Garnette Cadogan's nonfiction explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. He writes about culture and the arts for various publications, and, in fall 2017, was included in a list of 29 writers from around the world who “represent the future of new writing.” He was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar (2017-2018) at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.

The editor-at-large of Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (co-edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro), he is at work on a book on walking.