Manchester and New York. Two Atlantic capitals of modernity, ‘shock cities’ of their day; two cities where the ruins of a municipal socialism are now buried under a flood of finance capital, yet where the irrepressible spirit of resistance pushes up through the cracks.
Join authors Owen Hatherley and Isaac Rose to think comparatively, and assess the balance sheets and prospects for would-be-left-wing city governments in a right-wing society.

Isaac Rose works as an organiser for the Greater Manchester Tenants Union and is author of the The Rentier City (Repeater, 2024).

Owen Hatherley writes regularly about aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, the London Review of Books, Sidecar and Tribune. He is the author of many books, most recently Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer (Penguin, 2022), Artificial Islands (Repeater, 2022) – which won Best Book and Best Monograph at the 2023 Architectural Book Awards – Transitional Objects: Photographs of Poland (the modernist, 2023), a photobook, and Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects (Repeater, 2024), a short book about social democracy in New York City. He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin.