This year, the UAR Editorial Team will be exploring the contours of “urban crisis” as a theme around which we will introduce new essays and revive older works from our journal’s archive. This theme was selected to reflect the growing concerns that academic researchers, policymakers, urban planners, and others have expressed about the confluence of global economic uncertainty, political instability, social unrest, and environmental risks — among others — that is influencing our understandings of how to talk about urban crisis today.

In addition to these curated, edited collections, published bimonthly, we are also pleased to announce the winners of our inaugural graduate student essay competition, whose work will be published here later this spring. The winners are:

• Yetimoni Kpeebi (UNC Charlotte), “Homelessness as America’s New Urban Crisis”

• Ang Liu (Rutgers University), “The Hidden Balance Sheet: Invisible Debt and the New Urban Crisis”

• Michele McLaughlin-Zamora (UCLA), “‘The City Has Completely Turned Its Back On Us’: Los Angeles Mutual Aid Networks and The Politics of Refusal”

• Isaac Oates (CUNY Graduate Center), “Delivering the New Urban Crisis: Inequality in New York’s Food-Delivery Economy”