Bettina Ng'weno (African American and African Studies)

Nairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New City traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads, and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng’weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, they imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures.

Christina Cogdell (Department of Design)

Toward a Living Architecture? examines the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology and complexity. Based on Christina Cogdell’s field research in architecture studios and biological labs, this book critiques generative architecture by evaluating its scientific rhetoric and disjunction from actual scientific theory and practice, definitively explaining the role of the natural sciences within contemporary architecture.

Hsuan L. Hsu (Department of English)

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception-or the sensory perception of temperature-is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labor management.

Beth Rose Middleton Manning (Department of Native American Studies)

Beth Rose Middleton examines new and innovative ideas concerning Native land conservancies, providing advice on land trusts, collaborations, and conservation groups. Increasingly, tribes are working to protect their access to culturally important lands by collaborating with Native and non- Native conservation movements. By using private conservation partnerships to reacquire lost land, tribes can ensure the health and sustainability of vital natural resources. In particular, tribal governments are using conservation easements and land trusts to reclaim rights to lost acreage. Through the use of these and other private conservation tools, tribes are able to protect or in some cases buy back the land that was never sold but rather was taken from them.

Brett Snyder (Department of Design)

California Changing offers a unique climate change tour, delving into architectural scale sites across the state. From innovative houses using sustainable techniques to historical locations ravaged by the combined forces of drought and wildfire, the book explores a range of poignant examples. The main visual contents are a set of architectural site illustrations that are each enhanced by an augmented reality component showcasing the interplay between past, present, and future scenarios.

Brett Snyder, a professor and chair of the MFA program in design at UC Davis, is both a teacher and an active practitioner whose work helps to reimagine spaces people know intimately while also collaboratively discovering what’s possible.

While structural racism can be measured across an entire neighborhood, city or county, its impact on people’s lives might be more localized. A recent study in sociology found that people most impacted by structural racism died more than two years sooner than the average American adult.