An artist and a historian talk trees: What they mean, and what it takes to get city-dwellers to see them clearly.

With so much of value under threat from rising seas and flooding rains, recent books reconsider our relation to the water’s edge.

This is what democracy looks like: not only public squares, but office buildings. In the Lower East Side, the Peace Pentagon was the source point for four decades of resistance.

Whither housing? Ask the houses. In four recent books, home is where the histories of housing policy and politics makes themselves known.

Battles for inclusion and exclusion in the life of the city more often end in stand-offs than in skirmishes.

For the Circulation Desk, five books explore the stuff that binds us together in infrastructure networks public and private, old and new.

Four tales of the cities that arise from moral and environmental disaster. Can we ever really start anew?

Three graphic novels dramatize the forces that shape the city, recasting old stories of good versus evil onto high-rises and streetscapes.

Introducing the Circulation Desk, a bimonthly snapshot of the urbanist titles that turn our gears. On Inauguration Eve, could four recent biographies of real estate giants deliver insight into the years ahead?

Shannon Mattern takes us inside two examples of the extensive, yet relatively invisible, infrastructures that drive New York's libraries and explains how their logistical systems shape our physical, political, and intellectual landscapes.