In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.

She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

Steamboats and railroads turned long-distance travel from an arduous undertaking into a regularized commodity: travel became something that people could purchase. Historians have long understood the economic and political ramifications of improved travel, but the social and cultural dimensions of early steam transit are less studied. In The American Transportation Revolution, Aaron W. Marrs explores the cultural influence of steamboats and railroads, which fascinated Americans across the country. Demonstrating the wide cultural reach of steam transit, Marrs draws from an eclectic set of sources, including children's books, comic almanacs, musical works, sermons, etiquette guides, cartoons, and employee rulebooks. This rich tapestry of cultural production helped "naturalize" steam technology for Americans before they ever encountered steam transit in person. Before ever seeing a railroad, Americans could read a novel that took place on a railroad, see an image of a train on currency, or purchase piano music imitating a train. These cultural artifacts made these new forms of transport feel familiar and natural. Marrs examines how cultural norms about travel emerged through the prescriptions of etiquette authors and the actions of travelers themselves, how enslaved people made innovative use of transportation networks to escape from slavery, and much more. Marrs convincingly demonstrates steam transportation's broad cultural impact on the United States, and how Americans, in turn, imprinted their own meaning on this new technology.

In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.

An increasing part of the workforce is experimenting with new forms of work, as freelancers, self-employed or highly skilled employees with greater autonomy. International in scope, this book comprehensively explores these new models of work, mobility and life trajectories, and the increasing role of non-metropolitan coworking spaces.

A successful transition to a post-automobility future will require new ways of thinking about and conceptualizing automobility, one of the most significant and powerful imaginaries of contemporary neo-liberalism. This book offers such a view by reconceptualizing automobility in its entirety as both an imaginary and a dreamscape. In order to address the challenges, externalities and tragedies that automobility has brought upon us, automobility, we argue, must end as we know it.

However, this updated second edition of How Great Cities Happen explains how crises like climate change and the lack of affordable housing demonstrate the urgent need for a broader approach in order to create and sustain great cities. Offering innovative solutions to these contemporary challenges, the book examines emerging directions in strategic land use transport planning and analyses how cities function as a home for future generations and other species.

COVID-19 crisis prompted the public authorities to rethink the use of public space in order to develop means of transport that are both efficient and adapted to the health context and their effects on cycling practices in Europe, North, and South America. Its contributors collectively reveal and evidence through policies analysis, mapping, and innovative qualitative analysis bridging video and interviews, how those new infrastructures and policies can be a trigger for change in a context of mobility transition. This book provides an important element on the way local authorities can act in a quicker and more agile way. While some decisions are specific to the context of the beginning of the pandemic, the analysis offers lessons on the way to implement the transition toward a low-carbon mobility, on the importance of processes based on trials and errors, on the political stakes of reallocating road space.

ve source of revenue. Students from India have especially been seen as among the most desirable populations, as they’re typically fluent in English and overwhelmingly enroll in professional fields deemed critical to the knowledge economy. The large numbers of these youth migrating for their education tend to be viewed as a shining example of the value of the contemporary global university and how it enables ambitious people to secure opportunities not available to them in their home nation. However, a deeper examination of these young people’s encounters reveals a more complicated story than glossy brochures and paeans to American higher education would suggest. Indebted Mobilities draws on Susan Thomas’s close shadowing of a group of middle-class Indian migrant men who attended a public university in New York just as the institution sought to “internationalize” its campus in the wake of ongoing withdrawal of state funding. Thomas takes the reader along with the young men as they study, work, and socialize, pursuing the successful futures they believed to be promised when they migrated for an American education. All the while, they must face their marginalization as they become enmeshed in the fraught inclusion politics of contemporary university life in the United States. At the heart of these encounters is these students’ relationship to debt—not just material ones that include student loans, but moral and affective debts as well. This indebtedness, which keeps them tied to both India and the United States, is meaningful to how Indian middle-class men make sense of their experiences as student-migrants. These youth long to be modern “men of the world.” Yet Thomas illuminates how the complex realities that arise for them, informed by the logic of US exceptionalism, force a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants.