Kara Murphy Schlichting, PhD, is a historian of urban and environmental history. A resident of Brooklyn and a faculty member at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), she researches and teaches urban-environmental history, with a focus on coastal environments and New York City.
Inspired by inspired by the pressing contemporary issues of climate change and increasingly extreme seasons in North America, her new work explores the long history of the urban heat island effect in New York to reveal 150 years of climate history in the city.
Her book New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago, 2019) offers a new model for understanding the invention of metropolitan New York. By broadening the definition of planning, and paying close attention to the levels of governance on which it occurred, this book uncovers a complex regional history, not just a history of the city’s influence on its periphery.
“In this perceptive addition to literature on the history of urban planning and development, Schlichting shifts attention from the downtown core of New York City to show that the urban periphery was not so peripheral after all. . . . Highly recommended.” (Choice)
“New York Recentered takes into account the twin dynamic of New York as an island city and as a regional entity. This is a welcomed change in perspective that allows the author to examine metropolitan growth and development from the relatively unstudied, but important, vantage point of the periphery. Goodbye to center city–heavy perspectives on Gotham!”
Martin V. Melosi | author of The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present
“New York Recentered is an important work in urban history because it will force us all to look beyond Manhattan and take in New York as a regional city united by water. I don’t know of another book that attempts to look at the regional city in this way, and I commend Schlichting for the originality of her approach, the thoroughness of her argument, and the success she has achieved.”
David Schuyler | author of Embattled River: The Hudson and Modern American Environmentalism
