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.
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.
Changing Notions of Urban Crisis
By Richardson Dilworth (UAR Managing Editor)
In this brief introductory essay I focus on articles on urban crisis published in the first two decades of UAR, leading up to the 1985 symposium, “Whatever Happened to the Urban Crisis?”, which included an introductory essay by Mark Gottdiener (1985) and three articles, by Eric Monkkonen (1985), Alexander Ganz (1985), and Irene Rubin (1985). I then provide a quick and admittedly incomplete overview of changing notions of urban crisis since that symposium to suggest that, despite healthy usage of the term in the decades that followed and the invention of new terms such as “permacrisis” and “crisis cities” that suggest some evolution in this particular framework, the framework itself has always been so malleable and potentially inclusive that its subject is not crises per se but rather how and why we might define things as crises.