We’re delighted to share that Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life has been selected for the longlist of the 2026 Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award. The award recognises outstanding non-fiction writing on the ways cities confront contemporary challenges and imagine urban futures, and this year’s longlist was selected from submissions received from around the world.
It’s particularly gratifying to see Performing New Orleans included among such a diverse and thought-provoking group of books. Looking across the longlist, what stands out is both the breadth of topics and the geographical reach of the work represented. The selected titles engage with questions of mobility, housing affordability, informal urbanism, migration, refugee settlement, public transport, shrinking cities, gender and leadership, and urban sustainability.
The books move between cities and regions including New Orleans, Nairobi, New York, cities across Africa and the Middle East, Australia, and global discussions around the 15-minute city and pedestrian urbanism. Collectively, they remind us that urban resilience is never just about infrastructure or policy; it is also about belonging, care, culture, everyday practices, and the ways communities adapt to change.
In that sense, we’re especially pleased that a book centred on performance and everyday cultural life sits alongside works focused on housing markets, transport systems, governance, migration and urban development. The longlist suggests a growing recognition that understanding cities requires multiple perspectives and methodologies, and that arts and culture have an important role to play in conversations about urban futures.
We are honoured to be in such company and grateful to everyone who has supported the project. Congratulations to all the authors on this year’s longlist.
The full longlist can be found on the Metropolis website: https://www.metropolis.org/news/what-are-cities-for-10-books-worth-reading-this-summer/