Madeleine Hamlin's paper critically contends that the Chicago Housing Authority's important pilot program to allow a limited number of individuals with criminal records to live in their housing replicates pervasive fears of crime linking poverty to criminality.

In this article, Julie Chamberlain asks what the concept of the 'urban laboratory' achieves in the context of racialized urban disinvestment and stigmatization, with the Hamburg International Building Exhibition’s (Internationale Bauausstellung Hamburg, 2006–2013) work in Hamburg–Wilhelmsburg as an example.

Taking the case of Calaveras County, California, Michael Polson's article shows how medical cannabis activists reimagined the urban and rural in capacious ways, thus catalyzing a local transformation that mirrored national trends around drugs, penality and Rightist politics.

This essay by Samantha M Fox show how, during the socialist era, street lamps were an essential instrument in the construction and conceptualization of socialist urban space. Since privatization, they have come to signify the fractured and radically individualized nature of capitalist urban space.

This paper by Martin Müller and Elena Trubina discusses improvisation as a liminal practice of inhabiting the in-between that marks urban spaces from squats and brownfields to communal gardens, from infrastructural maintenance and urban living labs to political protest and solidarity in times of crisis.

In this article, Wendy Cheng examines newspaper publisher Elias Manchester Boddy’s transactions of purchasing three Japanese-owned nurseries as an instance of racial plunder: a morally and affectively inflected act of theft structured by racism that is as much about the act’s preconditions and afterlives as it is about the act itself.

In this paper, Elise T Jaramillo examines the way that the social and material reality of water flow troubles deeply embedded racial and socioeconomic divisions by creating fluid kinship: a social space that flows like an acequia, according to a topography of human relationships.

This paper by Christopher Neubert explores how research focused on odor can reveal the complicated dynamics through which bodies are enrolled into subject formation and become a terrain of political struggle.

Başak Saraç-Lesavre's paper offers an ethnographical account of activities undertaken by their Nuclear Task Force at a peculiar moment.

By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, Angeliki Balayannis' paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference.