (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)
This event took place on 25 May 2022. View recording on YouTube here.
About the book: These are stories of community members acting together to transform empty, contested, or unsafe spaces into functional, safe, convivial places. A diverse set of place makers, from activists to architects, mediators to planners, spanning four countries and ten US locales tell their stories in their own words. The complex and challenging cases range from building affordable housing to community building in the aftermath of racial violence. After grappling with issues like immigration, climate change, and coalition-building, place makers recount how they worked alongside once-suspicious community residents to enhance and enrich the places in which they live.
About the author: John Forester (Cornell University)
Discussant: Tommaso Vitale (Sciences Po)
This event took place on 27 April 2022. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation. With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.
About the author: Tom Slater is Urban Geographer and Professor at Columbia University.
Discussant: Stijn Oosterlynck (University of Antwerp)
This event took place on 30 March 2022. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 cities in Europe and North America over a 20-year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries and on the analysis of core planning, policy and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies. The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening are not only physical but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning—a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities that prioritize equity in green access, in secure housing and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.
About the authors: Isabelle Anguelovski is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. James JT Connoly is Associate Professor at University of British Columbia.
Discussant: Dagmar Haase (HU Berlin)
2021
This event took place on 9 June 2021. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions. Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.
About the author: Hannah Knox is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University College London.
Discussants: Yvonne Franz (University of Vienna) and Yuri Kazepov (University of Vienna)
This event took place on 26 May 2021. See the book on the publishers website here.
About the book: From Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Miami, US cities are struggling to address the twin crises of high housing costs and household instability. Debates over the appropriate course of action have been defined by two poles: building more housing or enacting stronger tenant protections. These options are often treated as mutually exclusive, with support for one implying opposition to the other.
Shane Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance. He offers readers more than 50 policy recommendations, beginning with a set of principles and general recommendations that should apply to all housing policy. The remaining recommendations are organized by what he calls the Three S’s of Supply, Stability, and Subsidy. Phillips makes a moral and economic case for why each is essential and recommendations for making them work together.
There is no single solution to the housing crisis—it will require a comprehensive approach backed by strong, diverse coalitions. The Affordable City is an essential tool for professionals and advocates working to improve affordability and increase community resilience through local action.
About the author: Shane Phillips is Project Manager at the Randall Lewis Housing Initiative for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
This event took place on 28 April 2021. View the recording on YouTube here.
About the book: In Migrants and City-Making Ayse Çaglar and Nina Glick Schiller trace the participation of migrants in the unequal networks of power that connect their lives to regional, national, and global institutions. Grounding their work in comparative ethnographies of three cities struggling to regain their former standing—Mardin, Turkey; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Halle/Saale, Germany—Çaglar and Glick Schiller challenge common assumptions that migrants exist on society’s periphery, threaten social cohesion, and require integration. Instead Çaglar and Glick Schiller explore their multifaceted role as city-makers, including their relationships to municipal officials, urban developers, political leaders, business owners, community organizers, and social justice movements. In each city Çaglar and Glick Schiller met with migrants from around the world; attended cultural events, meetings, and religious services; and patronized migrant-owned businesses, allowing them to gain insights into the ways in which migrants build social relationships with non-migrants and participate in urban restoration and development. In exploring the changing historical contingencies within which migrants live and work, Çaglar and Glick Schiller highlight how city-making invariably involves engaging with the far-reaching forces that dispossess people of their land, jobs, resources, neighborhoods, and hope.
About the authors: Ayse Çaglar is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. Nina Glick-Schiller was the Director of the Cosmopolitan Cultures Institute at the University of Manchester.
This event took place on 24 March 2021. See the book on the publishers page here.
About the book: The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.
About the author: Neil Brenner is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology and Director of the Urban Theory Lab (UTL) at the University of Chicago.
Discussant: Yuri Kazepov (University of Vienna)
