2025 New Books Showcase

Tuesday, November 18, 2025
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
1028 HN (in-person)

The Hunter College Department of Geography and Environmental Science is proud to present its 2025 New Books Showcase, highlighting the latest publications from our faculty. Join us for an engaging event featuring presentations, insights into urban environmental challenges, GIS applications, and innovative approaches to building equitable cities.

Featured Books and Authors

Jochen Albrecht – GIS and Housing: Principles and Practices
Dr. Albrecht, GISP, is a professor of Computational and Theoretical Geography. In spite of this term, he is a member of the Board of the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI) and a keen proponent of the good, i.e., professional use of GIS. His book GIS and Housing: Principles and Practices, co-authored with two Hunter College alumni, is bridging the gap between abstract GIS methods and practical solutions to one of the most wicked problems our society is facing today. It provides GIS technicians and analysts with an overview of US housing challenges and examples of how to effectively integrate spatial thinking to address housing policy questions, while simultaneously introducing housing policy analysts to advanced GIS concepts and techniques to create livable neighborhoods that include housing alternatives beyond the single family. Through numerous examples, the authors advocate for a collaborative approach that encourages professionals, policymakers, and analysts, across different ideological and political perspectives, to confront the multifaceted housing crisis.

Marianna Pavlovskaya – Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation
Dr. Pavlovskaya is a Professor of Geography at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is an urban and feminist geographer and a critical GIS scholar. Her new book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation, collectively authored with three colleagues Maliha Safri (Drew University), Stephen Healy (Western Sydney University), and Craig Borowiak (Haverford College) was published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2025. This book documents with data, maps, and ethnographies how people living under hegemonic capitalist systems find ways to build their own economic institutions based on solidarity instead of profit and competition. Might this be the future of our cities?

William Solecki – Cities and Environmental Change: From Crisis to Transformation
Dr. Solecki has studied urbanization and climate change for almost thirty years. He has served as an author on several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments and is a co-founder of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN). He is also a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers. Environmental issues have always burdened cities and their residents. In Cities and Environmental Change, Dr. Solecki analyzes how cities have solved past environmental challenges and provides a framework on which to build solutions to the problems caused by the climate crisis. The book illustrates the process of urban environmental transition and the role crises play in shifts in urban environmental policy.

Everyone is welcome to attend. No RSVP required!