Ananya Roy is a scholar of urban planning, geography, and social welfare at UCLA whose work examines inequality, poverty, displacement, and the politics of urban development. Her influential scholarship on urban informality challenges the idea that “informal” activity simply exists outside formal systems, instead examining how governments and institutions themselves produce and regulate informality.
Verónica Crossa examines street vending and the struggle over public space in Mexico City, asking what happens when efforts to regulate and “improve” the city collide with the livelihoods and everyday practices of the people already using its streets.
tamika l. butler (she/her or they/them) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research employs a critical race, historical, legal, and policy-based approach to examine how transportation policy and infrastructure have been used to segregate, isolate, and prevent the mobility of Black and other historically oppressed groups of people.
This book is Number One in addressing the politics of where we’re allowed to go in public. Adults don’t talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs reveals the opposite is true.
Majora Carter is an urban revitalization strategist, real estate developer, MacArthur Fellow, broadcaster, and author whose work focuses on creating opportunity within historically undervalued communities. Her approach connects economic development and talent retention to the belief that people should not have to leave their neighborhoods to find opportunity.
