TOPIC

Books

Fighting Fire

In the 1970s, a wave of arson caused widespread damage to the Bronx and the tenants who called it home. What brought a decade of fire to an end?

Life Beyond Line Items

To get the city we deserve, New Yorkers must be active participants in its governance. What spaces and methods can help us build democratic muscle and demand moral budgets?

New City Critics

The Shortest Ramp Is a Longer Road

A new Crown Heights bookshop is a cipher for conflicting feelings of ambivalence, betrayal, and belonging

New City Critics

A Year in Property

An artist chronicles her daily life through the lens of property. From homes to household goods, are we condemned to be defined by what we own?

Home Valuation

New stories from Mitchell-Lama co-ops and the LA Tenants Union narrate the housing crisis as a struggle for control, and over the true meaning of a home.

Circulation Desk

What Colors Are the Crabgrass?

New books chronicle US suburbs' divergence from their mythical origin scenes of verdant lawns and white picket fences — and detail how social struggles have always been part of their story.

Landscape Orientation

An artist makes her books by walking. Their pages unfold in ways as unusual and idiosyncratic as the city itself.

Circulation Desk

Second Chances

Recent books explore the potential in underused and overdetermined spaces, from mid-century American city centers and suburban shopping malls to the current glut of vacant retail storefronts and offices.

Alternate Routes

A new guidebook locates residents’ struggles to make and remake New York City in the image of their own needs and desires.

Behind the Mask

Two scholars navigate the myths and abstractions attached to marginalized urban neighborhoods, bridging the distance between narratives imposed from outside and residents' experiences and spatial practices.