The Urban Affairs Review is pleased to announce its inaugural graduate student paper competition. In this first year, our theme is the “The New Urban Crisis.” The concept of urban crisis has been explored by scholars since the 1950s and has been deployed to capture myriad city problems from traffic congestion to fiscal deterioration to putative moral decay. In this competition, we encourage authors to examine what might be new about the contemporary challenges facing cities in the U.S. and beyond. Topics may include the impact of budgetary austerity; rising inequality; the targeting of cities by the Trump administration and other authoritarian regimes around the world; climate change; or the intersecting crisis captured by the term, “polycrisis.” Alternatively, researchers might argue that there is no “new urban crisis” at all. 

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