In 1748 a collection of Ottoman bureaucrats and hydrological engineers set out to map the sprawling system of aqueducts, collection basins, conduits, and fountains that sustained the residents of Istanbul. This was a period...
Michigan cities in the mid-twentieth century were prosperous places that helped to spawn the American middle class. Today, Detroit, Flint, and others have suffered more than half a century of urban crisis. Detroit is the largest city to have ever filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, while Flint gained...
Business turnover is constant in every neighborhood in New York: bakeries replace Mexican restaurants; glasses stores replace butcher shops. In his essay, “City Limits,” Colson Whitehead wrote about this change as a natural condition of New York. But what if the...
Planning Participation:Urban Design, Black Power, and the Struggle for Community Control across the American Century explores the emergence of “participatory planning” in the mid-twentieth century. Through a focus on federally funded—yet activist led—community action programs in the US, Caroline’s research examines how the Black Power movement, the War on Poverty, and models of community development originally developed to quell...
Davindar Singh’s dissertation project focuses on the particularly logistical political economy of Indian Punjab, the patterns of urbanization it produces and destroys, and the circulation of people, resources, and expressive (musical) media through the spacetime of this logistical political economy....
Thanks to the HMUI and other granting agencies, I was able to travel to DC and conduct substantial dissertation research on the history of 4-H clubs in the US and abroad. 4-H was the largest rural youth club throughout most of the US-allied world after 1945, and...
Abu Dhabi’s rapid urbanization and infrastructural development in the 1960s and 1970s accompanied a significant demographic shift, including a large inflow of South Asian migrant labor, particularly from the state of Kerala. My dissertation project, tentatively titled “Ghost Houses” studies the durable,...
The project aims to understand the relationality of distance and proximity, visibility and invisibility between a village and a futurist city-making project in Kenya. Through an experiential and sensorial approach to qualities of movements, socialization, laboring, and leisure in a seemingly liminal space...
The Coptic Orthodox community constitutes the largest Christian community in the Middle East today and has historically played a central role in Egyptian society. Still, the socio-political and intellectual contributions of Copts remain scantly studied. This digital project helps remedy the gap in the...
Nicosia, an ancient walled city in Cyprus, is the only divided capital worldwide. After the Turkish invasion in 1974, Nicosia was divided by a buffer zone into two ethnic groups, the Turkish-Cypriots in the north and the Greek-Cypriots in the south. This conflict led to forced displacement, urban segregation, and human rights violation, especially for local women. After the opening of Nicosia's buffer zone in 2003, the interaction of Cypriot women sparked bicommunal actions for peace over the Cyprus' conflict. Despite being oppressed and underrepresented, Cypriot women use Nicosia's...
Begging and street vending are a common sight in many cities in developing countries. Yet we hardly have any existing literature examining the economic behavior and interactions in these activities. There is hardly any existing micro evidence on their financial and demographic backgrounds of those panhandlers and street vendors. At the first stage, I intend to collect comprehensive evidence on these areas through a quantitative survey with street vendors and panhandlers, including children, in New Delhi, India. To get a holistic picture of their lives, the survey collects labor market...
Funding from HMUI will support archival research for my dissertation, "Where the Pipeline Begins: Crime Control, Child Protection, and the Development of Schooling in Chicago's Black Belt, 1900 - 1965." This...
The goal of this project is to assess whether the relationship between rent control policies and housing policy preferences (“NIMBYism”) is moderated by income. Building on a prior survey of tenants in Berlin, I am using the HMUI funds to obtain fine-grained data on local-level incomes. In the next step, I then examine whether the effect a recent Berlin rent control law varies with the socio-economic makeup of the neighborhood.
