What’s New From Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Welcome back our UAA Virtual Booth! In addition to publishing our own books, we distribute books for a wide range of exciting academic presses from around the world. In this post, Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and James Graham from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, one of our distributed presses, introduce two new books that are particularly exciting for urban studies.
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Welcome! Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and James Graham of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City here, an architectural press dedicated to expanding the ground of architectural discourse. We’re delighted to be a part of Columbia University Press’s virtual booth for this year’s Urban Affairs Association conference.
It’s hard to think about much besides the daily news right now, yet what could be more urgent than thinking together about cities as we try to imagine what kind of a world will emerge from this moment—and if we can’t do it in person at UAA, we can certainly do it through books! We’ve published a number of books in the past years that address the city and the diverse livelihoods, forms of knowledge, and representations that are constitutive of collective urban life––do check out our backlist—but we wanted to highlight two of our freshest.
The first, Ways of Knowing Cities, is a lively and timely volume of critical essays that explores how technology mediates not only our experience of cities but also our knowledge about the built environment. This book aims to unsettle dominant and staid spatial tools, tactics, and narratives of the urban world in order to make room for new concepts and new frameworks for registering the city and social possibility in it. It considers the expected (the “smart” city, urban algorithms, and critical infrastructure) alongside the more unexpected (extraterritorial urban policing, African hair-braiding salons, and homophily).
The second, Preservation and Social Inclusion, asks some necessary questions about how to make the work of preservation as equitable as possible—after all, preservation, like so many other fields, is about negotiating different values and sometimes competing claims on what (and whom) a preserved building represents. This is a book filled with insights from practitioners working on the ground and reshaping institutions.
We’ll look forward to seeing you at next year’s conference! Until then, happy reading, and stay well.
Isabelle and James