The Rights to the City – a distinctive interdisciplinary book series sponsored by the Urban Affairs Association and published by Routledge | Taylor & Francis – is now actively seeking proposals for monographs and curated edited volumes by both established and early-career researchers.
The series is committed to publishing empirically rigorous, theoretically informed, and practically relevant studies that interrogate processes of urban transformation and the struggles for social justice that they bring about. We invite high-quality proposals that analyze how rights—broadly conceived—are defined, acquired, and sustained by groups, and the institutions that represent them in the city. The editors are particularly interested in books that examine how cities and city-regions can be shaped to yield equitable and sustainable rights, learn from each other, and contribute to enhancing such rights on local, national, and global stages. The series is global in focus. We encourage proposals that push disciplinary boundaries and utilize a variety of methodological approaches to engage the series’ six main themes:
The Rights to the City series aims to appeal to a wide readership, including scholars, teachers, practitioners, activists, students, and general audiences. We are committed to providing an author-friendly publication experience that emphasizes timely and robust peer review and offers support to enhance the visibility and impact of work featured in the series. We look forward to hearing from authors interested in advancing our understanding of the social, spatial, and political dynamics of urban society and critically promoting more equitable and inclusive urban futures.
Welcome to the Rights to the City book series, an exciting new initiative that looks to advance impactful scholarship on some of the most essential issues and ideas in urban studies. Building upon—and moving beyond—Henri Lefebvre’s original treatise on ‘the right to the city’, our focus on rights to the city acknowledges the plurality, contestability, and ambiguity of a complex concept. Rather than something that is codified legally, rights to the city both reflect and embrace an open, progressive orientation towards democratizing urban life in city centers and metropolitan peripheries around the world. The series is therefore interested in books that promote interdisciplinary dialogue and provide theoretical and empirical foundations needed to build more just urban futures.
We intend Rights to the City to be inclusive of diverse voices across the globe, and open to explorations of formal and informal urban politics and policies. Prospective authors should expect to feature in a series with a clear identity, purpose, and a reputation for publishing substantive and impactful research. Potential readers should expect high-quality, rigorous research that engages crucial questions regarding whose right to what city? The series will feature books that go beyond the diagnosis of problems to present constructive strategies to address urban inequities and systemic injustices. In other words, this is a series that aims to be an innovative resource for a range of global scholarly and practitioner audiences in support of critical urban research and action worldwide.
Dr. Jean-Paul Addie, Editor
Urban Studies Institute, Georgia State University
