Fifteen years in the making, Becky Nicolaides’s The New Suburbia is a remarkable achievement, arguably the most important and thorough exploration of diverse and multiracial suburbia yet published. The book focuses on Los Angeles County as the pacesetter for national trends and combines a lengthy overview of general patterns with detailed case studies of four suburban municipalities (Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, Lakewood) that took divergent paths as they navigated powerful transitions. In the best traditions of urban and social history, the methodology is both qualitative and quantitative, including extensive archival work, dozens of interviews, and production of a massive dataset that is available online. Nicolaides addresses fundamental questions, including how once white-dominated suburbs “transitioned from bastions of segregation into spaces of multiracial living,” and how suburban political culture evolved through new forms of inclusion and exclusion upon the arrival of large numbers of Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, immigrants, the working poor, diverse family types, and more. The New Suburbia also tracks the diversity within these groups, showing how multiracial actors contributed to the “reproduction of metropolitan inequality” and the re-racialization of property, with some challenging but others embracing the white middle-class suburban ideal. Nicolaides resists easy generalizations, emphasizing the “complexities of justice in an era of re-racialized spatial privilege” and concluding that the suburbs are “a space where everything happened.” The New Suburbia is a worthy successor to Crabgrass Frontier and other landmark syntheses in the field of suburban history and will prove indispensable to scholars interested in the remaking of diverse suburbs across the nation.

Honorable Mention

Andrew W. Kahrl

The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

University of Chicago Press

The Black Tax is a powerful, well-written, and sweeping contribution to the scholarship on racial inequality, racial capitalism, public policy, civil rights activism, municipal governance, urban and African American history. Andrew Kahrl marshals extensive evidence to show that local property systems have consistently over-assessed Black property owners (specifically homeowners), and under-assessed white property owners and corporations–from Reconstruction to the present, in urban and rural areas, within and between cities and suburbs, across the North and the South. Kahrl dismantles the persistent myth that Black people don’t pay their fair share of taxes, and are thus unworthy of social welfare provisions. The Black Tax reveals that, alongside better-known culprits—including housing, labor, and bond market discriminations and exclusions—local tax systems have long operated as “an engine of inequality” and also developed exploitative relationships with the private tax lien industry. Kahrl draws on depositions, newspapers, interviews, multidisciplinary scholarship, and records of local governments and advocacy groups that either created or challenged a property tax system “ripe for manipulation and abuse and prone to inequitable results.” The Black Tax contributes to the study of material, and especially granular, matters of public finance along the color line, demanding that both scholars and the public discourse attend to this underappreciated aspect of the racial wealth gap. A decisive and timely intervention of how racism structures the political economy of American capitalism.

Best Book in Urban History

(excl. the U.S., Canada, and Europe)

Mark Baker 

Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou

Harvard University Press

Mark Baker’s Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou is a deeply researched and methodologically innovative study that reshapes our understanding of China’s urban history. Shifting attention from the familiar metropolises of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, Baker makes a compelling case for examining Zhengzhou—an “ordinary” provincial city—as central rather than peripheral. He adopts a refreshing “outward-facing approach” (p. 7) that highlights the city’s multiple spatial relations to its hinterland, edges, and broader region, revealing how Zhengzhou eventually became a critical hinge of mobility, planning, and statecraft. By tracing the intersections of railroad construction, industrial zoning, revolutionary governance, and internal migration, Baker demonstrates how state strategies of “concentrated development”, while generating new opportunities, have simultaneously produced uneven urban landscapes across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Baker’s analysis deftly weaves together archival research, ethnography, and spatial theories to show that spatial politics—questions of who lives where, who has access to services, and who benefits from state investment—have been integral to both socialist modernization and post-reform urbanization. The book makes an outstanding contribution not only to modern Chinese history but also to comparative urban studies. Ultimately, Baker shows that Zhengzhou’s story is indeed pivotal: it is a window onto the spatial logics of state power, market resource distributions, and the roots of social inequality in China and beyond. For its originality, methodological breadth, theoretical rigor, and wide applicability, Pivot of China is eminently deserving of the 2025 Best Book in Urban History Award.

Honorable Mention

Andra B. Chastain

Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City

Yale University Press

Andra Chastain leads her readers on a mind-spinning tour of Santiago’s metro system, which she nimbly approaches as a vehicle to discuss the Chilean capital’s urban society, the Chilean state, and the country’s international relations. With her Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City, Chastain addresses the relatively neglected topic of urban transportation as well as breaks new multiple grounds. First, she goes beyond the cumbersome US by incorporating France and French (only) formally apolitical expertise in her discussion of the Latin American Cold War. She also contributes to the historiography on neo-liberalism by teasing out the continuities in some of Chile’s policies before, during, and after the Pinochet dictatorship. Finally, she positions Santiago within the field of global urban history, which “employs transnational, global, comparative frameworks to understand the specificities of urban spaces and, conversely, uses urban history to shed new light on transnational or global processes” (14). Grounding her work on a wide and eclectic source-base, Chastain skillfully brings together social, political, and cultural approaches and proves that her study of urban transportation reaches well beyond the confines of Chile’s capital.

Honorable Mention

Rosemary Wakeman

The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941

University of Chicago Press

The Worlds of Victor Sassoon is an engaging story about the “interconnections” of three “global cities” in the interwar years. Succinct and nicely written, Wakeman’s book addresses how capitalism, imperialism, and globalization jointly shaped urban life in Bombay, London, and Shanghai, all ports, and “high-energy, high-traffic” places. As Wakeman explains, these three cities “best exemplify the connectivity that characterized globalization in the 1920s and 1930s,” and are compellingly brought together through the life of Victor Sassoon, member of an elite trading diaspora. Sassoon lived in the three cities and invested in many of the businesses that shaped capitalism and urbanization in those decades, like shipping, banking, and real estate speculation, which Wakeman illuminates through a close reading of his personal diaries. By combining different scales of analysis, Wakeman effectively addresses both the overarching narrative of global movements, the concrete transformations of urban spaces, and the personal lives of some of the capitalist elite of the early twentieth century. Engaging and lively, the book is important to understand how patterns of migration, industrialization, leisure and mass culture changed daily urban life.

NEW AWARD!

Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power

Co-Winners

Claire Morelon

Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914-1920

Cambridge University Press

Andrew W. Kahrl

The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

University of Chicago Press

The Committee appointed to award the inaugural Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power, made up of Lily Geismer (Chair), Brent Cebul, and Lizabeth Cohen, takes pleasure in announcing the selection of two books: Andrew Kahrl’s The Black Tax: 100 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and Claire Morelon, Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). We have taken the unusual step of honoring two books in recognition of the very different but equally impressive ways that they have addressed the subject of cities and political power. Each author reveals how governance as well as a wider range of political, cultural, and social factors have shaped urban life. Moreover, in Kahrl’s use of the city as a setting to understand how inequality has been structured in the United States and Morelon’s analysis of the social spaces of the city itself as a vehicle for mobilizing Prague’s inhabitants--first for war and then for revolution--we recognize important intellectual lineages with Lizabeth Cohen’s pathbreaking work in Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, and Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. As the prize is awarded in the future, we hope that it will continue to recognize superb work concerned with the nature of urban political power in the United States as well as far beyond its borders. 

Andrew Kahrl’s The Black Tax offers a revelatory account of how the political construction of local property tax regimes created and sustained racial inequalities from Reconstruction through the 2008 financial crisis and up to today. This meticulously researched, forcefully argued, and accessibly written work offers fundamentally new insights into the wide-reaching and predatory dimensions of local tax systems and how they have ensured that Black people have consistently paid much more for worse services. In doing so, Kahrl shatters the mythology of the welfare cheat by demonstrating that communities of color were the ones being cheated – and pillaged – all along. It is a sweeping and ambitious in the best sense of the words, revealing a set of damaging patterns practiced across time and a wide range of spaces, including not only the largest metropoles most familiar to urban historians but also the many mid- sized and small municipalities we too often overlook. Kahrl should also be commended for how he combines clear and approachable explications of complex and often opaque local tax systems with the lived experiences and forms of resistance of a wide range of ordinary people. In sum, The Black Tax is a searing portrait and indictment of structural racism.

Claire Morelon’s Streetscapes of War and Revolution is a thoroughly engaging, deeply researched, and profoundly creative investigation of how daily activity on the streets of Prague during and after the First World War reveals both the intentions and

expectations of rulers and the responses of citizens, who were sometimes cooperative and other times rebellious. By insightfully reading various uses of the street, such as for parades, protests and postering, as well as popular participation in other urban spaces, including make-shift hospitals, market stalls, black markets, and train stations, Morelon takes us far deeper into understanding social and political life on the urban wartime home front than is usually presented. She brilliantly demonstrates that Prague’s residents’ support for and then rejection of the Austro-Hungarian war effort, followed by their early enthusiasm and later disappointment in the new Czechoslovak Republic, can be discovered by carefully reading quotidian activity and popular appropriations of Prague’s public realm. Here, the local reveals imperial and national stories that contradict standard interpretations, such as that Czeck political mobilization can mostly be attributed to the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. By introducing the reader to the significance of simple acts such as queuing for food or soliciting for a charity or targeting a foreign refugee, Morelon opens our eyes to all that can be learned from close scrutiny of how people moved through and remake urban space. In doing so, Morelon models a methodology for understanding the social and cultural construction and contestation of political power that can be applied to many other times and places.

Joe William Trotter, Jr. Prize for Best First Book in Urban History

John Bardes

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930

University of North Carolina Press

John Bardes' The Carceral City expertly complicates our understanding of slavery, mass incarceration, and urban history. The author utilizes an impressive analysis of thousands of police and prison records, and the writings and ideas of influential figures such as Edward Livingston. Bardes offers fascinating insight into the reciprocal relationship between enslavers and the state-builders, including those at the local level, as mediated by policing and carceral institutions. Bardes successfully argues that the mass incarceration did not originate in the twentieth century, but rather in the early nineteenth century with the building of the slave prison system, first established in 1805 in New Orleans. This system had higher rates of incarceration than modern-day New Orleans, which for decades has ranked as the leader in incarceration. Bardes also explores how this carceral system continually criminalized, policed, and jailed free people of color. This is not just a story about New Orleans, as other cities including Charleston, Memphis, and Mobile constructed similar system. Bardes also traces how the connections between race and incarceration survived rupture like the Civil War and Emancipation and shaped the contemporary carceral system. The Carceral City is a compelling and model work of urban history.

Honorable Mention

Menika B. Dirkson

Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia

NYU Press

Menika Dirkson’s Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia is a timely and important work of urban history. Dirkson explores how city leaders responded to the influx of African Americans to Philadelphia during the Great Migration initially with efforts of containment and segregation. White politicians and journalists stigmatized under-resourced Black neighborhoods as dangerous and high-crime. This labeling in turn justified increased spending on over-policing—and police violence—of those spaces, supported by decreased social service spending and further disinvestment in Black communities, which only exacerbated the social causes of crime. Dirkson expertly unpacks this vicious cycle that continues to afflict many cities. The work also examines efforts of resistance through anti-poverty programs and Black grassroots mobilization. Dirkson skillfully utilizes an impressive array of primary sources, including print and television news stories, police reports, maps, court records, census information, sociological studies, municipal policies, maps, housing pamphlets. 

Lynn Hollen Lees Book Prize for Best Book in European Urban History

Katya Motyl

Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894-1934

University of Chicago Press

Katya Motyl’s innovative and engrossing history of new womanhood in Vienna proves that we cannot understand a city without understanding the everyday practices and bodily routines of the women who live there. Using a staggeringly diverse collection of sources (archival and non-archival, written and visual), Motyl discovers how Viennese women used subtle but purposeful acts like loitering, strolling, and reading romance novels to pioneer new and transgressive forms of womanhood. In their daily quests to reinvent and satisfy themselves, women transformed not only cultural conceptions of gender but also the physical spaces around them. Motyl’s impressive, determined focus on the quotidian enables the reader to explore the streets and cafés of Vienna alongside the women in her book. Embodied Histories contributes to both gender and urban history by, on the one hand, connecting the body to urban transformations and, on the other hand, bringing daily practices of urban life into conversations about “new women.”

Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article

Danielle Beaujon

The Algerian Enemy Within: Policing the Black Market in Marseille and Algiers, 1939-1950.

French Historical Studies 

Danielle Beaujon’s article “The Algerian Enemy Within: Policing the Black Market in Marseille in Algiers, 1939-1950,” is an exquisite example of historical scholarship. It’s beautifully written, doggedly researched, and effectively engages with a diverse set of sources, ideas, and themes. Many other historians have written (profitably) about colonialism, racialized policing, urban space, and black markets. But few can so expertly interweave these threads into a cohesive, profound, and ultimately human story, one that teaches us not just about the histories of Marseille and Algiers and World War II, but one that also can teach us historians how to write history.

Thaís R. S. de Sant´Ana

State-led Development and Migrants’ Resilience in the City of the Forest

The American Historical Review

Thais R.S. de Sant’Ana’s “State-led Development and Migrants’ Resilience in the City of the Forest c. 1910–1930s” makes a critical contribution to urban history by re-centering migrants in the story of Manaus—the capital of Amazonas—and reframing the city’s development beyond familiar narratives of boom and decline. By focusing on the overlooked interwar period, the author challenges earlier scholarship that has portrayed the ‘city of forest’ as stagnant and underplayed workers’ adaptations to the city’s shifting economic landscapes. Through a nuanced analysis of state policies, labor practices, and everyday strategies of survival, the author demonstrates how migrants—construction workers, domestic laborers, small farmers, and rubber tappers—were simultaneously indispensable to state-led development and excluded from its infrastructures of support. Rather than portraying them as passive subjects of economic cycles or state policies, the article highlights their resilience, adaptability, and autonomy, evident in the formation of labor associations, their creative repurposing urban spaces, and the maintenance of ties to their regions of origin. By showing how migration to Manaus encompassed diverse motivations and how the city functioned as both a site of opportunity and a point of transit within regional circuits, the article broadens understandings of urban transformation in Amazonia. With its integration of local, regional, and national perspectives, and its insistence on centering migrants as agents of socioeconomic change, this work not only revises the history of Manaus but also advances broader debates in urban and labor history.

Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History 

Daniela Samur

Binding the State: Bogotá’s World of Prints, 1880s–1930s

Binding the State: Bogotá’s World of Prints is an innovative history of urban development and state power told through the lens of printmaking, bookselling, and literary culture in Bogotá at the turn of the 20th century. Daniela Samur argues that the mass production of print commodities and the development of a modern, capitalist state in Colombia were mutually reinforcing processes, both of which resulted in a wide array of social contradictions along lines of class and gender. Beginning with the institution of the Regeneración government and attendant centralization of state power in the 1880s, Samur shows how state administrators sought to impose order onto Bogotano and Colombian society through print; and how workers, book-buyers, and readers articulated their own relationships to the world of letters. Samur deepens our historical understanding of how cities operate as nodes of state administrative power by focusing on bureaucracy as something with a social and material life, fixed in particular spaces and carried out by particular groups of people. She shows that Bogotá’s urbanity was bound up in processes of knowledge production and circulation, highlighting the importance of libraries and bookstores in creating the look and feel of a modern cityscape. Moreover, books connected Bogotá to the rest of the world, whether through paper sourced from New England or texts sourced from France and Spain. Printmaking and bookselling also helped produce new members of urban elite classes while enforcing the marginalization of those who could not readily access print culture as readers and consumers, but who did often make up the contingent laborers who carried out print production and archival maintenance. Meticulously researched, theoretically grounded, and drawing on an astonishing range of primary sources, Binding the State is an essential contribution to the study of cities, states, and knowledge-making.

Honorable Mention

David Helps

Securing the World City: Policing, Migration, and the Struggle for Global Los Angeles, 1973-1994

In Securing a World City, David Helps achieves a clear and convincing reorientation of the rise of global cities in the late twentieth century through the lens of crime and criminality, and above all through debates about safety. His canvas is Los Angeles from the 1970s to the 1990s, tracing the mayorship of Thomas Bradley, LA’s first black mayor, as his city became “a paradigmatic global city” of downtown skyscrapers and a bustling trading port. Helps’s dissertation is rife with indelible portraits of Angelenos who attempted to make a world city in their own image, underscoring a crucial tension between engineering a “safe” city to benefit the tourism industry and one to protect working class and poor residents.

“Global cities” are already the subject of a rich intellectual tradition, thanks to contributions from Marxist geographers and urban historians, especially those who center transnational networks and their legacies in the U.S. after the 1960s. Focusing on porous boundaries and refugee flows, or the finance and real estate industries, Helps notes that previous scholarship on the topic has privileged “connections and flows.” But what Securing a World City gives us is an architecture of municipal power in which decisions from local lawmakers fundamentally shaped LA’s status as a “world city,” driving its demographic shifts and new methods of development. In so doing, Helps describes in granular detail what a “crisis of legitimacy” looked like for LA’s political elite and how the city’s working-class residents, still expecting to have a voice in their city’s future, readied for battle over housing policy, police budgets, and more. It all happened on a battleground that Helps recreates across seven gripping chapters, concluding when LA’s wealth gap widened enormously and the city became a so-called majority-minority metropolis during the 1990s. Securing a World City is an urban history of today and indeed one for tomorrow.

Honorable Mention

Joshua Lappen

Cultures of Power: Electrification, Politics, and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles

Joshua Lappen has produced a highly compelling work of scholarship. Cultures of Power tells the story of electricity’s underappreciated role in the development of greater Los Angeles. Lappen argues that this influence persisted long after the city’s first power lines were strung, creating a “regime of electric visibility” which shaped not only the city’s physical form but also its culture and politics. Throughout, he evinces mastery of an impressive array of sources as well as a knack for clear, concise, and even beautiful writing. Across four chapters, Lappen transports the reader from the streets of downtown Los Angeles on the raucous night of its “Power Inaugural,” to the windswept tracts on the outskirts of the city that electricity soon transformed into streetcar suburbs, to the San Fernando Valley farmers whose groundwater pumps became crucial nodes in the expansion and profitability of the region’s power companies. Cultures of Power is particularly adept in its use of diverse expository methods to convey the omnipresence of electricity in the region’s development. Lappen deftly moves from discussion of the nitty-gritty of bond referenda and the geography of hydroelectricity to analysis of how period art and architecture made Los Angeles’s electricity “visible” in underappreciated ways. The richness and complexity of the historical universe that Lappen recreates—one with electricity at its center—leaves the reader convinced that the “culture of power” is no mere historian’s term of art but rather a social phenomenon that was molded, perceived, and experienced by Angelenos themselves. Ultimately, Lappen’s dissertation achieves its goal of redefining our understanding of electrification’s role in the development of Southern California. Far beyond that, it makes a convincing case that our discipline as a whole must pay renewed attention to infrastructure as a key motive force in shaping the modern city.

Kenneth Jackson Award

Matthew Lassiter 

Destin Jenkins

Lisa Keller

Best Book in Urban History Award

Lucia Carminati

Daniela Samur

Anh Sy Huy Le

Joe William Trotter Jr. Prize

Joseph Plaster

Melanie Newport

Lynn Hollen Lees Prize

Cindy Ermus

Rebecca Madgin

Maximilian Miguel Scholz

Arnold Hirsch Award

Titilola Halimat Somotan

Evan Friss

Ashley Howard

Michael Katz Award

Bobby Cervantes

Jacob Anbinder