Multiple Dimensions of Urban Inequality
By Yue Zhang, UAR Co-Editor
Inequality has been a central concern in urban politics, with multiple dimensions ranging from institutional and territorial to economic and social. The four articles selected here collectively show that urban inequality is not produced by a single mechanism, but emerges through the interaction of institutional design, economic restructuring, labor market transformation, and differentiated citizenship across global contexts.
Meta-governing the Co-creation of a Green and Just Transition in Urban Areas
The accelerating climate and nature crisis and the political ambition to ensure distributed socio-economic prosperity call for swift action to create a sustainable future while leaving nobody behind. While global and national efforts to promote green and just transitions in contemporary societies are indeed crucial, they rarely consider the challenges that such transitions entail for local communities—and not least for those living in poor and devastated urban areas.
Invisible Debt and the New Urban Crisis
By Ang Liu (Rutgers University–Newark)
While urban crises are often understood through visible symptoms such as housing unaffordability, segregation, and infrastructure decline, the financial arrangements that sustain these conditions are easier to overlook. This paper explores the concept of invisible debt—debt displaced into separate entities, off-balance-sheet arrangements, and future revenue claims outside the core municipal budget. Drawing on comparative cases from Chicago, São Paulo, Dubai, and Chengdu, it shows that these arrangements differ across institutional settings but share a broader logic of fiscal displacement. Cities reorganize debt through quasi-public authorities, public-private partnerships, state-linked developers, and local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Ultimately, the contemporary urban crisis is characterized by the extent to which fiscal strain is deferred and fragmented, keeping immediate financial pressure out of sight while allowing deeper, long-term vulnerabilities to accumulate. The true vulnerability of the city remains off the books until the moment of reckoning.
How do Americans perceive cities, and why does it matter?
Americans tend to have strong feelings about cities. For many Americans, cities are almost not even real places at all, but mystical, foreign realms that represent and confirm their fears about crime, poverty, race, immigration, terrorism, and dozens of other social ills. Cities are not where decent, upstanding citizens live; they are simply a concentration of problems. Social scientists have recently begun to focus on the resentment of urban spaces and populations, especially among white Americans, and how this resentment affects political behavior and state decision-making.
Community Centered Research During Times of Crisis
Good research on cities hinges on collecting accurate information from diverse groups of people. For instance, the use of focus groups, interviews, and ethnographies can teach us a great deal about the nuances of urban communities. This can help researchers and policymakers think through important issues such as trust, cooperation, and the needs of a community that may not be reflected through survey research alone. My own research began with a single question: How do Black Chicagoans in Bronzeville, Greater Englewood, and Calumet Heights interact with institutions and neighbors they distrust to find solutions to police violence and community violence? This type of question requires deliberation, follow-up, and elaboration. In short, a qualitative research approach. Yet, what happens when a crisis shakes the ability to meet and build relationships with community members?
Revisiting the transportation crisis across America
By Christina Greer (UAR Co-Editor)
Over the past several decades, local municipalities have worked with (and against) state governments to increase funding for public transport. Issues of transportation reform- just exactly who pays for existing and future infrastructure, how technology is incorporated into updating systems, and how revenues should be redistributed- have served as roadblocks for local, state, and federal elected officials as they think critically about expansion, equity, and redistributive policies pertaining to transportation policy.
“The City Has Completely Turned Its Back On Us”
By Michele McLaughlin-Zamora (UCSB)
Los Angeles mutual aid networks (LAMAs) stepped up to provide critical aid and resources to the most vulnerable communities during and after the January 2025 wildfire crises and in the wake of extreme institutional failure. As this catastrophic climate crisis unfolded, cross-community direct action mobilized at an unprecedented scale to meet a wide array of everyday needs. Despite strong, vibrant, ethnoculturally focused political communities, regional power building has struggled to find wide roots. However, as the crises escalated, typically siloed communities united while institutions and elected officials made fundamentally flawed decisions, further endangering Angelenos in dire times of need. These governing failures are not a one-off case of crisis fumbling but indicative of L.A.’s intentionally diffuse governing landscape and historically racialized structure of policy and practice, roots of the ongoing urban crises. One year following the wildfires, LAMAs are in the process of building regional socio-political capacity in light of ongoing institutional insufficiencies and escalating polycrises, engaging in a grassroots “politics of refusal” and often on the front defensive line against the active rise in national authoritarianism. Within a critical environmental justice framework, critical political ethnography and digital ethnography help to explore the evolving regional community organizing power and political influence of LAMA hubs and their potential to move the region, and the nation, towards stronger urban sustainability and resilience.
Formulation and Evaluation of Two Citywide Gentrification Measures
One national concern is the lack of affordable housing. Among other challenges (such as homelessness), this deficiency encourages gentrification, a process entailing affluent newcomers flowing into lower-income, disinvested neighborhoods. These districts are often initially dominated by minority populations, while gentrifiers are usually White. Encroaching residents raise rents through their demand for homes, and increased rents financially encumber the incumbent, more resource-limited denizens. Additionally, many scholars, journalists, and activists assert that rising rents displace economically disadvantaged occupants. Gentrification also inhibits the entrance of lower-income households, a less visible but more pervasive concern.
Delivering the New Urban Crisis
By Isaac Oates (CUNY Graduate Center)
New York City’s 2021 legislation establishing minimum pay for app-based food delivery workers represents a significant recent effort to protect gig workers. This essay argues that the legislation is counterproductive: by raising pay without reclassifying workers as employees, it gave delivery platforms an incentive to extract more output per worker hour, shifting the cost of higher wages back onto workers in the form of greater strain and risk. Drawing on data reported by delivery platforms to the city under the 2021 legislation, the essay shows that between the second half of 2023 and the second half of 2024, deliveries per worker hour rose 75% while consumer spending per delivery stayed flat and platform gross profit per delivery fell only modestly, suggesting that workers absorbed the bulk of the mandate’s cost. The essay situates these findings within Richard Florida’s framework of the new urban crisis, arguing that Florida’s prescription of converting low-wage service jobs into family-supporting work cannot be achieved through wage protection alone when the underlying power asymmetry between platforms and workers remains intact. The New York case is not exceptional: platform companies have pursued analogous arrangements in California and other states, and a proposed 2026 federal rule would make independent contractor classification easier nationally. For this class of worker, the new urban crisis is not a failure of policy ambition, but a predictable feature of how platform labor markets distribute power.
Homelessness as America’s “New Urban Crisis”
By Yetimoni Kpeebi (UNC Charlotte)
Homelessness in the United States has reached its highest recorded level in decades, yet governance responses remain overwhelmingly punitive. Drawing on critical urban theory, this essay frames homelessness as America's “new urban crisis.” By exploring the unprecedented scale of homelessness and the intensification of punitive governance, this essay shows that homelessness has shifted from a temporary social emergency to a normalized mode of urban governance in contemporary American cities. I conclude by arguing for a decisive shift away from punitive governance and toward housing-centered solutions grounded in the rights and dignity of the unhoused.
Decarceration and…?
Public Safety Realignment significantly changed spending behavior in California’s city governments. Taking changes in spending behavior as an indication of policy prioritization, I provide statistical and descriptive evidence that the design of the Realignment policies led city officials to de-prioritize enforcement when dealing with the policies’ effects. I use a policy feedback framework to explain why this happened. The provisions within Realignment that led to large reductions in the state’s incarcerated population also made local policy makers feel that increased law enforcement would lead to redundancy, thus exacerbating the “revolving door” problem in their local jails.
Do Sanctuary Cities Reduce Fear?
Fear changes behavior. Based on an original survey of Mexican undocumented immigrants in the United States, our research reveals that those afraid of deportation pull back from the most routine interactions of modern life — talking to police, enrolling children in school, visiting a hospital, even leaving a phone number at a restaurant. These are the small acts through which people participate in society. When fear suppresses them, the consequences ripple outward.
When Fewer People Looks Like Better Finances
In many small towns, public finances seem to improve at exactly the moment things are getting worse.
Fewer residents… but higher spending per person.
Fewer people… but more revenue per inhabitant.
At first glance, this sounds like good news. But our research shows the opposite: in many shrinking municipalities, these “improvements” are largely an illusion. Across Spain—and in many other countries—rural areas are steadily losing population. This trend is often discussed as a social or demographic problem. But it also has a less visible consequence: it changes how we measure and interpret the financial health of local governments.
Why Some Cities Go Further Than National Government Demands–and Others Don’t
When national governments make new policies, they often rely on cities to carry them out. But cities are not passive delivery machines. They have elected councils, local priorities, and their own understanding of what is needed locally. So, what happens when what the national government wants conflicts with what the city council has already decided to do?
Gentrification and Rising Rents May Worsen Black Residents’ Views of Whites as a Group
America's housing crisis has reshaped cities in profound ways. As rents have skyrocketed and affordable neighborhoods have become harder to find, higher-income residents have increasingly begun moving into historically lower-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods. This process, gentrification, has generated enormous debate about displacement, neighborhood change, and racial dynamics. But one question has received surprisingly little attention: how does gentrification affect the way Black residents feel about the racial groups moving into their neighborhoods?
When Cities Take Back Their Water, Who Really Gets a Say?
Cities that reclaim their water services from private operators tend to invite citizens into governance during the dramatic transition, then quietly push them out once serious decisions begin. This is the central finding of our comparative study of Paris and Naples, published in Urban Affairs Review: public ownership is not sufficient for public accountability, and participatory governance structures created to legitimize reform are routinely dismantled or emptied of meaning the moment civic actors start pressing on questions of budgets, hiring, and investment priorities. In other words, participation is welcomed at the margins, but becomes contested once it reaches decisions about how resources are actually allocated.
Size, Rurality, Peripherality and Mergers
Contrary to other countries such as Denmark, in the Netherlands local party systems shows signs of reverse nationalisation. Using data from seven municipal elections between 1998 and 2022, we observe that the Dutch local party system nationalisation index decreases considerably over time, meaning more independent local parties in the local council. We find that size, rurality, peripherality and mergers all have an influence on the index.
Why Mayors Matter
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, over 1.5 million people fled to Poland in a matter of weeks. Poland had no national integration strategy, no refugee camps, and very little experience managing large-scale displacement. Cities, rather than the central government, became the frontline responders and improvised solutions for housing, healthcare, education, and social support with minimal guidance from above.
Influence of State Planning Environments on Urban Sprawl
Urban sprawl has been a dominant feature of U.S. urban expansion over the past five decades. Sprawl has many well-documented negative consequences, such as the degradation of prime agricultural land, higher per-unit costs of land development and urbanized land and housing, higher municipal costs to maintain services and amenities, longer and more frequent travel distances in single-occupancy vehicles, and even poor health. Unsurprisingly then, many U.S. cities, regions, and states have tried to combat urban sprawl since the 1960s using four main approaches: state growth management laws, urban service area boundaries, local government regulations, and smart growth strategies.
San Francisco Residents’ Experiences in the Latest– and Largest– Public Housing Redevelopment Program in the US
Since its introduction in the 1990s, researchers across disciplines painstakingly analyzed HOPE VI, a public-private redevelopment initiative that transformed over 100 thousand units public housing across the United States while also displacing an estimated 250,000 residents. Despite it being adopted for the last fifteen years and being poised to convert four times as much public housing as HOPE VI, much less attention has been given to outcomes of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD program.