Ruth Fincher, Kurt Iveson, Helga Leitner.  Everyday Equalities:
Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities.  Minneapolis 
University of Minnesota Press, 2019.  264 pp. Ill., tables.  $27.00
(paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-9464-8.

Joseph Ben Prestel.  Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in
Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910.  Oxford  Oxford University Press, 2017. 
288 pp.  $93.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-879756-2.

Constance Smith.  Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and Urban
Belonging.  Melton  Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2019.  223 pp. 
$99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84701-233-3.

Lukasz Stanek.  Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe,
West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War.  Princeton 
Princeton University Press, 2020.  368 pp.  $60.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-691-16870-8.

Reviewed by Diana Wylie (Boston University)
Published on H-Africa (August, 2020)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut

Beyond the Myopia of Privilege: New Directions in Global Urban Studies

Hoping to preempt a retaliatory attack, a Muslim immigrant slips off
her scarf. She is riding a bus in Brisbane and wants no one to
associate her with a Muslim gunman who has just taken hostages nine
hundred kilometers away in Sydney. Her simple act of self-protection
provides one twenty-first-century glimpse of the anxiety that often
comes with living in modern cities: are you safe, do you belong?   

Probing these insecurities may help to strip the veil from the eyes
of the privileged, such as those citizens of the Global North who
define the urban norm by their own affluent and secure experience.
Four recently published urban studies, discussed below, set out to
show their readers what they may have missed seeing. Ignoring
geographical and cultural boundaries, their authors focus on urban
problems shared across the globe. Doing so allows them to reject the
historical experience of Western Europe as a universal model for
urban development. They are interested, too, in the urban experience
of all social classes. The anxiety expressed in the simple act of
removing a head scarf suggests yet another trait the books share:
most of them stress the historical and political significance of
feelings.

In _Emotional Cities, Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo,
1860-1910_ (2017), Joseph Ben Prestel makes the unusual choice of
focusing, in alternate chapters, on two cities not normally compared.
He is examining a period when life within both cities was
intensifying in the wake of the rapid advent of steam power,
railroads, and the telegraph. The emotional consequences of living in
a time of revolutionized production and communication were profound
and remarkably similar in Berlin and Cairo, at least among the middle
classes. People worried that their social fabric was unraveling.
Nighttime leisure activity like fast dancing and barhopping disturbed
them. Working-class people had even begun promenading for pleasure in
the streets of Berlin; how could the middle class avoid contact with
them and, worst of all, with streetwalkers? Berliners thought they
were losing their moral compass, while Cairenes facing similar
changes feared they were losing their rationality. The city brought
out dangerous, nervous feelings, ones they rejected as alien to
traditional virtues like _Sitte_ (German custom) or '_aql_ (rational
emotions in Cairo). By the early twentieth century these on-edge
citizens were thinking they had found remedies by moving to the new
suburbs and engaging there in physical exercise. The "they" in
question are mainly the middle classes. They are the ones whose
worries are most easily retrievable in the form of books,
periodicals, medical literature, though some concerns of the lower
classes may also be ferreted out of police files and court records.

Prestel wants to take the field of urban history and de-regionalize
it as well as avoid Eurocentric models of normal historical
development, like the ones embedded in the linear modernization
theory of the 1960s. Instead of defining "stages" of development, he
is interested in comparability across the globe. There were, of
course, profound differences between the circumstances of Berlin and
Cairo. They were not always in sync. Most notably, Egypt was subject
serially in the late nineteenth century to control by two different
metropoles--Istanbul and London--while Germany was pridefully
launching its own empire. This difference in power and wealth had a
major impact on people's emotions and debates, leading Germans, for
example, to consider Egyptians backward and medieval, despite the
fact that they were dealing with similarly unsettling experiences
like massive urban migration. Nevertheless, the middle classes in
both places feared a loss of social cohesion, in their eyes glaringly
apparent in innovations like professional matchmaking (Berlin) and
drinking alcohol (Cairo). They both argued that citizenship should be
earned through taking control of one's emotions. As their cities grew
more and more challenging, they increasingly turned to the
countryside and searched for their "true" national identity in folk
custom. Prestel acknowledges that the debates did have a nationalist
cast: Berliners blamed the French ("last but not least the cancan,"
according to one Berliner) for their own moral decay (p. 33);
Cairenes believed they needed to be ultra-rational--following the
reason of the mind and no longer of the heart--as well as physically
fit.  Only then could they compete with robust European nations.
Prestel argues that the urban turn to rural areas for solace and
identity should be seen not only in nationalist or anticolonial
terms, but also as a shared critique of modern city life. Berlin and
Cairo were on a "parallel historical trajectory" (p. 20).

Writing with care, and a remarkable command of four relevant
languages (German, Arabic, French, English), Prestel avoids reductive
statements. He notes, for example, that while "emotional practices"
are not entirely determined by social structures, they are "a
historical product of social changes"; these feelings go on to exceed
and destabilize the structures giving rise to them (p. 18). Prestel
avoids making the two cities seem identical by stressing, rather,
that the debates of their denizens show a "shared understanding,"
including a joint fascination with the new sciences of psychology and
city planning as well as with medical advances (p. 192). He is more
interested in the adoption of urban change than in the origins of
those changes: he has chosen not to explore the impact of religious
faith; nor does he discuss how class struggle and material interests
produced the traits distinguishing and uniting his two cities.

Prestel has written an innovative work that complements the classic
studies of nineteenth-century urbanization, like those by Frederick
Engels and Charles Booth which laid out in meticulous detail the
terrible conditions of housing, sanitation, and diet endured by the
urban poor. In joining the two cities he challenges urban historians
and perhaps even city-dwellers to divest themselves of their myopic
focus on their own cities as unique and on European cities, in
general, as defining the global norm.

Lukasz Stanek builds a different kind of transnational scholarly
bridge in _Architecture in Global Socialism, Eastern Europe, West
Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War _(2020). Focusing on the
work of Eastern Bloc architects and planners in two different regions
of the Global South, he is trying to unseat not Eurocentrism _per
se_, but a bias toward the impact of Western Europe. There were
other, underacknowledged "geographies of collaboration," he writes,
that had a big postcolonial impact on urban space (p. 2). He joins
scholars who have written recently about "worldwide mobilities of
architecture" by showing how architectural apparatus--blueprints and
master plans, materials and machinery, design details and images,
norms and regulations, teaching curricula and methods--flowed out of
Eastern Europe to sites in Africa and the Middle East, specifically
Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City (p. 2).

The originality of this book lies in its depiction of the Cold War as
a period when the big drivers of international architectural exchange
came not only from former imperial metropoles like London or from new
ones like New York or Moscow. The interactions of Eastern Bloc and
African and Middle Eastern architects were frequent and manifold and,
as Stanek writes with apparent pride, their projects were often under
local direction. He wants to show that a "socialist world system" did
indeed exist in the form of real and significant trade links. Stanek,
a Polish architectural historian based at the University of
Manchester, rewrites Cold War history by drawing attention to
otherwise ignored players--Bulgaria, for example--that have been
"written out of Western-based historiography of architecture" (p. 2).

This architectural history fits in the classic mold of describing in
great detail the process by which architects and planners developed
their plans, even for projects that were never built. This act of
careful reconstruction took Stanek to many eastern archives, plus a
few in Africa and the Middle East. Abundantly quoting, describing,
and illustrating these plans, he has written a book which almost
constitutes an archive in itself. Regrettably, the text within the
illustrations is not always legible (and never translated).
References to the images are often glancing. What matters most is
"the worlding of Eastern Europe" and the construction of a "world
socialist system" that was neither utopian nor ideological, but an
epiphenomenon of the "reality of foreign trade" (pp. 305, 171). 
Putting his findings in the broadest possible context, Stanek
concludes that the Cold War accelerated the "global mobility of
architecture" and was thus a progenitor of architecture's current
globalization.

What impact did these eastern-inspired plans actually have on
people's lives? Stanek claims that they provided "frameworks for
everyday lives, ... create[d] points of concentration, and ... set
extension vectors for urbanization processes" (p. 2). "New collective
subjectivities" emerged and "global projects of solidarity" were
tested (p. 27). The substantiation of these claims will have to be
sought elsewhere.

How can we know the long- or even medium-term significance of a
particular urban project? That question is impossible to answer if
the users of those buildings or neighborhoods are left out of the
analysis. This point is driven home by Constance Smith in _Nairobi in
the Making, Landscapes of Time and Urban Belonging_ (2019), an
anthropological study based on her residence in Kaloleni, a Nairobi
housing project built by the British colonial government in the 1940s
for families of Kenyan workers. Unlike Prestel's focus on
middle-class urban emotions and Stanek's interest in Eastern Bloc
planners, Smith's eye is trained on slum-dwellers. How do they try to
shape a decent and secure urban life?

The postcolonial Kenyan government has abandoned Kaloleni. There is
no trash collection. Because the population of this mainly Luo
(western Kenyan) neighborhood is now three times greater than it was
created to house, its trash has become prodigious and unhealthy,
especially when it rains and the streets stink like open sewers. The
many people living in each cluster of dwellings--the original
bungalow or block augmented by numerous jerry-built, revenue-earning
"extensions"--share one latrine and one shower room without running
water. Most residents work at informal jobs within the estate. (Only
a quarter of Kenyans are employed in the formal sector.) Given its
poverty, Kaloleni has an unsurprisingly high crime rate, but no
police. Its residents are now facing a different kind of threat to
their security than thieves. The danger is posed by Vision 2030, the
Kenyan government's scheme to jolt Nairobi into becoming a globally
connected, middle-income city. If the plans to raze the slum and
allow two private Chinese companies to build in its place 55,000
apartments actually succeed, the people of Kaloleni will lose homes
they have carefully built up over the decades and thus their own
sense of history and belonging.

Rather than despair, the people of Kaloleni take a wide variety of
creative initiatives to enhance their sense of belonging. They modify
their domestic architecture to emulate the enclaved style of living
in the richer quarters of Nairobi, building perimeter walls and
putting up burglar bars. They not only try to manage the practical
signs of decay by, for example, planting lawns, but they also tell
the area's history in such a way that they become the legal owners of
the land or even assert that their houses still belong to Queen
Elizabeth; they stake claims by telling stories that document-bound
historians would find distorted or simply false. "Kenya grew from
here," they say, as if the run-down housing estate gave birth to
today's independent nation, which, strictly speaking, it did not (p.
79). Asserting the historical importance of Kaloleni is their way of
presenting its identity, and their own, in a positive light. One side
effect of these flights of historical imagination is that the
colonial management of the estate is now remembered for its
orderliness rather than for excessive control.

People adopt words like "digital" (in English) to express their
understanding of a future in which they are actively trying to craft
a place. They do not reject Vision 2030--the glossy and probably
utopian vision of the new Nairobi being peddled by international city
planners, corporate leaders, and local political elites--so much as
worry that they will be left behind, "living in a museum where time
stands still" (p. 172). They are strung up between fantasizing about
what Vision 2030 might bring and fearing what it might take away.
They have long hedged their bets, in any case, by building retirement
homes in western Kenya. These days, however, fewer young people speak
their parents' home language. They are increasingly wedded to Nairobi
as their only home and as the site of all their dreams for the
future. They are on Facebook and read diasporic blogs. The formerly
inspirational power of nationalism and of devotion to one's rural
place of origin is waning in favor of popular dreams of a "digital"
future that can be attained, if at all, only in a city like Nairobi.
When Smith calls for more studies of "global urbanism," she is aware
that these patterns pervade the Global South (p. 182).

Smith has done empathetic and adventurous fieldwork. (Her lodging in
Kaloleni was no bigger than her bed.) She scrupulously avoids making
Manichaean statements by, for example, saying that Nairobi seems to
be simultaneously a place of impossibility and potential; uncertainty
has been made routine. The ambiguities and incongruities of living in
the Global South, she argues, should not be explained away but
recognized for what they are: "generative" (p. 182). By "generative,"
she may mean that, despite the failure of most Kaloleni residents to
live truly "digital" lives, their creative efforts in dealing with
the challenges of home-making have succeeded in generating a sense of
belonging, of life projects, of meaning. These efforts contribute to
the particularity of Nairobi, which is now in danger of being
homogenized by international real estate markets that treat land only
as a financial resource and that frame the city's future as a generic
global city for the elite.

Rather than _faits accomplis_, Smith writes, cities are continually
being made. Urban "belonging is about crafting a place for oneself in
the future" (p. 181). One hopes that future researchers, or perhaps
even Smith herself, will grapple with questions she does not address
about the direction this "making" is likely to take. One feels driven
to ask what the slum-dwellers are _actually_ forging in the material
world, not simply in their imaginations: can they reap any tangible
benefits, or are they simply creating a tenuous sense of belonging?
Further, do they frame their hoped-for benefits--whether tangible or
intangible--mainly in individual or in communal terms? In short, are
the solidary nationalist dreams of the 1960s being replaced by
individualistic hopes for the material rewards of modern urban
inclusion like luxury apartments?

In _Everyday Equalities, Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial
Cities _(2019), four geographers (Ruth Fincher, Kurt Iveson, Helga
Leitner, Valerie Preston) approach the problem of modern urban
anxiety from a decidedly activist point of view. Professing
"progressive ideals" (opposition to racism, support for social
justice), they have co-authored a book with the practical aim of not
only honoring but also promoting public and private initiatives that
will allow people to live together as equals without sacrificing
their cultural differences. A salient example is the Muslim woman
who, after removing her scarf in order to avoid being stigmatized in
public, was joined by a non-Muslim stranger who urged her to put it
back on and then launched an "I'll ride with you" hashtag to offer
protection to other Muslims.

The key words in their title--_equality_, _multiculture_,
_settler--_flag their ethical concerns: that all people living in a
city, immigrants or not, should be treated equally; that modern
cities should be defined as "multicultures" because cities are
inevitably "socially diverse societies" (p. 1); and that even
Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, and Los Angeles should be understood as
"settler colonial cities" because they were "established through
concerted efforts to dispossess and eliminate indigenous societies"
(p. 2). Another key word--_everyday--_signals their celebration of
the humble.

The immigrants who flock to these cities, mainly from Latin America
and Asia, are being buffeted by the forces of neoliberalism and
neoconservatism raging not just in Australia and North America but
around the globe. The authors envision two enemies. Neoliberals fail
immigrants by advocating individual self-help and resisting the use
of government resources to ease their integration. Neoconservatives,
proposing that the state deploy its powers to defend inherited social
hierarchies, find a dangerously receptive audience among right-wing
populists and white nationalists. Despite this arsenal of
anxiety-provoking forces, the four case studies demonstrate the
situation is not hopeless. Agitation may have the power to spark
progress by orchestrating egalitarian everyday encounters until they
are institutionalized. If people can work hard to forge solidarities
which have political repercussions, a new social order can slowly be
made.

By arguing for the equal treatment of all groups, the geographers are
not arguing for "assimilation," "toleration," or even official
policies of "multiculturalism," because they all fail to tackle "the
inequities associated with cultural difference, particularly
racialized difference" (p. 25). They are situating themselves instead
in the long line of activist-reformers alarmed at injustice and
poverty like Jacob Riis (and of postcolonial theorists like Paul
Gilroy and Stuart Hall). They are thus distancing themselves from
urban designers like Ebenezer Howard and Frederick Law Olmsted who
focused on creating agreeable urban space in which new communities
could gradually be forged. In fact, the geographers find excessively
optimistic, or even naïve, the idea that sheer contact will
inevitably lead to social harmony, preferring to make a simple
statement: popular initiatives matter.

The sequence of the case studies takes the reader serially through
everyday challenges faced by immigrants: making a home (Melbourne),
working for a living (Toronto), moving around the city (Sydney), and
making public space (Los Angeles). The Melbourne case study shows how
very complicated it is to make a home in another culture. "Home" is
not only a house but also a neighborhood. The physical shape of both
is important. Rules laid out by the government in a public housing
project, as well as by developers in private developments, have a big
impact on how "at home" people actually feel. Do recent refugees, for
example, have to live packed together in segregated housing, and can
they get access to a public park? Does the way a particular space is
configured, and even decorated, allow people to feel they belong to a
neighborhood where they can show care for one another and share
jokes?

The Toronto case study pushes the theme of space into the modern
workplace by drawing attention to the isolation of many urban
workers. Cashiers and domestics, among other "low skill and feminized
occupations," typically work alone, enjoying minimal contact with
their peers (p. 132). How can they become aware of their shared
interests if they never speak? Unions and community associations can
galvanize feelings of solidarity when they organize meetings even
outside the workplace, especially in creative ways. One trade union
demonstrated the power of nonstate initiatives by recruiting mainly
Caribbean women hotel workers to sing in a choir. Singing together,
the women were able to forge a sense of solidarity that cannot evolve
among workers, like cashiers, who never share a space. One cleaner,
and proud choir member, observed, "in our last round of bargaining
we're on the news all over, so people are listening to us [sing and
bargain]" (p. 113). Meanwhile, the grievances of the
cashiers--working part-time, in isolation, with unpredictable
schedules--went unaddressed.

By focusing on public transport, the Sydney chapter shows that even
fleeting encounters on a bus can reinforce and challenge hierarchies.
Filming a racist rant, for example, allows the ranter to be publicly
shamed. Posters against yelling or hogging seats can be used to set
standards of appropriate behavior. If religious, labor, and community
organizations can forge a coalition to support, say, asylum seekers,
there is a chance that progressive legislation can be adopted, like a
$2.50 daily cap on refugees' transport fares. This cap was actually
adopted by the New South Wales government after a carefully
orchestrated campaign that included setting up meetings to hear
asylum seekers' stories, then deluging the minister of transport with
used tickets marked "Mobility with Dignity" and finally encouraging
the primate of the transport minister's church to lobby her. All
these behind-the-scenes efforts were designed to avoid making public
demands that could inflame popular resentment against migrant
entitlements. They worked.

The Los Angeles case study lauds the creation of new public spaces
where Asian and Latin American migrants can commune with each other,
bridge their own differences, and forge new associations governed by
progressive rules. The two cases in point are the 2003 Immigration
Workers Freedom Ride to Washington, DC, and the creation of Worker
Centers within L.A. itself. The people traveling by bus to Washington
found their buses to be "mobile classrooms" where they engaged in
instructive storytelling, learned tactics of civil disobedience, and
put the latter to use. At the Worker Centers people identified and
discussed instances of racism and sexism occurring even among
themselves. In both cases, having actual physical space in which to
communicate resulted in the taking of political initiatives. In the
process a new sense of solidarity was born.

By focusing on globally pervasive patterns of discrimination against
immigrants and investigating their possible remedies at a microlevel,
the four geographers are asking their readers to drop the blinkers of
privilege. Their earnest and carefully documented efforts pay close
and respectful attention to what people actually do in their daily
lives in the city. While Stanek's Eastern Bloc architects refer
rhetorically to "solidarity" and "collective subjectivity," these
four geographers and their students actually delve into the quality
and impact of individual, small-scale human interactions in their
cities. They are interested in the _enactment_, more than the
rhetoric, of equality, especially when it occurs on a "microscale."
They document and validate the mundane. They take classic concepts
like "public space" and freshen them up by showing that public space
can exist and have value wherever people encounter one another, not
just in, say, formally designated areas like Central Park. Public
space can be created by popular initiatives, not only by planners and
architects. In the process of putting their sense of justice on
display--by riding, for example, with a woman who feels unequal and
unsafe--ordinary people are redefining the urban norm. 

Citation: Diana Wylie. Review of Fincher, Ruth; Iveson, Kurt;
Leitner, Helga, _Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler
Colonial Cities_ and
Prestel, Joseph Ben, _Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in
Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910_ and
Smith, Constance, _Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and
Urban Belonging_ and
Stanek, Lukasz, _Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe,
West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War_. H-Africa, H-Net
Reviews. August, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55354

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.