As we write, New York City counts over 62,000 homeless people on the street and in the shelter, a number that may well be short of a more accurate figure. Our city has a right to shelter, but not a right to housing, and there is a critical difference at play between the two: Shelter only removes the visible fact of homelessness from view, while doing little to change the material circumstances.

Asher Ghertner continues his work as a creative and profound scholar with his first monograph, "Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi". This book is a great read yet also manages to be impressively detailed in its data and textured in its ethnographic feel. Ghertner proves particularly agile in his movement among sites in Delhi as well as among concepts and modes of academic engagement, shifting from exposition and explication to conceptual development and back again.

"Seeing Like a City" is a testament to the evolution of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s urban thinking. This book is about doing urban theory without the safety net of established narratives, in the hopes of grasping new viewpoints from which to see the urban corners, patchworks, and dynamics that are either over-simplified or utterly dismissed by mainstream scholarship.

This book is condensed and challenging, and it is a must-read for scholars, professionals, and urban activists, as it explores not just the well-known work of Agamben that was translated to English, but also some less familiar texts translated and discussed by Boano.

Aware of the limitations of previous strategies of social control, bourgeois reform appropriated many of the aforementioned proposals and reframed them in its own agenda a few decades after the inception of Central Park, creating more dynamic but closely monitored small parks and playgrounds in working-class neighborhoods, in New York City and across the US. A more nuanced elucidation of the problematic agency of design, therefore, is needed.