The reading challenge category 4 is "A book about housing, homelessness, and/or the use of urban space." When thinking of books for the challenge, I realized that the "use of urban space" really opens the category widely to almost any work in urban geography or urban studies more broadly, but I tried to keep these generally connected to issues of inequality in urban space.
Here are my recommendations for books that could work in this category:
1. Mike Davis is one of the first authors I think of when I think of writing about cities. He was a rare scholar who produced a large number of books that were also really, really good. Many of these books are about cities - in particular, Los Angeles. I read his most famous book on LA, City of Quartz in my first year of grad school in the 1990s, and I still think of it as one of the best books on urban life in America. I have not read his Ecology of Fear, also about Los Angeles, though I could count it for the cateogry "book you've owned for a long time, but never read." Nor have I read his more recent Set the Night on Fire, co-written with Jon Weiner, and about Los Angeles in the 1960s, but that would also work in this category.
2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is co-founder of the abolitionist organization, Critical Resistance, and the author of Golden Gulag, a now classic work in the study of the political economy of prisons. Her newest book Abolition Geography, a collection of her essays written over the last 30 years would be an excellent choice for this category for anyone interested in the abolitionist activism, economics and geography of the carceral state.
3. I live in Atlanta, so of course Dan Immergluck's Red Hot City about Atlanta's rapid gentrification and its broader impact on the city's people has been on my reading list since it first came out. Perhaps ironcially, I found a copy of it in a Little Free Library in my neighborhood.
4. In 2019, LA Family Housing published an interesting reading list about homelessness that includes both fiction and non-fiction, classics and newer books. From that list, I've read Righteous Dopefiend, which is about a community of drug users living under a freeway overpass in San Francisco. It's an incredible work of ethnography and photography, though more about addiction and harm reduction than urban land use.
5. A geographer friend of mine reminded me that science-fiction author and socialist, China Mieville has written many novels about very strange cities. Of these The City and the City is my favorite. In it, two cities share the same space, nearly cross-hatched and rubbing shoulders against eachother, but the residents are officially, legally, invisible to each other. He explains the ideas behind the book in this interview with Geoff Manaugh for Bldgblog: it started with the idea of different species living in the same space but experiencing it differently (humans and rats in London) or jurisdictional boundaries in urban spaces. It's all complicated sounding, but the metaphor works and the book is both entertaining and thought-provoking.
6. Another book that would also work for the category "book written in the 1960s" (but remember only one category for book!) is Lewis Mumford's The City in History, which comes highly recommended by my geographer friend. I recall reading pieces of this for my doctoral prelim exams, but also reading his much shorter Sticks and Stones - for the same seminar that introduced me to Mike Davis's work. Mumford's a really elegant writer and his work is a great introduction to thinking about architecture and urban space.
7. The title Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern sounds promising. This book is a quantitative explanation of something that seems fairly obvious - homelessness is higher when rental housing markets are tight, and this factor more than any other (poverty rate, drug addiction, etc) causes higher rates of homelessness in a given location.
This entry's theme song is Living Colour "Open Letter (to a Landlord)"
8. There are several interesting books in this list of past prize winners from the Urban Affairs Association. Go to the above link to check out Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design; Lawrence J. Vale, Purging the Poorest; Japonica Brown-Saracino, A Neighborhood that Never Changes and Jennifer Clark Uneven Innovation.
9. If you haven't read it, Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic work that continues to be an influence in urban planning
10. It's on every list, so why not this one too? The Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted by Matthew Desmond has been part of the conversation about homelessness in the US since it came out in 2016. I haven't read it, but many people really like it.
11. Another exploration of the anti-state-state is John Arena's Driven from New Orleans. I haven't read this one, but the description says it's about how non-profit organizations drive poor people out of the city and contribute to privatization.
12. Kristian Karlo Saguin's book about Manila is the most recent winner of the American Association of Geographer's Meridian book prize. It's called Urban Ecologies on the Edge
13. Don Mitchell's book Mean Streets sounds really interesting. The linked review from the Urban Geography Journal summarizes the argument of the book it is not a failure of the system, but "the effective operation of capitalism that creates homelessness."
13. Several years ago I read journalist, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is based on interviews with people living in a slum behind the Mumbai airport, not far from several luxury hotels. It's a devastating book about poverty amidst plenty and one of the most memorable indictments of neoliberalism that I've encountered.
14. The novelist Aravind Adiga writes about similar themes in fiction. His novels White Tiger (his debut and a Booker Prize winner) and Last Man in Tower are both excellent portrayals of poverty, wealth and corruption in modern India. Last Man in Tower in particular is about housing and real-estate as you might guess from the title.
15. Another excellent and devastating book is Ann Petry's The Street. I read this book one summer when I was a teenager and all I remember about it is that it I read it in a short period of time and that I became depressed as a consequence - but also loved the book. Might be time to revisit.
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