New Books: Contested City
Featuring Alissa Walter, author of Contested City:
Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad published in 2025 by Stanford University Press. Contested City charts the political history of modern Baghdad and how residents navigated and negotiated with the state through periods of economic growth, war, and sanctions.
Get the book!
Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad. Alissa Walter. Stanford University Press, 2025.
Guest
Alissa Walter, Associate Professor of History, Seattle Pacific University
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Emily
You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Alissa Walter, the author of Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad from Stanford University Press. Contested City reconstructs the modern political history of Baghdad through close examinations of the city’s unique administrative geography, the built environment, and the role of everyday citizens in the construction and reconstruction of urban life under conditions of war, sanctions, and dictatorship in the twentieth century.
Alissa Walter
I'm an associate professor of history at Seattle Pacific University. And I earned my PhD in the history of the Middle East and North Africa from Georgetown University. And so my research focuses mostly on modern Iraqi history. But I've also done research on modern Egyptian history as well.
Emily
Alissa, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m really excited to talk to you about your book, Contested City – it's such a rich analysis of a really-understudied city. What brought you to Baghdad?
Alissa Walter
So I was first drawn to study Baghdad in part because it's very difficult actually to do a national scale history of Iraq. Iraq is an incredibly diverse country. It is ethnically diverse. It is religiously diverse. The relationship between the citizens and the government varies widely depending on the region. So just to give a quick example, in 1991,15 of the 18 provinces of Iraq rose up in rebellion against the government, and in the north, these are majority Kurdish provinces. They actually succeeded in breaking away and having semi-autonomous rule that persist to the present. In the South of Iraq, the government was able to crush the rebellion violently, whereas the center of the country, in and around Baghdad, where the government had its strongest core of power, it was able to maintain control there and so it felt really unwieldy to try to speak to all of these different dynamics.
And so, Iraq is also a relatively less studied country in the western academy and that just has to do with the fact that Iraq was ruled by a dictator for so many decades. And so it was difficult for researchers to do field work there, to have access to new records there. Of course, all of that change after 2003, and we can talk about that more, and the impact of you know, Iraq's political situation and how it relates to research. But so, I wanted to try to understand the most basic dynamics of how people interact with the government and I felt like we had to just start at the center because actually we aren't yet sort of ready and able to speak to broader trends yet, because we're still catching up and learning so much about Iraqis’ experiences. So, I started with Baghdad as the center of power. I've worked mostly in the Iraq Baath party archives to do my research.
These archives have anywhere from 8 to 10 million pages of bureaucratic memos, depending on who you ask, and they're not particularly well organized. It actually took me months just to figure out a strategy for how to even locate the records that pertained to local governance issues in Baghdad. And so actually, that's another reason why I focused on Baghdad as the capital city. It does feature extremely prominently in the records, whereas if I had attempted to say, look at rural dynamics or a smaller city, my task would have been even harder, and so I am looking forward to seeing what future generations of researchers do as we're kind of building up a foundation of deeper understanding about the internal dynamics of rule and governance in post-colonial Iraq.
Emily
I really do want to get back to the archives in a minute, that is a really fascinating part of your investigation here. But first, can you tell listeners a bit more about the scope of the book? What questions are you trying to answer?
Alissa Walter
I work on state-society relations. And so I'm really interested in seeing how kind of ordinary people, non-elites, people that aren't particularly politically connected, how they interact with the government and in the Iraqi case, I'm quite interested in seeing how the residents of Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq, have managed to survive a litany of challenging circumstances, from war and sanctions and foreign occupation and the dictatorship and what those survival strategies have looked like and how they involved or interacted with the government and all of this is playing out in the context of the capital city. And so this city itself, its built environment, its neighborhoods, its infrastructure, all have a role to play as well, and what I really love about an urban history angle to this is that it allows us to see how the residents of Baghdad shape the city, make the city kind of work for them and their interests, but also to see how the government has intervened in that built environment as well. And so it's an excellent venue to see all of these different power dynamics playing out in this negotiation and quest for political survival quest for literal survival in the face of war and hunger on the part of Baghdadi residents.
Emily
So the archives. There’s a really interesting story behind state archives that you lay out early on.
00:07:33 Alissa Walter
So for those who aren't familiar with the Iraqi Baath party archives, this is a collection of, archive memos that was originally compiled by the bureaucrats in the ruling party, the Baath party of Saddam Hussein's ruling party. And these were records found in the basement of their headquarters.
The collection, though, has generated a lot of controversy and how these really precious, that cultural artifacts that are so key to understanding the lived experiences of Iraqis over the decades of Saddam's rule what happened to them. And who had custody of these records, and so the records, rather than going into the possession of, say, the US government, which was the occupying power in 2003, or rather than being turned over to the new Iraqi government that, you know, gained official rule in in 2004 and 2005. Instead, this collection had been under the care of a non-profit organization that was run by Iraqi academics who had lived in exile during Saddam's years. Even more controversially, the nonprofit organization ended up expatriating these records to the United States for safekeeping. They were concerned about with escalating violence in Iraq, say, especially in 2005, 2006, with the sectarian war, that these records wouldn't be safe and that they weren’t able to safeguard and so they were brought to the Hoover Institution, which is a think tank based out of Stanford University. And this generated international outrage. And there was a lot of concern that this actually violated international law because this is cultural heritage and property of the Iraqi people.
Now these records have since been returned to Iraq. It happened just in recent years under the Iraqi Prime Minister. The Iraqi government, though, has chosen not to make these records available, so they are returned to Iraq. But Iraqis still can't access them, and so it remains the case that anyone wanting to look at these records still has to come to the United States, where there is a digital archive and copy made that is still available through the Hoover Institution, and so working in these records has been complicated and has, I think, generated a lot of really good and productive discussion about research ethics that I hope that our subfield of Iraqi history can actually help serve broader conversations, because actually, a lot of areas of history deal with, say, colonial archives or expatriated records and I think historians are still catching up with, say, anthropologists and talking about positionality and research ethics even when dealing with like past records.
And so a lot of colleagues have made kind of a principled decision not to work with these records because of the controversy. And I have tremendous respect for their decision, and I completely understand where they're coming from. I ended up making a more pragmatic kind of practical decision to go ahead and work in these records.
The thought that well, if no one works in them and if no one knows what in them, Iraqis can never learn what happened and like what was happening behind the scenes.
And that said, I still firmly believe that Iraqis are the ones best positioned to interpret these records and to make sense of them and to write their own histories. And so I see the research that I've done as sort of a humble offering and placeholder until the day that Iraqis are able to access these records more widely and to rewrite and correct what I've done here, but I just hope that this book is useful to Iraqis in whatever way that it can be.
Emily
The political history of Baghdad is inextricable from its colonial past, from British occupation through the US invasion in 2003 and beyond. So much of the city’s political and social geography is really embedded in this postcolonial perspective, but you also give readers some insight into the precolonial setting.
Alissa Walter
So one of the things I have found so interesting about studying the history of Baghdad as a city is to see the way that it's developed over time and well, I think all cities share certain characteristics in common. I have found that Baghdad has a really unique trajectory and how it has developed into the modern capital city that it is today and so one thing that I find a lot of Western audiences are surprised to learn is that in the early 20th century Baghdad was a small town. It hadn't been a capital for centuries, it was sort of a backwater Ottoman city, part of an Ottoman province, but not a major metropolis. It didn't have massive political clout at that time, of course. It has a very, like, glorious past. It had been the capital of the Abbasid Empire and the setting of 1001 Nights but at the time of the turn of the century, it had about 100,000 people. It had dirt roads. It had you even very little Ottoman investment in its infrastructure, it still had, like a floating pontoon bridge to cross the Tigris River, by the time that the British were invading in World War One. And so when the British colonized and created the modern entity of Iraq, Baghdad is launched back onto the world stage, becoming a capital of this newly formed colonial country.
And at this point it is the recipient of like, just massive investments by first the British and then the British backed monarchy called the Hashemite Monarchy and onward.
Baghdad's also on a floodplain and so it isn't hemmed in in the way that many cities have sort of natural boundaries, whether from mountains or waterways and so forth, the Tigris server has always split the city down the middle, and so it doesn't form an exterior perimeter around the city either.
It was able to expand rapidly and fairly easily with mud brick buildings, which is the traditional material that's always been used in the city.
Another thing that's important to know about Baghdad is that it has always been built around neighborhoods, and that is again a common feature you would find in most Ottoman cities. But these neighborhoods have retained their purpose over time from the British to the Hashemites to the post-colonial dictatorships of the later 20th century, neighborhoods continue to be the primary organizing principle of the city, and not just as cultural centers or social centers with sort of a vague idea of where their boundaries are and where their centers are, but there have been administrative units from the Ottomans to the US occupation and to the present, and so one thing that I do in my book is I trace the evolution of neighborhoods as they existed from the argument times all the way to, 2011.
Emily
The administrative units of these neighborhoods is really fascinating, and ties into not just political or governing arrangements, these kind of street-level bureaucracy, but also the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, the maintenance and reproduction of socioeconomic class, and more.
Alissa Walters
Because what happens when you have neighborhoods as official administrative units with official boundaries is that governments from the 19th century to the 21st century have installed bureaucrats and officials and administrators into the neighborhoods to help with daily tasks of governance. And so there are you call it, kind of traditional forms of governance. And that would be in the form of a Mukhtar that is centuries old tradition of having sort of a local elder who can help do things like count how many people are in the neighborhood, who can help with conscription, who can help with sort of monitoring all the way to then having bath party officials who are installed and responsible for a neighborhood as their jurisdiction in the sanctions era of the 90s, you have rations agents who are then installed in each neighborhood. And so you have actually a thickening of these street level bureaucrats, of these local low ranking officials, but who nevertheless are entrusted with absolutely essential day-to-day governance task on behalf of a national and centralized regime and that the neighborhood apparatus of bureaucrats gets more important overtime rather than less important, and not to me, was sort of a surprising finding. We think of Saddam Hussein as having overseen a very centralized government. And it's true, but also sanctions and war necessitated a certain amount of delegation to the local level, and what I found was that neighborhood level, Baath party officials or the neighborhood Mukhtar or the neighborhood rations agent played increasingly important roles as decision makers and not just as kind of functionaries who are just entrusted to, you know, carry out the dictator’s orders, but that are actually entrusted with a lot of responsibility and a lot of decision making that they get to exercise.
Emily
You spoke already about your research in the archives, but there’s also quite a bit of oral history included in your analysis. How did the residents you interviewed frame their experiences of dealing with the state on the street-level?
Alissa Walter
So for my research I did four different trips to Iraq to do field work, and the book is based on roughly 100 interviews with Iraqis, some of which I carried out myself directly, some of which I did as part of research teams and then of course, I did archival research in seven different archives, but mostly with the Baath party archives as I mentioned. And so in talking directly with Iraqis about their experiences, about their memories of government, of course, a lot of that is -- all of that is filtered through their positionality in the present and with the political changes that have happened, but overall, the impression is that there was a ton of fear. There's so much fear, and justifiably so. Whenever people were thinking about interacting with their Mukhtar or with any Baath party representative, people understood how high the stakes are. There was justifiable paranoia about who is an informant, what will be reported, and so Iraqis had an extremely well-honed sense of how to perform, how what you say, how you act, how you address someone. But what's interesting to me in in my research and digging deeper is that you realize that it's not just fear, right? And this, this is part of I think overall a lot of the findings of the kind of recent generation of scholars that are studying Iraq post-2003, is realizing that as much as fear was palpable, and fear I think informed the way that residents of Iraq interacted with anyone from the government, they also were incentivized to try to navigate those relationships to try to get what they needed out of the system too, and so one of the things I spent a lot of time looking at were petitions and letters that ordinary Iraqis sent to regime representatives. And sometimes they send it straight up the chain to Saddam himself, and sometimes they register their letters with their local neighborhood Baath party official, and it was fascinating to get to see the way that Iraqis asked for help or tried to position themselves favorably. And so, two-thirds of the letters I looked at were very flattering. What I expected lots of, you know, our exalted leader, the father of all Iraqis, dear Saddam, May God protect and preserve you. And lots of flattery and pleading, begging for help with money for surgery, for extra money, for rent. The very personal problems that Saddam had positioned himself through these paternalistic politics to act as this father figure and he would televise meetings with Iraqis to hand out refrigerators and things like this.
But there were also, like a third of the letters are very different and are actually very strident and forceful and use the language of rights. And that people were kind of advocating for themselves and saying, hey, like your officials messed up and they are punishing me for something I didn't do where they cut my rations off, and they shouldn't have. And here's why. And saying things like, “Hey, I served in the army” or “I lost a son in the army in your war and you owe me.” And it was also fascinating to see again because the stakes were high, because fear...
Everyone knows someone who's been disappeared, right? Everyone knows what happens in the prison, but that again, through this really well-honed sense of where the red lines are that Iraqis figured out where they could push and that they did. But again, going back to this point about neighborhood level bureaucrats, one of the things I realized was that this wasn't anonymous. Sure, some people are sending this up to Saddam and they probably will never meet him face to face. But a lot of times they're actually petitioning their neighborhood level bureaucrats and regime representatives where they know them, right, or they know of them, and likewise that neighborhood official knows of them too. And actually, I argue this is part of why the neighborhood officials were delegated with so much responsibility because they were best positioned to say, “Hey, like, what's this family's reputation. What's their standing? Are they loyal? Do they have clouds of doubt?” Kind of over their head. So it was actually very personal interactions, even in the midst of bureaucratic processes and that combination, I thought was really fascinating.
Emily
Those petition letters you looked at – it's so interesting, you develop a kind of typology to categorize them. What else, besides the actual demands or requests, or even the tone or style of the letters, did you learn about residents from these? Was there any hint as to the spatial distribution – like did certain neighborhoods have a higher rate of letter-writing than others, that sort of thing?
Alissa Walter
So I tried very hard to suss that out in my analysis. What I could say generally was that women were very well represented amongst petitioners, I will say with the caveat that my sample of petitions that I looked at is not representative, and I know that in part because I was able to finally map them on to the city and I saw that there were clear sampling errors like a large percentage was all from the Rashid district in Baghdad. So it's like, OK, I think this has more to do with where it was filed in the archives and where I happened to locate that file than it was as representative of patterns, unfortunately, because I was really hoping to get a sense of who and why and what that can say, but looking at only 100 letters is just simply not large enough to gain that pattern. But, so women are very well represented and so we can at least say that one's gender wasn't holding women back, and perhaps actually it may have even been an advantage in that several of the kind of social welfare policies were specifically for female headed households, and that they were able to, often very shrewdly, invoke as some gendered scripts positioning themselves as you know, especially vulnerable and dependent, and Saddam as the father figure, and so forth. There was a range of educational backgrounds represented, and so some petitions were not just typed, but even in later years like on you know from a computer. Which there were not many computers available in the late 90s and early 2000s and that’s demonstrating certain kinds of educational and financial privilege. Others were illiterate and signed with their thumbprint. And so, this is where our really looking forward to the day when Iraqis are themselves able to analyze these better, because I know that there are certain social and cultural cues that would be even more apparent to Iraqis viewing these than what I was able to pick up on. But I was able to simply say that there was a broad spectrum of people that were writing petitions; it wasn't just people that were destitute. Everyone who wrote a petition, or nearly everyone who wrote a petition, seemed to be a political independent, and that made sense to me because it seems like people that were both party members would have had different avenues for seeking favors or maybe already have certain privileges where they wouldn't maybe need to just drop a letter in a mailbox like this and I also know that there were many people who would not have written a petition. It's hard as a historian in the archives to speak to absences. I know that the absences are there, and that is also from just speaking to Iraqis. And anyone whose family was persecuted would probably not dare to invite extra scrutiny into their lives right through sending a letter, including their address and all of that. And so my hypothesis remains that people writing letters would have felt that they were on neutral to positive terms with the regime but still had needs that needed to be met.
Emily
War and conflict were perennial issues for Baghdadis in the late twentieth century, and these were significant challenges for daily life and survival. You talk about food rationing being another key bureaucratic and administrative responsibility that placed residents in direct contact with these street level officials. How did residents navigate this process?
Alissa Walter
So as some brief context, the UN imposed a really severe economic embargo on Iraq in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Iraq at that time had imported 70% of its food needs as an oil producing country, its agricultural sector wasn't fully able to provide for everyone's food needs and so they were very vulnerable to the humanitarian impact of these and so right away, within weeks, Saddam's government implemented an emergency food rationing system. Now, I will say if some of those food supplies were funded from Kuwait, I think this is not, just to be clear, this isn't just about Saddam finally decided to be a humanitarian. But politically the regime could not have survived massive bread riots and the people were really at risk of starvation if the government did not figure out a way to get essential food supplies to the people and so we see that the embargo was put into place in August 1990. By October 1990, they are doing monthly food distributions and by January 1991, it is a pretty well oiled machine, which is remarkable just the time and speed with which they're able to do this because essentially the government had to do a flash census in order to figure out how many people there are, then figure out a way to track who was receiving rations. Rations were available to every man, woman, child, and foreigner living in the country and the way that they managed to pull this off was by tapping into the neighborhood level bureaucrats and administrative system that they had already built up and so they turned to these neighborhood level administrators and created some neighborhood level committees who were then tasked with going through and getting a roster of everyone who lived in that area and again, this is where it's really important to come back to the idea that neighborhoods are not a vague social entity. These are administrative units with really clear boundaries. And so it is in fact possible to do a census and be really clear about that and the Muktar is brought in to do that and so each household is then registered and every member in the household, including infants, like everyone's on the on the rations card and then they are eligible to receive monthly rations now scholars who are familiar with the Chinese rationing system that used under Mao, or those who have looked at the Soviet systems of food rationing would be familiar with large warehouses, like very centralized distributions where, you know, people who live to that talk about waiting in breadlines for 7 hours a day. And actually, there's fascinating research done on like gossip in breadlines as a form of political speech, because that is just where people had to spend so much of their time. It became like a full-time job just queuing for Russia. And Iraq, it looks completely different, and I think the contrasts are fascinating because what Saddam's government did was to rely on grocery stores and by grocery store. I don't want to invoke, like, the idea of, like, a big Safeway with, like, large square footage. These were corner markets where people bought their daily fresh produce and the government just went, so these were not bureaucrats. They often weren't even Baath party members, they were just grocers and the government turned them into regime representatives and they became official employees and got vetted. And, you know, they would say, two days a month, you're going to turn your grocery store into a food rations distribution center, and then the rest of the month, you go back to being a grocery store. And so this is where, you know, Iraqis would go. And so people say it was not a big deal. Grandma would go get the rations, come back home, done. And everyone knew each other. And this is again part of the surveillance that happens and also the way that Baghdadis themselves can try to leverage these relationships. And so I mean this food distribution system was a massive piece of the government's political strategy for survival because they are now monitoring every person in the country very closely. And if someone doesn't come for their food rations one month, it was: Where are they, right?
And so they're now able to follow up and there's a just that thickening of just the sheer people that are employed by the government in each neighborhood now has increased.
But there are some Baghdadis who would try to cut deals with their rations agent and maybe sell rations on the black market or try to get some extra rations. And so the government is now also needing to try to keep an eye on the rations agents themselves to make sure that they are involved in too much backdoor dealing, which could happen.
Emily
And it wasn’t just food – there are multiple urban systems and infrastructures that you take up in your analysis that were deeply impacted by these conflicts. Was the US invasion in 2003 significantly different from previous experiences for Baghdadis?
Alissa Walter
So, my book really engages with the built environment and infrastructure of Baghdad in like three key chapters, and the first chapter talks about all the building and construction of new housing and the expansion of the city and the way that politics and power informs that.
And in the middle of the book, I have a chapter about how the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War impacted the city through destruction, especially when we think about the 1991 Gulf War bombings, which devastated the infrastructure of Baghdad, and then when we come to 2003, we have to pay attention to the built environment again, because it is utterly transformed and remade through the US occupation of all the consequences that come from that fateful invasion. And so when we look at the period after 2003, there is so much that we can say about changes that happened to the landscape of Baghdad and how that impacted the way that Baghdadi residents lived in the city, tried to survive in the city and how they then negotiated with power brokers in the city.
There has been some fascinating research that has been done on concrete blast walls that were constructed, like hundreds of miles of blast walls were constructed, and chopped up the city in dramatic ways. Because some of my colleagues have done such fascinating work on that, I decided not to cover the same ground that I would really encourage some of your listeners to check that out.
But so instead what I looked at was essential services like essential infrastructure, things like sewage pipes and electrical grids, and how people navigated the complete collapse of the state and the complete collapse of municipal services. I think, you know, I was certainly old enough to follow the Iraq War of 2003 in real time and it's something I had, you know, been studying for years, but it really wasn't until I began interviewing Iraqis about the 2003 invasion and the immediate aftermath that I really began to understand the impact of the collapse of basic essential services and its impact. I think I was more thinking about the looting, right. And like other forms of destruction that were happening. But the day that U.S. troops arrived, the garbage stopped getting collected.
The day the US troops arrived, people no longer had fuel for cooking, and the cooking fuel actually is one of the most prominent memories. Almost everyone I spoke to talked about the fuel crisis in the first year, which is also mind boggling for a country that has like the fifth largest oil reserves in the world that a fuel crisis was what they felt so acutely.
But so looking at that, just basic services needed to keep an urban population alive. I wanted to understand how Baghdadis survived that and tried to negotiate that and what I had realized is that all of the survival strategies that I talked about in the earlier chapters of my book had all been developed in interaction with the Iraqi state bureaucracy.
And that bureaucracy, despite war and sanctions and everything else, had remained remarkably stable in its processes and in its formation. Like I said, this whole retinue of these neighborhood officials and just how it worked and what the offices were and who you went to, people knew that.
And then overnight, it is gone. There is no office left. There is no bureaucracy left. There is no one to turn to.
And so, part of what I look at is just how Baghdadis tried to fend for themselves. And in most neighborhoods, that was what people were left with. And it was terrible. And people really suffered. And then in a few instances, there were some kind of larger scale efforts at kind of collective self-organizing.
And this is where my chapter follows the story of one militia leader, the famous political figure Muqtada Sadr, and what he attempted to do by essentially acting as the government in the district that he controlled. And then what the US was trying to do in its own way by creating neighborhood level councils and how Iraqis are trying to figure out how these councils related to what they were used to before, which turns out there wasn't much of a connection there, and so that's, that's where I take the story from there.
Emily
Alissa, thank you so much. I think you write this book with a great deal of care – what are you hoping readers will take away from it?
Alissa Walter
I think what's important to me about this book and what's even like precious to me about this book is trying to pay attention to the lived experiences of Baghdadis in their neighborhoods as their neighborhoods have transformed over the years.
And I begin the book with thinking about what drew so many people to Baghdad. You know, its population goes from 100,000 to over a million in the span of just one generation. What were Baghdadis or those who came to be Baghdadis? What were they seeking in their cities? How did they build their communities, and I talk about how there are these neighborhoods that get organized around people's professions, so you have like, police neighborhood and teachers, neighborhood and secret police neighborhood and how that has shaped the city in really unique ways. And then how rural migrants, especially from southern Iraq, have remained sort of perpetually marginalized in the city. And that's another important story that I try to weave through the book, the fate of this very large district that has been known as Revolution City, Saddam City and today, Sauder City, that's home to 25% of the population of Baghdad, but has remained always marginalized. And then thinking about everything since 2003. The neighborhoods of Baghdad were violently remade through just terrible bloodshed and sectarian killing and yet Baghdadis continue to remake their city today and I think while so much of my book is focusing on the past and on history, I do think it's important to kind of turn our attention back to Baghdadis today especially kind of the young people of Baghdad, how they have continued to try to remake their city, and some of that is through the development of new nightlife and restaurants. And I went to these amazing board game cafes in Baghdad the last time I was there and things that I think a lot of those like people in the West would be surprised to know that there's like a lot of people in Baghdad playing like, Settlers of Catan every night in these beautiful board game cafes, right? But also I think about the tittering protests that started in 2019 and 2020 and how, you know, the residents of Baghdad, and again, especially the young people are really trying to forge a new path forward for their city.
And so I'll say again if anything in my book has helped to capture the experiences of Baghdadis living in their city, if anything, in my book is useful for Iraqis, I will be really glad for it. I'm certainly very appreciative that I've had a chance to be a visitor in the city that I've had a chance to hear the stories of Iraqis, and I just look forward to continuing to hear how Baghdadis continue to shape the legacy of their city going forward.
Emily
My thanks to Alissa Walter, author of the Contested City from Stanford University Press. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.