New Books in Urban Studies

Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026) by Dr. Jacqueline Riding.

Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to worldwide fame. But his work and outlook were always shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and the threat of the workhouse, radical politics and desperate poverty.

Framed through the life of this iconic success story, acclaimed historian Jacqueline Riding reveals working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Breathing life into forgotten stories of mothers and sons, labourers and actors, vagrants and sex workers, of suffering, survival and success against the odds, this compelling social history paints a striking portrait of a vanished city.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses to stay buried. Saints, Sultans, poets, and lovers—all linger in the city’s imagination, their stories shaping how we remember what once was.

In Ghosted, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites—Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal—to unearth a Delhi that exists between worlds: a palimpsest where Sufis bless kings, jinn listen to grievances, and begums occupy dilapidated hunting lodges. What begins as a search for Delhi’s haunted monuments becomes a meditation on why we are drawn to the dead and how ghost stories become vessels of collective memory.

Blending archival research with folklore, myth, and reflection, Chopra paints an intimate portrait of a city forever in dialogue with its former selves. Through invasions and rebirths, he reveals that Delhi’s spirit resides not just in its monuments but in the unseen presences that linger among them.

Ghosted is a lyrical, haunting journey through the city’s spectral landscape— an invitation to listen to what its echoes tell us about memory and identity.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside Asia. Spanning 30 city blocks and home to tens of thousands of monolingual Chinese residents, its endurance is remarkable—especially given how close it came to erasure.

In Chinatown: San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy (JHU Press, 2026), Dr. Dafeng Xu uncovers the contested history of this vibrant community, focusing on the transformative period surrounding the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed 80 percent of the city, including Chinatown. White San Franciscans saw the disaster as an opportunity to permanently displace the neighborhood. Instead, Chinatown was rebuilt—but not without conflict or consequence. Using detailed census data and other historical documents, Dr. Xu examines how this rebuilt Chinatown differed socially and physically from its earlier form—and the many ways it stayed the same. He explores whether the earthquake shifted patterns of segregation, if and how Chinese immigrants navigated pressure to assimilate—including adopting English, changing their names, and leaving ethnic neighborhoods—and whether they gained economic ground in the city's new landscape.

Dr. Xu's study reveals a striking contradiction: while Chinese Americans were often criticized for not assimilating, systemic barriers made that very process nearly impossible. The post-disaster Chinatown became a symbol of cultural resilience, shaped by both community agency and persistent exclusion. Rich in insight and original research, Chinatown offers a powerful look at how disaster, racism, and resistance shaped one of America's most storied immigrant neighborhoods.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's,” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research's working group on the economics of crime, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.

Alfred Marcus is the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, University of Minnesota.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bangkok is one of the world’s great cities, and the central artery of that city is the Chaophraya River. Michael Hurley’s book, Waterways of Bangkok: Memory, Landscape, and Twilight (NUS Press, 2025) just published by National University of Singapore Press, is an evocative reflection on the river’s place in Thai history, society, and culture. The author describes the Chaophraya River as the “binding thread of the Thai heartland”. He uses the river to examine historical legacies, the role of diverse ethnic groups that have contributed in various ways to Bangkok, and the country’s fractious politics. The book is also a meditation on the important, but today barely noticed, shift in Thai social life from a waterborne lifestyle to a land-based one, a shift which is barely a century old. Flooding, water pollution, and Bangkok’s notorious traffic jams, are all related to this movement away from an earlier aquatic culture.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices