Student housing has emerged as a mainstream global asset class, while the concentration of students in particular neighbourhoods through a process of "studentification" has increasingly been recognized as an important phenomenon in a variety of international contexts. Yet student housing is often associated with vexing planning problems associated with noise disturbances, behavioural issues, and poor property upkeep. Therefore, attention to how the student housing submarket is formed and operates is essential. This dissertation draws primarily on a case study of the City of Waterloo to investigate the role of a variety of actors including developers, investors, landlords and property managers, planners, institutions, students, and others in creating and shaping the student housing submarket. In doing so, it interrogates how and why student housing has become a favourable investment, the role of the life course therein, and the implications for planning practice. Waterloo is an especially salient case, as it is home to nearly half of Canada's private purpose-built student accommodations and is an exemplar of the so-called "knowledge economy city." The analysis combines political-economic and intergenerational approaches. Data are drawn from document analyses of planning reports and real estate industry filings, reports, grey literature, and related materials as well as semi-structured interviews with 44 key informants from the planning and real estate sectors, universities, and student and neighbourhood organizations, and 27 students. The findings are described in four empirical article-based chapters. The first article demonstrates how planning in Waterloo has not merely responded to changes in the student housing submarket, but since the 1980s has actively anticipated change and as a result has shaped subsequent trajectories of studentification. The second article examines where and why the student housing sector in Canada has garnered the attention of large-scale finance-backed investors, and the strategies these players use in their attempts to extract value from the sector. It also considers the implications of this process for students and cities as it has played out in Waterloo. It concludes that the development of student housing in Canada has been largely driven by the search for new avenues for profitable investment, and therefore studentification can be interpreted as a spatial and sectoral fix within capitalist urbanization. The third article investigates the role of planning, real estate strategies, and neighbourhood politics in shaping studentification at the local scale by producing "generationed" spaces based on a distinct student life course stage. It finds that creating a student neighbourhood in this way facilitates the extraction of rents, and argues for a radical reconfiguration of the politics of studentification based on intergenerationality. The final empirical chapter evaluates Waterloo's attempts to bring more non-student residents into a near-campus neighbourhood, a process and policy I call "post-studentification." Despite promise to address some issues, in practice, the strategy may not achieve its intended outcomes or be applicable as a model elsewhere, and may reinforce inequalities along the dimensions of class, age, and gender. As a whole, the research contributes to understanding student housing as a matter of "town, gown, and capital" by theorizing studentification and its relationship to other urban processes, including capitalist urbanization. It also illustrates the centrality of the life course to these processes. Finally, given the role of planning therein, the dissertation provides practical recommendations for formal planning practice, post-secondary education institutions, and housing advocates for building a more equitable post-studentification city.

For close to a century, Harlem has been the iconic black neighborhood widely seen as the heart of African American life and culture, both celebrated as the vanguard of black self-determination and lamented as the face of segregation. But with Harlem’s demographic, physical, and commercial landscapes rapidly changing, the neighborhood’s status as a setting and symbol of black political and cultural life looks uncertain. As debate swirls around Harlem’s present and future, Race Capital? revisits a century of the area’s history, culture, and imagery, exploring how and why it achieved its distinctiveness and significance and offering new accounts of Harlem’s evolving symbolic power. In this book, leading scholars consider crucial aspects of Harlem’s social, political, and intellectual history; its artistic, cultural, and economic life; and its representation across an array of media and genres. Together they reveal a community at once local and transnational, coalescing and conflicted; one that articulated new visions of a cosmopolitan black modernity while clashing over distinctions of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. Topics explored include Harlem as a literary phenomenon; recent critiques of Harlem exceptionalism; gambling and black business history; the neighborhood’s transnational character; its importance in the black freedom struggle; black queer spaces; and public policy and neighborhood change in historical context. Spanning a century, from the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance to present-day controversies over gentrification, Race Capital? models new Harlem scholarship that interrogates exceptionalism while taking seriously the importance of place and locality, offering vistas onto new directions for African American and diasporic studies.

"This book takes up the question of how higher education institutions could benefit from serving new settlers in the migration catalyzed by the shift to remote work"--

State capitals are an indelible part of the American psyche, spatial representations of state power and national identity. Learning them by heart is a rite of passage in grade school, a pedagogical exercise that emphasizes the importance of committing place-names to memory. But geographers have yet to analyze state capitals in any depth. In American Capitals, Christian Montès takes us on a well-researched journey across America—from Augusta to Sacramento, Albany to Baton Rouge—shedding light along the way on the historical circumstances that led to their appointment, their success or failure, and their evolution over time. While all state capitals have a number of characteristics in common—as symbols of the state, as embodiments of political power and decision making, as public spaces with private interests—Montès does not interpret them through a single lens, in large part because of the differences in their spatial and historical evolutionary patterns. Some have remained small, while others have evolved into bustling metropolises, and Montès explores the dynamics of change and growth. All but eleven state capitals were established in the nineteenth century, thirty-five before 1861, but, rather astonishingly, only eight of the fifty states have maintained their original capitals. Despite their revered status as the most monumental and historical cities in America, capitals come from surprisingly humble beginnings, often plagued by instability, conflict, hostility, and corruption. Montès reminds us of the period in which they came about, “an era of pioneer and idealized territorial vision,” coupled with a still-evolving American citizenry and democracy.

'Peter J. Taylor has produced a sweeping, empirically grounded, defense of cities as fundamental building blocks of long-term, large scale social structures; a way of freeing social science from state-centric bias; and indeed, mankind's hope. However, the single greatest strength of this complex, seductive, argument is the insistence on treating cities relationally, as process. Here the key to understanding the significance of cities is by studying them in terms of the dynamic networks they form and in their relations to states.' – Richard E. Lee, Binghamton University, US 'The founding father of the famous Globalization and World Cities research network and think-tank on worldwide links between cities presents this fascinating overview on cities in geohistory. By moving cities to the centre stage, Peter Taylor proposes that concern for states tell only part of the macro-social story of humanity. Cities have been, and are, the engines of innovation. This impressive new book provides new insights into why cities succeed or fail. The book is in the class with broadminded presentations like Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.' – Christian Matthiessen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and President, International Geographical Union's Commission on Urban Geography 'This is a "big" book by Peter Taylor. It tells of the extraordinary world-making powers of cities across the ages, it explains why a state-centric social science has constrained recognition of these powers over the last two centuries, and it outlines a new "indisciplinarity" to help us make sense of a human condition increasingly forged out of the urban. Anyone troubled by the social sciences as we know them, ought to read this book.' – Ash Amin, Cambridge University, UK and author, Land of Strangers Accepting that cities are extraordinary, this book provides an original city-centred narrative of human creativity, past, present and future. In this innovative, ambitious and wide-ranging book, Peter Taylor demonstrates that cities are the epicenters of human advancement. In exploring cities as sites through which economies flourish, by harnessing the creative potential of myriad communication networks, the author considers cities from varying temporal and spatial perspectives. Four stories of cities are told: the origins of city networks; the domination of cities by world-empires; the genesis of a singular modern creative interval in which innovation culminates in today's globalised cities; and finally, the need for cities to act as centres for human creativity to produce a more resilient global society in the current crisis century. Providing a long-term view through which to consider the role of cities in attending to incipient crises of the twenty-first century, this closely argued thesis will prove essential for students and scholars of urban studies, geography and sociology, and all with a professional interest in, or personal fascination for, cities.

Today is a new metropolitan age and for the first time ever more people live in cities than they do anywhere else. As cities strengthen their international and cultural influence, the global world is acted out most articulately in the world′s urban hubs - through its diverse cultures, broad networks and innovative styles of governance. Looking at the city through its internal dynamics, the book examines how governance and cultural policy play out in a national and international framework. Making a truly global contribution to the literature, the editors bring together a truly international and highly-respected bevy of scholars. In doing so, they skilfully steer debates beyond the city as an economic powerhouse, to cover issues that fully comprehend a city′s cultural dynamics and its impact on policy including alternative economies, creativity, migration, diversity, sustainability, education and urban planning. Innovative in its approach and content, this book is ideal for students, scholars and researchers interested in sociology, urban studies, cultural studies, and public policy.

In 1933, the Banff School opened in the stunning surroundings of Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies. From its beginnings offering a single drama course, it has since grown into the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, a renowned cultural destination. Uplift traces its first four decades as it generated ideals of culture and liberal democratic citizenship intrinsic to the development of modern Canada. In an era of unstable cultural policy and state support, Uplift draws welcome attention to the continued place of the arts, culture, and the humanities in public education and a life well lived.