The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty. Tulasi Srinivas. Duke University Press. 2025.

What does beauty and the many forms of labour, consumption and culture that surround it, look like in contemporary Bangalore (Bengaluru)? Tulasi Srinivas’s The Goddess in the Mirror is an ethnographic study of contemporary Indian beauty parlours in the capital city of the state of Karnataka, India. The beauty parlours located in every corner of contemporary urban India may initially seem like unlikely sites for political anthropology. But Srinivas’s detailed account of the moral, political and emotional worlds that sustain the beauty parlour begs to differ. Through vivid descriptions of bodies, relations, and myths, Srinivas adroitly demonstrates how the pursuit of beauty is deeply intertwined with gender, religion, and power in urban India. 

Beauty parlours have emerged as crucial sites for understanding contemporary urban life as spaces where gender, labour, consumption, and cultural transformation meet, yet few ethnographies have captured their complexity. Srinivas thus makes an original and worthwhile intervention with this work. Her scholarly background in anthropology of religion and ethics permeates the work. Each chapter explores a theme corresponding to an aspect of the goddess and a facet of beauty culture, providing the book with a conceptual symmetry. Srinivas’s analysis of beauty is deeply feminist, while also expanding feminist discourse by including perspectives beyond the heteronormative frame. This book challenges both Western feminist discourses on beauty, which are mostly centred on cisgender heterosexual women’s experiences and South Asian feminist scholarship on embodiment and public space. Both of those traditions have tended to overlook queer and transgender experiences in discussions of beauty, labour, and aspiration.  

Ethnographic approaches and urban context 

The book is immersive, seamlessly blending theory and case studies and a multi-sited ethnographic approach of participant observation and in-depth interviews at beauty parlours around Bangalore. Encompassing upscale boutiques to modest neighbourhood salons, the client base of these beauty parlours is wide, serving women from different classes and castes from middle-class housewives to working-class migrants and queer communities. This enables Srinivas to capture the heterogeneity of the beauty industry. 

The work situates intimate salon interactions within the broader context of Bangalore’s post-1990s urban transformation, during which the beauty services sector exploded

Crucially, the work situates these intimate salon interactions within the broader context of Bangalore’s post-1990s urban transformation, during which it emerged as a global tech hub. During the same period, the beauty services sector exploded, and by the end of the 1990s, the “personal care” market was booming. In this neoliberal urban milieu and capitalist expansion, when beauty work became a new labour niche, Srinivas’s ethnography stays attentive to everyday life and interpersonal relationships in the salon. She documents the intimate ties between beauticians and their clients, and how the salon becomes a microcosm of Bangalore’s social contrasts and connections.  

Her fieldwork combines traditional observation with a knack for narrative. For example, Srinivas describes sitting with beauticians as they styled hair or threaded eyebrows, and interweaves these descriptions with stories of film stars, Hindu goddesses, and personal hopes. She acknowledges the unstable power dynamics between the researcher and subjects in the salon setting, as well as the challenge of representing intimate, embodied experiences without exploiting them. Srinivas’s reflexivity about her own positionality as a researcher and as an Indian-American anthropologist returning to Bangalore strengthens the ethnography. She occasionally appears in the narrative, which humanises the account, renders her presence and learning process transparent. 

Beauty as a social, moral and political project

A central contribution of this book is its reconceptualisation of beauty as a richly layered social project. Srinivas notes that the concept of beauty has long been a central ethical category in South Asian cosmology. She illuminates how the abundance of beauty signifies auspiciousness, moral virtue and order, while ugliness in myth signals evil, chaos, or the asura (demonic) realm. This cultural association of beauty with goodness means that women’s appearances are never politically neutral.  

Clients and beauticians often reference Hindu myths in their daily salon conversations. These stories serve as models for women to interpret their lives and desires.

Srinivas argues that women in Bangalore’s salons practice ethical self-fashioning. As they seek smoother skin or more radiant faces, they also shape their “ethical subjectivities” through storytelling and ritual practice. For example, clients and beauticians often reference Hindu myths in their daily salon conversations. These stories serve as models for women to interpret their lives and desires. Beauty is a political resource, a way for women to navigate recognition as an intersubjective acknowledgement of one’s social standing and worth, as well as respectability and opportunities within the prevalent power dynamics.  

Rather than romanticise beauty, Srinivas outlines its complexity. It is not entirely empowering or oppressive, but a constantly evolving arena of negotiation. This perspective counters the Western feminist discourse that attempts to place beauty within binaries; they either view beauty solely as a patriarchal trap or they see it as a form of liberation. Within this context, Srinivas portrays beauty as part of everyday politics involving ethics and feelings. 

Myth, narrative and embodiment 

Salons of Bangalore are revealed as storied spaces where women often recount Hindu epics and legends alongside Bollywood plots and personal anecdotes, through which they process their realities. A beautician might compare a client’s predicament with a scene from the Mahabharata, or a group of clients collectively riff on the beauty contests of celestial apsaras. Such storytelling, Srinivas argues, functions much like Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights (an endless story technique that is ultimately survivalist)She suggests that Bangalorean women sustain hope and community through shared mythic references. This perspective resonates with current anthropological interest in affect and futurity in neoliberal societies, as Srinivas aligns with scholars like Arjun Appadurai and Lauren Berlant who view narrative and imagination as essential tools for managing uncertain futures. 

Srinivas does not side with scholars (such as Talal Asad and Johannes Fabian) who argue that myth is “passé” in contemporary anthropology, a mere reflection of something else. In fact, in her fieldwork, she observes how myth provides a vocabulary of embodiment and emotion that bridges the personal and the cosmic. Srinivas’s writing excels in conveying the sensory and affective dimensions of this process. 

Caste and labour politics of beauty 

Srinivas also illuminates macro-political issues through grounded, everyday encounters, analysing the caste and class dynamics underlying India’s beauty culture. She delves into the politics of skin colour and caste to argue how fair skin – coded as savarna (upper-caste) and upper-class – remains a premium beauty ideal in India. Srinivas powerfully juxtaposes the myth of Draupadi with Mahasweta Devi’s subaltern story of Dopdi. Through this retelling, she exposes how social violence against darker-skinned women persists in contemporary India, albeit in new guises. She shows how caste inequalities are both reinforced and contested in everyday beauty work. 

A book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle

Labour and economic exploitation form another critical thread of her work, as Bangalore’s beauty workers are often young women from the northeastern states or from marginalised caste backgrounds. Srinivas analytically links personal narratives of loneliness of migration and vulnerability to abuse, and a constant negotiation of belonging to wider political-economic structures. She argues that beauty labour is political labour in the sense of who gets to occupy urban spaces, whose bodies are considered desirable or polluting and how global capitalist forces intersect with ancient inequities of caste.  

One potential limitation of the work stems from its analytical breadth. Srinivas sets out to combine mythology, economics, sensory ethnography, and political critique all in one volume, resulting in certain topics being touched upon but not followed explored in depth. Similarly, the detours into Sanskrit aesthetics and epic myths might overwhelm readers unfamiliar with these references and can occasionally lead to an idealised interpretation of its role. 

That said, this is a valuable and nuanced book that will resonate with scholars of gender and labour, urban anthropology, South Asian studies, and anyone interested in how everyday practices become sites of political struggle. In terms of disciplinary impact, The Goddess in the Mirror may well become a touchstone for integrating aesthetic and affective dimensions into analyses of power.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities, and Neighbourhoods. Anne Power. Policy Press. 2025. 

How housing reflects social life

“Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.” – Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

This passage from Oliver Twist draws readers into the cramped interiors and precarious lives of the urban poor, making housing conditions inseparable from social injustice. It is fitting, then, that Dickens’s world serves as a touchstone for Anne Power, Professor Emerita of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. As its title signals, Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities, and Neighbourhoods shifts attention from buildings to the social life they sustain – or fail to sustain. For Power, housing is not simply infrastructure, but a complex combination of stability, dignity, and belonging. She argues that the wider role of housing involves valuing and protecting the lowest-income communities. Dickens’s London offers an early literary record of what happens when the ground beneath those communities collapses. 

The way housing is designed, developed, and managed is central to creating and sustaining communities. Housing policy, in short, shapes collective life.  

The book’s authority rests on experience as much as analysis, drawing on decades of work in housing systems, urban regeneration, and low-income neighbourhoods. This includes her leadership of LSE Housing and Communities and direct involvement in improvement initiatives including the 1966 “End Slums” campaign with Martin Luther King and the Urban Task Force (1998). Power is extraordinarily well placed to write on housing, and in this book, she expertly combines policy expertise with practical knowledge. The resulting book offers a precise mixed-methods design with apt case studies and persuasive policy arguments, and speaks to students, scholars, and practitioners alike. 

The book advances an expansive understanding of shelter as a constant across human history, from “prehistoric cave dwellings to rudimentary huts, portable tent homes, stone cottages, tenements, and terraces, to semi-detached houses and high-rise blocks” (3). This long view allows her to treat housing as a social process rather than a static object, one that includes informal and precarious dwellings alongside formal stock. This dynamic view of shelter is echoed by fellow LSE professor Claire Mercer’s The Suburban Frontier (2024), which details suburban growth and squatting in Dar es Salaam, and Carolyn Whitzman’s Home Truths (2024) that explores Canada’s housing crisis. Power’s central claim gives the book its force: “the way housing is designed, developed, and managed is central to creating and sustaining communities” (vi). Housing policy, in short, shapes collective life.  

Housing as key to social reform 

In the first section, Power identifies the influence of Robert Owen (1771-1858), founder of utopian socialism and among the first to connect fair, accessible housing to the creation of “a productive and cooperative society that took care of basic needs while protecting and advancing people’s wellbeing” (11). This framing is apt, as Owen emphasised mutual respect between workers and supervisors that extended to renters and social landlords. Likewise, social reformer Octavia Hill (1838-1912), co-founder of the National Trust (1895), demonstrated how attentive management, affordable rents, and decent conditions could improve everyday life. Her hands on approach to property management proved “if you treat tenants with respect and fairness, you could establish a two-way trust that would keep your properties in good condition and your tenants happy” (15). Together, Owen and Hill establish the foundations for a collective and sustainable approach to housing managment. 

Where the first section establishes these reform principles, the second turns to 20^th-century overcrowding and demolition. Power details the 1974 financial crisis that nearly bankrupted the UK and the austerity measures that followed. Citing examples like the Charteris Road community and Finsbury Park in North Islington, she links economic retrenchment to intensifying social problems, clearance schemes, and state-led rehousing. Immigrants and newcomers were frequently excluded from these plans and pushed into cramped, deteriorating private rentals, exacerbating existing inequalities. Legislative responses – the Race Relations Act (1968) and the Homeless Persons Act (1977) – sought to define “priority need” and address discrimination, but policy often lagged behind lived conditions. 

Place-based investment, shortcomings in housing provision 

Section three, “Targeting the Poorest Areas,” shifts to the 1997 election of the New Labour government and its stated commitment to “equality of opportunity” (95). Tony Blair’s platform – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, “education, education, education,” and the insistence that “no-one should be disadvantaged by where they live” – folded housing into broader neighbourhood renewal strategies. Despite Blair’s success offering low-income families supplemental support through tax credits, the Housing Benefit did not have the same effect. Power notes, “to prevent the risk of arrears…Housing Benefit was paid directly to landlords” (96). As such, the connection between landlord and tenant diminished, creating a “system that lacked mechanisms for picking up problems or generating responsibility” (96). By revealing the shortcomings of impersonal property management, Power emphasises the need to protect low-income communities from further decline. 

Power successfully illustrates that housing policy is never merely technical – it determines whether communities hold together or come apart.

The fourth and final section, “Changing the Basis of Welfare,” brings the argument into the 2000s and 2010s. Returning to the principles articulated by Hill and Owen, Power argues that long-term stability depends on community-based management grounded in fair rents, decent housing conditions, and trust between tenants and landlords. Writing through the 2008 financial crisis and the premiership of Gordon Brown – credited widely for stabilising the global financial system – Power notes both meaningful reductions in child and pensioner poverty and persistent shortcomings in affordable housing provision. Even so, she concludes that the thirteen years of New Labour government produced tangible, ground-level gains for low-income communities. 

A framework for reading marginalised neighbourhoods 

Ultimately, in Beyond Bricks and Mortar, Power asks readers to see housing as more than a physical or economic commodity; it is the social foundation on which dignity, stability, and belonging rest. Advocating a community-based approach to social housing, she grounds policy in respect, stewardship, and everyday care. Each case study tests this principle in practice, showing not only what fails but what works. Power successfully illustrates that housing policy is never merely technical – it determines whether communities hold together or come apart.

For scholars like me – currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the literatures of Canadian suburbs – this argument can apply in other contexts. Power’s attention to tenant-led networks, local organising, and the daily practices that sustain belonging offers a concrete framework for reading marginalised neighbourhoods. Her model travels well as a set of principles, though its reliance on the institutional strength of Britain’s social-housing sector may be harder to reproduce in more fragmented, market-led contexts. 

I see both the promise and the limits of that transfer in the neighbourhood of Jane-Finch in Toronto, where newcomers are attracted by affordable rents and transit access and where community groups, cultural events, and religious gatherings operate as infrastructures of care. Residents share information, resources, and rituals, building systems of support that counter the area’s persistent stigma as a crime-ridden periphery. Power’s work is a crucial contribution to the work of capturing such textured social life that goes far beyond the physical shelter and policies that try to contain it. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Anne Power will speak about the book at a public LSE event on Tuesday 3 March, The care economy and social housing. Find details and register to attend.

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Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore. Jamie Wang. MIT Press. 2024.

Contradictions of an eco-modern state 

Singapore is celebrated as a global exemplar of sustainable urban development. It boasts an attractive green skyline, a thriving modern economy, and a high quality of life for many of the city-state’s residents. Over the past six decades, the Singaporean government has made concerted efforts to transform this 735-square-kilometre island of six million people into a green and modern knowledge economy. At the same time, the government has been criticised for its authoritarian approach to governance and its brazen pursuit of technocentric capitalist growth. In short, the urban sustainability story of Singapore is replete with numerous contradictions.

Wang highlights the extensive investment of money and materials that is required to build and maintain this highly engineered lush landscape.

In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore, Jamie Wang probes beneath the glossy façade of Singapore’s triumphant sustainability narrative to explore the tensions, misalignments, and paradoxes of this eco-modern state. She draws upon her background as an environmental humanities scholar to tell “more-than-human” stories about urban greening, housing development, transportation and water infrastructures, and urban farming. The study highlights the co-constitution of humans and non-humans, and Wang notes that “exploring, collecting, and telling these stories is my attempt to weave together a more diverse, human and other-than human, material and affective urban life” (178). The result is a rich and nuanced narrative that weighs the benefits and drawbacks of Singapore’s pursuit of green capitalism while also encouraging readers to imagine alternative sustainable futures.  

Urban greening as state-building 

Urban greening is the most prominent agenda of Singapore’s eco-modern agenda and the city boasts thousands of greening initiatives that integrate nature and the city. The globally renowned Supertrees project as well as thousands of green walls and rooftop gardens serve as an effective branding tool to attract tourists while creating a pleasing aesthetic experience for residents. Wang highlights the extensive investment of money and materials that is required to build and maintain this highly engineered lush landscape and argues that the government’s greening agenda is less about ecological protection and more about producing governable configurations of non-humans and humans. She writes, “In controlling nature and the citizens in this regimented and interrelated way, Singapore effectively creates the sense of a highly secure, stable environment in which to invest, live, and visit” (36). In other words, urban gardening is a primary strategy of state-building.  

Erasing historic ways of life 

Control is also a dominant driver in the provision of collective services in Singapore. This is particularly evident in the government’s systematic replacement of traditional houses with high-rise residential towers. Today, the public housing programme provides stability and affordability for 80 per cent of the island’s residents. However, it comes at the expense of autonomy and the residents’ ability to choose from a broader array of housing options. Wang describes her visits to the few remaining traditional low-rise neighbourhoods where a slower, more deliberate mode of existence reflects the unique Singaporean culture of the past. She argues that the government’s comprehensive management of housing and land use is not only an infrastructural strategy to support dense living conditions but also a social engineering strategy to erase memory, culture, and communal modes of rural and semi-rural life.  

The push for security in agriculture and water 

A primary motivation of high-rise living in Singapore is to replace the traditional land-intensive agricultural economy with a land-efficient knowledge economy. Since the 1980s, the government has rezoned farmland to construct high-rise apartments, office buildings, and transportation infrastructure (152). This has resulted in steep declines in agricultural production and today, Singapore’s heavy reliance on food imports is a national security concern. The government has addressed this by supporting vertical farms, a new form of a food production that involves indoor growing on vertical shelves, often using hydroponic, aquaponic, and aeroponic techniques that do not require soil. The government promotes vertical farms as a key strategy to provide food security while bolstering the knowledge economy. Meanwhile, the compressed growing cycles and optimised production requirements of vertical farms involves significant energy, water, and fertiliser inputs while also replacing the traditional agrarian society with a globally-leading agrotechnology economy. 

She finds inspiration in spontaneous, uncontrolled instances where nature and humans diverge from the government’s ecomodernist script to reveal the relational and situated characteristics of the world.

National security concerns also drive the government’s plans to modernise Singapore’s water supply. The city-state currently imports about half of its water from Malaysia (119) and this creates risks due to uncertainties about future climate change impacts and geopolitical tensions. To achieve self-sufficiency by 2060, the Singaporean government has invested in desalinisation and water recycling technologies that are expensive and energy-intensive and produce significant volumes of toxic wastewater. Moreover, this high-tech approach to water supply decouples water from the island’s natural hydrological cycles, transforming it into a manufactured product for human consumption. Surprisingly, there is little emphasis on demand-side water management and efficiency programmes to reduce water consumption by the island’s agriculture and manufacturing industries.  

The limits of sustainable development under capitalism 

Wang’s study provides important lessons about the deficiencies of human-centred, capitalist, and technocratic forms of sustainable development. She argues that the championing of technoscientific innovation and economic growth serves to obliterate the social and cultural aspects of everyday life while alienating humans from their non-human surroundings. She finds inspiration in spontaneous, uncontrolled instances where nature and humans diverge from the government’s ecomodernist script to reveal the relational and situated characteristics of the world. For example, rare plants continue to thrive outside of the urban greening initiatives, animals do not always follow the prescribed ecological corridors, and small groups of Singaporeans continue to practice place-based forms of agriculture. These examples demonstrate that alternative configurations of humans and non-humans continue to co-exist alongside the controlled conditions of the Singaporean government. 

Wang concludes that “the work of reimagining through a rich and layered more-than-human relation is also an effort of re-collecting and re-membering, resisting the singular eco-modernist’s future” (179). Her insights go beyond Singapore to include all cities that are striving to align economic growth with ecological protection. Green and prosperous cities will not be achieved through the development and implementation of technology-led capitalist growth but instead require deliberate and sustained efforts to integrate humans and non-humans in the messy multiplicity of everyday life.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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City of Equals. Jonathan Wolff and Avner de Shalit. Oxford University Press. 2023.

Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit’s recent collaboration, City of Equals, is a love letter to the city. The city has long been an unloved creature, its dwellers depicted as alienated and rootless. City of Equals rebuts this tale of woe by exploring the forms of egalitarian rootedness and place-making that can flourish within the city. Combining analytic philosophy with qualitative research methods, and drawing on urban studies, sociology, and political geography, it will be of interest to scholars working across disciplines, urban planners and policymakers, and those who call cities home. While there are works that examine justice within the city and the injustices that are specific to cities, Wolff and de-Shalit have produced a novel account of egalitarianism for the city.

What makes a “city of equals”?

Wolff and de-Shalit set out to discover what it means for a city to embody the egalitarian spirit – what constitutes a “city of equals.” Material equality is one obvious answer; but, Wolff and de-Shalit note, cities with significant income inequality, such as Berkeley, California can nevertheless qualify as egalitarian in spirit. There must be, they surmise, something more to egalitarianism than the distribution of resources. Instead, the authors are moved by relational accounts of equality, “less interested in making sure that everyone has the same amount of anything that ca n be distributed among them, but rather that each person has good reason to regard each other as an equal, and be regarded as an equal by them” (13).

What does it mean to have the sense that you are being treated as an equal? Wolff and de-Shalit turn to 182 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2015 and 2019 by stopping “city-zens” – those who reside within the city boundaries (15) – in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, London, Oxford, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro. They do not explain the choice of cities other than to note that these cities range in size, significance, dominant religion, and national political context (20). The authors concede this is not a representative sample, locally or globally; however, they treat interviews as a trampoline that “enables you to gain an elevated viewpoint, thus freeing yourself from the solid ground of your position,” (18) and providing sight of questions and ideas not visible from the ground. The interviews therefore expand the authors’ point of view even when they do not provide an expansive or representative perspective (18).

Securing a sense of place

Wolff and de-Shalit provide an account of a “city of equals” which, at heart, is a city that “offer[s] each individual a secure sense of place.” The concept of a “sense of place” emerges from attachments to a particular setting or place, which can arise from one’s direct personal and family biography, or be mediated through collective narratives that imbue a place with meaning, for example, for cultural, religious or ethnic identities. We have a sense of place for a particular location, then, because it is where we fell in and out of love, where a religious figure was martyred, or where an ancient battle was lost. This sense may be shared or communicable, but it need not be universal; it is a changing set of relations with the artefacts, facilities, and people in a particular location. A component of one’s identity, a sense of place contributes to one’s wellbeing, and enables other components of wellbeing, including the capacity to be tolerant of others and thereby enable their sense of place.

Cities are home to most of the world’s population, are responsible for nearly 80 per cent of states’ GDPs, and increasingly dictate national politics

Wolff and de-Shalit identify four core values that engender a sense of place: 1: access to municipal services is not marketised; 2: there is equal opportunity to achieve a sense of a meaningful life; 3: diversity and social mixing in the absence of a monolithic culture; and 4: inclusion that does not rely on deference or submissiveness, but instead is enjoyed as a matter of right. They conclude by proposing that these core values be used to form an index for cities to use as a self-audit: they can help a city to “understand its own trajectory, looking back over the months and years, and to consider what it needs to do in order to come closer to a city of equals” (171).

A “city of equals” in an unequal nation

City of Equals is a much-needed enquiry into egalitarianism in the city informed by interdisciplinary perspectives and innovative mixed methods. Wolff and de-Shalit do not see it as the final word so much as a starting point that establishes the city as its own site of enquiry. At its heart lies the belief that egalitarians should care about equality at the level of the city, and that equality at this level is a distinct enterprise. One reason to care about equality in cities is their sheer size and significance: as Wolff and de-Shalit note, cities are home to most of the world’s population, are responsible for nearly 80 per cent of states’ GDPs, and increasingly dictate national politics (5).

But that is not to say urban equality can represent equality more generally. Wolff and de-Shalit insist that the city is a different sort of political institution from the state, with different political functions and hence a different understanding of equality. Fair enough. However, if cities increasingly determine economic and political life at the national and global level, what equality means in the city may inevitably inform practices and conceptions of equality at the national level. For example, a “sense of place,” which is amorphous and varied, might be more apt for immigrants than the existing paradigm of national integration. This is not only because most immigrants move to cities; it is also because the integration paradigm presupposes a “community of value” that is often exclusionary, on grounds of race, religion, and class, for immigrants and citizens alike. A “sense of place” provides an alternative way of belonging and living together – one that also contributes to one’s wellbeing and identity, but without requiring conformity with a national culture or set of values. Equality in the city might therefore bleed into equality in the state in ways that are generative and inclusive.

Many Arabs in the east of Jerusalem feel that they live under occupation and that Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem experience the city in very different, and unequal, ways

In turn, inequality at the national level might infect the city. More than a third of Wolff and de-Shalit’s interviews are conducted in Israel, which Israeli and international organisations have since concluded maintains an apartheid regime, including in East Jerusalem. The authors describe how these inequalities impinge on the egalitarian possibilities there: they note that many Arabs in the east of Jerusalem “feel that they live under occupation” and that “Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem experience the city in very different, and unequal, ways” (86). But this raises some politically urgent questions: How do city-zens retain an egalitarian ethos amid pervasive inequalities? And how do egalitarians in the city protect everyone’s sense of a place against the inequities imposed from above?

As Wolff and de-Shalit note, cities are often politically progressive and can be engines of change in national and global politics. But this may require that city-zens, from cities embedded in deeply unequal states, to the “sanctuary cities” targeted by the Trump administration, to the cities with mounting unhoused populations, not be complacent about their egalitarian credentials. It may be that a “city of equals” can only exist in a nation of equals, and that it falls to city-zens, with a secure sense of place and a willingness to look one another in the eye, to realise both.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II: Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities. Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi (editors). Routledge. 2024.

While critiques of the politics of space emerged primarily from adjacent disciplines – philosophy, sociology, geography – Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends (2009) stands out as a significant intervention from within the architectural discourse itself. It re-invigorated debates around architecture’s autonomy and revealed its deep entanglement with the messy realities of social life. Since then, a growing body of scholarship has interrogated the political dimensions of the built environment. This new volume, edited by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi builds on and complicates that trajectory by bringing together diverse voices across a range of political issues to examine how architectural knowledge might confront its problematic past – a legacy of complicity with neoliberal governance, and of abetting imperial and fascist regimes of power – and move beyond it. The editors mobilise alternative spatial imaginaries and pose an urgent question that permeates the volume: if architecture is always already political, what is to be done? 

Reimagining spatial practice 

The introductory chapter by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi situates architecture and urban space within broader socio-political concerns. From the outset, the authors assert that the discourse must face social realities such as exclusion, marginality, discrimination, and inequality. They call for modes of democratic co-existence through, for example, more inclusive participatory design processes. As they claim, architects need to “take a position against the inequalities and ethically/morally wrong practices that crises of our time have created, otherwise they lose their social relevance” (6). But this urgent call for a shift, according to the editors, must also navigate existing political frameworks and resist reductive binaries such as top-down vs. bottom-up. They frame this as an ethical imperative, and call on those with a stake in the production of space to act.

Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of using theory as a ‘box of tools,’ the handbook provides conceptual tools for alternative spatial practices – ones that may catalyse a “slow” revolution from within the discipline

The volume does more than simply consolidate theoretical positions; rather, it invites intervention and rethinking of spatial praxis. In this sense, it can be influential for all those engaged in spatial practice today. It is especially useful for younger generations who must navigate an increasingly complex field of socio-political challenges. Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of using theory as a “box of tools,” the handbook provides conceptual tools for alternative spatial practices – ones that may catalyse a “slow” revolution from within the discipline, as the editors suggest.  

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (2013, originally published 1969), the book’s discursive format – spanning 36 chapters – is not a static repository, but a stratified field of statements. These contributions reflect the current pulse of political and ecological challenges confronting architecture. As Foucault reminds us, discursive formations do “not accumulate endlessly” (145); statements are governed by historical rules determining what can be said, by whom, and under what conditions. 

The volume’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration […] calls for alliances between urban researchers, artists, engineers, lawyers, and activists to challenge the paradigms of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene

Structured across five sections – Events and Dissidence; Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire; Climate and Ecology; Urban Commons and Social Participation; and Marginalities and Postcolonialism – the volume offers a navigational framework for the reader. Each section opens with an introductory essay that helps chart the themes, drawing transversal links across the book. The case studies – skateparks, hospitals, rural communities, urban squares, digital environments, abandoned buildings – show how a spatial praxis can inform acts of resistance. In this light, the handbook is not a unified narrative but a differential collective murmur of interventions – whether ground-level or speculative – that reveal the potentialities of a critical architecture. 

Collective resistance and colonial spatial violence

The volume’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration is evident throughout, beginning in the introduction, which calls for alliances between urban researchers, artists, engineers, lawyers, and activists to challenge the paradigms of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene. This political plurality resonates with global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous land right struggles. The chapters examine how such critical concepts are enacted spatially. For example, the chapter, “Spatializing Queer Ecologies” by C. Greig Crysler et al., explores queer ambivalence through a prehistory of queer ecological spaces that challenge binary, patriarchal ideas of nature and the greenwashing they often support. One such place is Druid Heights in Marin County, California, a proto-queer anarchist community, which embraces non-binary sexualities and multi-species cohabitation, while critiquing settler colonial legacies. Their models of communal living, non-exclusive partnerships, and ambivalent land ownership offer alternatives for inhabiting space in the face of planetary collapse. 

From rural California to the dense urban Hong Kong, the chapter, ”Commoning Technicities in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement”  by Gerhard Bruyns and Stavros Kousoulas explores collective politics during the 2014 protests through the lens of affect theory. What they term “guerrilla urbanism” emerges from mobilisation: slogans on roads, encampments, makeshift structures, and barricades – where built infrastructure and human agency are mediated through technicity. According to the authors, “technicity deals with how humans relate and transform their environment through technology and how these relations transform all of them” in their own ways – “humans, technology and environment” (70). Drawing on Brian Massumi’s writing on affect, they show how the Umbrella Movement produced a collective defamiliarisation of urban space, resisting privatisation and enabling an emergent commons.

Another important chapter is Nishat Awan’s “Atlas Otherwise”, which seeks to dislocate colonial mapping, challenging dominant Western representational models that are now replicated through digital technologies. One example concerns Palestine, where satellite imaging is limited by US military-imposed restrictions. As a result, Palestinian territories remain selectively visible, reinforcing asymmetries of sovereign control. Awan traces thick, material moments that resist the clarity of colonial visuality, calling attention to what colonial mapping conceals or excludes. For the author, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s work on Mumbai, particularly through the project Soak (2009), offers an alternative cartographic imagination. Mathur and da Cunha reconceive terrain through their collaged sectional drawings – a shifting “monsoon surface” – “drawn” by weather and local practices like terracing and bunding. Their representations challenge colonial mappings that misrepresent Mumbai as a static territory. 

The volume’s ambition is to explore how architecture might reconfigure social relations and contest the spatial logic of capitalism

In Murray Fraser’s “Introduction to Marginalities and Postcolonialism” – Part VI of the book – the author mentions a pressing issue of political space today: Gaza. Gaza exemplifies contemporary colonial spatial violence. Through policies of displacement, and – what Sari Hanafi calls “spacio-cide” (2009) – Israel turns territory into a weapon of domination. In 2023 alone, over half of Gaza’s buildings were destroyed, with homes, schools, and hospitals targeted. This is part of a broader settler-colonial logic, where land becomes a mechanism for marginalisation, dispossession, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian life. The handbook also shows why such political matters are of concern for architecture. Since Fraser’s introductory chapter was written, the situation in Gaza has worsened into a humanitarian catastrophe. In this context, what agency can architecture still claim in the world? 

The future of architecture 

Together, these examples underscore the volume’s ambition – to explore how architecture might reconfigure social relations and contest the spatial logic of capitalism. The concluding chapter, “Robots, AI and Spatial Politics – Unpacking Potentials”, by Dagmar Reinhardt, extends the volume’s scope into the politics of emerging technologies. It highlights how AI and robotics are embedded in new systems of algorithmic regulation, labour automation, and surveillance. However, given the significance of these issues, the chapter also reveals the need for a more extensive treatment of digital architectures, algorithmic governance, and digital economy to warrant its own section. Despite this, the volume effectively positions architecture as having an important political role that practitioners and researchers must address. For interdisciplinary architectural teaching, as well as research, this handbook is a timely and active resource that carries with it an activist urgency. It invites readers to act and to design more inclusive architectures that are situated and respond to our socio-political lives, reclaiming the built environment as a space of ethical engagement. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main Image Credit: STUDIO KANU on Wikimedia Commons.

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Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging. Joseph F. Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto (eds.). The MIT Press. 2024.

“One very telling measure of a country’s well-being is how its residents live as they grow older.” – Alyaa AlMulla, Longevity Hubs.

The age of longevity 

We are living in a period described by the United Nations as a “longevity revolution”, with projections showing one in six people in the world being over the age of 65 by 2050. As this future unfolds before us, researchers, policy makers, and innovators are hard at work to prepare for the economic impacts and opportunities that a fast ageing population presents. In Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging, editors Joseph F. Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto set out to define and identify “longevity hubs”, or geographic hotspots with a relatively high level of innovation activity specifically aimed at older populations. 

The book is a two-part compilation of short essays authored by executives and CEOs from healthcare companies, assisted living centres, financial and investment firms, thinktanks, nonprofits, market research institutes, a medical billing software company, a VR start-up, and a self-driving vehicles start-up. In addition to the editors’ contributions, there are also pieces by academics from gerontology, architecture, neuroscience, and computer sciences.  

[The editors] propose the idea of a spectrum in which some longevity hubs excel at inventing scalable, exportable age-friendly or age-focused products and services, some excel at providing top-level quality of life to local ageing populations, and some excel at both.

The first part includes 32 essays that were originally published as opinion pieces by The Boston Globe in collaboration with the MIT AgeLab in 2021 and 2022 as part of a series called The Longevity Hub. Coughlin, the Founder and Director of the MIT AgeLab, and Yoquinto, a research associate at the MIT Age Lab, describe the book as partly being a permanent home for these works. The second part of the book contains nine additional essays from innovators around the world who each make a case for their region to be classified as a longevity hub. 

Emerging longevity hubs 

In the preface and introduction, Coughlin and Yoquinto pose questions about the conditions under which longevity hubs emerge, what keeps hubs going, how market knowledge flows between hubs, and who longevity hubs truly serve. To begin exploring the longevity hub concept, they sought to avoid predetermined definitions, citing their method of selecting “cities and regions by a simple criterion: their reputation as disproportionate hot spots of innovation for ageing has reached our ears” (xvi). In this way, the nine essays arguing for longevity hub status come from Dubai, Louisville, Japan, Milan, Newcastle, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, eastern Thailand, and the “Aging 2.0 global ecosystem” (a worldwide chapter-based network of cities and regions that organise conferences, maintain a startup database, and publish reports on age-related innovation). Analysing these submissions, as well as interviews they conducted with the authors, Coughlin and Yoquinto present a preliminary typology for focusing the definition of and making sense of a longevity hub. 

Contrasting approaches to age-centric innovation 

They propose the idea of a spectrum in which some longevity hubs excel at inventing scalable, exportable age-friendly or age-focused products and services, some excel at providing top-level quality of life to local ageing populations, and some excel at both. Each of the nine locations they evaluated are charted in the book according to their level of global aims, local aims, global input, and local input. They observed, for example, that their homebase Boston appears to have more global aims and inputs, whereas the Japanese sites and São Paulo have largely local aims and inputs.  

Additionally, their typology considers variables such as the number of relevant industries involved in age-centric innovation, if the innovation activities were more grassroots or top down, and the level of government support. Dubai, for example, has relatively few relevant industries, a hugely top-down approach, and a high level of government support. Founder of the UAE’s Longevity Think Tank Alyaa AlMulla describes in Chapter 12 how the government has placed a huge focus on providing high quality health care services and investing in healthcare research, real estate, and technology. By contrast São Paulo has relatively many industries, an entirely grassroots approach, and minimal government support. In Chapter 17, Layla Vallias, cofounder of the Data8 longevity economics research institute, explains that Brazil has a multitude of local business initiatives focused on the silver economy related to not just elderly care and care management, but also engagement and purpose, lifestyle, mobility and movement, mental health, and financial health. The editors hope that these regional analyses and initial explorations of the longevity hub concept will serve as a useful foundation for future research into the geography of age-related innovation.  

Scope and limitations 

Following the research set out by Coughlin and Yoquinto, the common thread running through the patchwork of essays is the authors’ shared interest in the “silver economy”. Also known as the ageing market, the term refers to the multi-sector market segment of products and services which are especially designed for ageing populations. The essays in Longevity Hubs reveal a wide range of thinkers and experts working to support their ageing customers to enjoy the best possible life quality for as long as possible through new and adapted age-friendly products and services. Examples from the book include intergenerational learning facilities, “mobility as a service” solutions, autonomous vehicles, management software for caregiving facilities, daily wellness rewards-based programmes, and community-centred living facilities. 

On the whole, this book is rather off balance. The 32 opinion pieces from The Boston Globe which occupy more than half of the book overshadow and fail to meaningfully connect with the broader theoretical concept of a longevity hub. This could be due to the fact that the book is not representing one cohesive study on longevity hubs but is rather a compilation of reflections from various figures working across the silver economy. The focus on global regions comes through in the second part of the book by nature of the geographically varied essays (though what constitutes a region could be better defined). 

In terms of advancing the development of products and services for older populations, the idea of longevity hubs may offer a useful framework to policymakers and those investing money and resources into age-related innovation.

In terms of advancing the development of products and services for older populations, the idea of longevity hubs may offer a useful framework to policymakers and those investing money and resources into age-related innovation. Further studies on the concept of longevity hubs may be relevant to business and economics researchers interested in innovation hubs. 

Longevity Hubs does not set out to deeply contribute to any research field per se, although academic readers will find interesting the initial typology presented in the introduction. This book will be primarily of interest to entrepreneurs, innovators, and policymakers who are developing and supporting technologies and solutions for local and global ageing populations.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India. Hemangini Gupta. University of California Press. 2024.

In Experimental Times, an ethnography of startup capitalism in Bangalore, author Hemangini Gupta quotes the city’s startup festival organiser Vlad Dubovsky on the festival’s raison d’etre: “the idea is to convey that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle rather than a career”. With this book, Gupta, an anthropologist of labour and gender, interrogates the gendered production of the techno-entrepreneur in the Global South. This adds to growing scholarship on gender, labour, urban studies and tech including works such as Carla Freeman’s High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (2000), J.A. English-Lueck’s Cultures@Silicon Valley (2017) and Benjamin Shestakofsky’s Behind the Startup (2024). Gupta’s work is a unique addition which provides a contextually-embedded reading of labour in Bangalore’s startup industry.

[Gupta] locates this labour in a continuum of office work and home life, as multiple dimensions of workers’ lives are assembled in the process of creating startups.  

Gupta focuses on the work and lives of employees and employers at Captivate Travels, a travel startup in Bangalore, which provides travel packages and products for clients. The book promises and delivers three key contributions to scholarship on gender, labour and techno-capitalism in the Global South. Firstly, the book underscores the importance of place and urban spatial imaginary to startup capitalism; secondly, it examines the figure of the “entrepreneur” and thirdly, it traces the simultaneous production of care, friendship and leisure, which accompany entrepreneurial subjectivity in startup capitalism. Gupta uses labour as method, in which labour is not only an object of study but the lens through which startups are perceived and then analysed. Moreover, she locates this labour in a continuum of office work and home life, as multiple dimensions of workers’ lives are assembled in the process of creating startups.  

The book deploys the concept of “experimental time”, the embodied experience of experimentation which is intrinsic to startup capitalism. Startups are known for experimenting with new products, models and working cultures. Gupta lucidly illustrates that this experimentation is not an abstract occurrence but is experienced through embodied and material everyday work cultures and workers’ future dreams. Startup capitalism operates through “experimental time”, by creating conditions of precarity for workers, who are simultaneously called upon to be entrepreneurial and risk-taking and to even experiment with automation technologies that can one day replace their labour. By locating experimental time in workers’ experiences and desires, this book provides embedded readings of startup capitalism from the vantage point of different types of workers.

Care relations blend with professional roles to create new ties and forms of belonging in urban spaces

The experimental character of startup capitalism is also strongly gendered as becomes evident in the story of Malathi, a woman entrepreneur who was making a pitch to venture capitalists in Bangalore, but whose idea was dismissed for not being sufficiently innovative. Malathi was a middle-aged woman pitching a product for children’s education, illustrating the value of this product by drawing upon her own experience as a mother. Her idea was swiftly rejected as she was cut off mid speech and asked to be more risk-taking. As Gupta explains, Malathi was being seen as a middle-class woman whose product for children’s education emerged from her own domestic experiences. This ran “contrary to the configurations of caste, class and gender that were being valorised” since the ideal entrepreneur was someone who was not domestic, but highly mobile and one who could leverage urban masculinity. Hence, despite the future-oriented and innovative claims of startup capitalism, it remains embedded in axes of gender, class and caste.

A key actor in the book is the city of Bangalore, which Gupta historicises by weaving in stories from her own family and their histories in British India and then post-independent urban life. As economic liberalisation took off in India in the 1990s, images and discourses of the “New Indian Woman” became widespread, a woman who occupied new spaces while staying within the limits of “respectable femininity”. As women enter unconventional workplaces, bonds based in care, friendship and solidarity emerge in urban places of work. Gupta narrates the story of Lata, an employee at the Captivate Travels, whose ex-husband began stalking her over the phone and then it was her colleagues at work (who she calls her “brothers”) who stepped in by threatening to report him to the police. While her family remained distant as she navigated difficult relations with her former husband, her colleagues were proactive in ensuring her safety and wellbeing. Here, care relations blend with professional roles to create new ties and forms of belonging in urban spaces.

A much-needed contribution to the feminist study of startup capitalism and labour in the South, offering fresh insights at the intersection of cultural economy, gender studies and tech-capital

The concluding chapter nods to ongoing processes of deindustrialisation and precaritisation of labour, which could have been further theorised to frame the specific political-economic moment in which startup capitalism emerges and becomes key to the Indian economy. How does deindustrialisation play into these shifting solidarities and more importantly, in changing the contours and dimensions of contemporary labour? As a reading of capitalism from the South, Gupta might also have engaged more with the theory of racial capitalism and the organisation of capital through embodied difference. Jodi Melamed points out that “capital can only be capital when it is accumulating and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups”. While these differences might not fully map onto Harish Trivedi’s descriptions of Bangalore’s “cyber coolies”, Gupta’s ethnographic material sheds light on the specific types of differences, inequalities and capital created and sustained in Bangalore, and India’s urban spaces more broadly.

That said, the book is a rich deep-dive into the world of startups and is especially empathetic and attentive to workers’ lifeworlds. Gupta balances reading workers’ appearances (I was particularly interested in her descriptions of women’s clothing and how these signal status, class and urban belonging) and their inner worlds, as articulated in conversations with others, homelife and types of relationships. Gupta makes a much-needed contribution to the feminist study of startup capitalism and labour in the South, offering fresh insights at the intersection of cultural economy, gender studies and tech-capital in everyday life. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Participatory Spaces Under Urban Capitalism: Contesting the Boundaries of Democratic Practices. Markus Holdo. Routledge. 2024.

Markus Holdo’s Participatory Spaces under Urban Capitalism concerns the relationship between participatory institutions and power in capitalist societies. Institutions like participatory budgets or citizen assemblies are often seen to function as shallow legitimising devices, but Holdo argues that it is precisely the need for legitimacy, a currency that only citizens can provide, that can grant participants some leverage to negotiate the terms of their participation and extract concessions.  

Central to the book is the distinction between co-optation, understood as absorption of civil society actors into the state and consequent loss of autonomy, and the conditional cooperation that maintains civil society independence and can foster democratising dynamics. In order to tease this out the book draws on empirical evidence from Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Rosario, Argentina, as well as a range of evidence from other cases, from the US Civil Rights movement to political party Podemos in Spain. In doing so, the book inventively combines theoretical perspectives that often speak past each other, critical political economy meets democratic theory and relational sociology meets rationalistic political science. 

Participation can support democratisation when it contributes to aligning elite and citizen interests.

The book is composed of six chapters and a methodological appendix. Chapter one sets up the puzzle: participatory governance is both seen as a force for democratic change and an elite legitimising device. The chapter argues for a relational perspective that views participation as a social practice embedded within power-laden fields, while also introducing a rationalistic and strategic view of agency to test whether participation retains democratic potential even under cynical assumptions regarding human motivation.

A dual theoretical orientation that underpins the book as a whole begins to become apparent: relational in its understanding of agents’ interactions with social fields, and rationalist in its analysis of elite-citizen interactions. While it is clear that Holdo has a stronger commitment to the former, the latter is important in order to convince “even the most hardcore … realists” (5) of his arguments. 

Chapter two explores how structure shapes participation, arguing that neoliberal constraints generate needs for new forms of legitimation. Holdo deploys his “relational-rational” lens to show how, within such spaces, participation can support democratisation when it contributes to aligning elite and citizen interests. The stage is set for subsequent chapters focussing on different aspects of interactions between elites and citizens.

Holdo argues that commitment to community and representation of neighbours’ interests are generative of a form of symbolic capital within participatory fields.

Chapter three confronts concerns of co-optation. It proposes the concept of “conditional cooperation”, a rational strategy in positive-sum contexts where elites respect and nurture the autonomy of citizens in order to extract stronger legitimacy. Situated between suppression, co-optation and concession, which are rational in zero-sum contexts, conditional co-operation explains how participation enhances legitimacy by preserving the capacity for dissent. 

Chapter four hones on subaltern motivations. Holdo argues that commitment to community and representation of neighbours’ interests are generative of a form of symbolic capital within participatory fields. The recognition and respect derived from this motivates citizens to guard against co-optation, by creatively balancing submission and subversion when negotiating with state actors.  

Chapter five, explains how this “deliberative capital” was leveraged by participants in his case study of Rosario, arguing that influence depended on maintaining autonomy while cooperating with government. Linking the generation of legitimacy to interdependence between elites and citizens, Holdo critiques accounts that conflate contention with non-co-optation, instead highlighting the conditions that make the kinds of civil society autonomy necessary for contention rationally and strategically valuable to both parties.

Overall, Holdo presents a compelling and elegant account of how participatory processes can create social spaces which nurture new forms of capital that can feed into democratisation. 

The final chapter ties the different threads together, theorising participation as a process of “boundary negotiation” and showing how participants use their symbolic capital, and the legitimacy it can provide to elites, to generate responsiveness. Participation is recast not as empowering or co-optative but as an ongoing site of renegotiation.  

There is much to like in this book. It successfully accounts for constraints whilst avoiding a structuralist dead hand, is perceptively attuned both to the complexity of power relations and the subtle forms of creativity employed by agents. Overall, Holdo presents a compelling and elegant account of how participatory processes can create social spaces which nurture new forms of capital that can feed into democratisation. 

There are, however, some issues, rooted in the combination of relational sociology and rationalistic political science. In the Bourdieuisian relational sociology that Holdo draws upon, “strategy” (or, perhaps more accurately, “practice”) emphasises the pre-reflective internalisation of social structure through habitus, sitting uncomfortably alongside assumptions regarding utility maximisation by rational agents made in rational choice approaches. The dispositions generated by habitus are ”strategic” in the sense of an unconscious adjustment of subjective goals to the chances of their realisation, which is objectively determined by social structure, rather than in the sense of rational calculation. 

Holdo is led by rational choice to understand co-optation as a way to neutralise dissent by absorbing opponents, especially their leaders, into power structures. However, from a relational sociology perspective, the boundaries between conditional cooperation and co-optation are arguably blurrier. Individuals can be, in effect, more subtly co-opted by accepting the rules of a field and internalising its values, such as by internalising certain notions of what is, or not, legitimate. For example, it often happens in institutionalised forms of participation that protest is frowned upon for being unconstructive, something hinted at by two of Holdo’s interviewees in Rosario (74). 

The rationalist perspective leads Holdo to argue that co-optation makes sense in zero-sum contexts, but co-optation can occur, and even be more effective, when participants gain something, such as social status or even material concessions, especially if those gains leave the basic structure of institutions unchanged. In essence, this raises questions about whether “conditional cooperation” escapes co-option or reconfigures it in more subtle ways, as in a Gramscian “passive revolution”.

The book bears important lessons and insights for political scientists, sociologists and urbanists interested in participatory democracy

To be sure, this is, in part, a definitional debate, and Holdo accepts within the book that the boundaries between conditional co-operation and co-optation are blurry and a matter of degree. Nevertheless, the analysis remains influenced by the (too) sharp distinction between these, rooted in rational choice theory. In the end, the rationalist perspective takes on a stronger role than Holdo’s justification for it in chapter one as an extreme case test of participations’ democratic potential. In my opinion, a deeper grounding in relational sociology would have been preferable, especially in investigating the grey areas between conditional cooperation and co-optation.  

However, this does not detract from the overall merit of the work, which is meticulously researched, elegantly argued and advances theories of participatory and deliberative democracy in important ways. The book bears important lessons and insights for political scientists, sociologists and urbanists interested in participatory democracy. While empirically grounded in Latin America, the book discusses and engages with a range of cases from the Global North, and its insights speak to contemporary debates about the limits and possibilities of citizen engagement in the context of capitalist poly-crisis and democratic decline.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Lennon Ying-Da Wang on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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The Suburban Frontier: Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam. Claire Mercer. University of California Press. 2024.

Picture a self-built bungalow with a red roof at five a.m. on a Monday morning, with clanging doors, bathing water heated in the kitchen kettle, and milk with spices warming for tea. This evocative scene, captured in Salasala, the northern hinterland of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, provides an intimate and immersive insight into a suburban development far from the urban centre. It is central to Claire Mercer’s well-researched book The Suburban Frontier: Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam (2024), which purposefully invites readers inside the home of a civil servant and his wife, a business owner, as they prepare their family for the daily commute to the city centre.

Using the upper-middle-class family’s routine as a symbol of ordinary suburban life, this study emphasises key differences between African and Euro-American suburbs, offering novel insights to the field of urban studies.

Using the upper-middle-class family’s routine as a symbol of ordinary suburban life, this study emphasises key differences between African and Euro-American suburbs, offering novel insights to the field of urban studies. Drawing on photography and interviews, Mercer theorises organic suburbanisation in Africa, thereby significantly expanding the scope of suburban theory, culture, and practice. The difference in scale and government involvement marks a clear point of departure for African suburbanisation, setting the stage for Mercer’s analysis of cash-based transactions and their connection to middle-class culture. 

Structured into six chapters, the book incorporates rich ethnographic data, including observations, stories, and photographs collected over three decades. Her approach is shaped by a decolonising perspective, as she examines land development in the wake of distinct eras of colonisation – first by Germany from 1885 to 1916, and then by Britain from 1919 to 1961. The opening chapters lay the groundwork for this exploration, with Chapter One historicising the impact and long-term legacy of colonial powers, and Chapter Two analysing how colonial systems influenced concepts of land ownership and imposed imperial power structures on African tribal cultures. Together, these chapters establish the connection between physical land and power dynamics.

Middle-class is deeply intertwined with the history of land ownership in the region, a history in which colonial rule imposed sweeping changes on longstanding land practices.

Chapters Three and Four investigate how the colonial legacy continues to shape land rights and create complex legal zones in the 21st century. These chapters examine how middle-class dwellers navigate the legal landscape to claim status within a socially stratified middle-class, while the final two chapters shift the focus to the symbolic significance of the home. Chapter Five explores the material markers of middle-class identity, from architectural choices to domestic arrangements, while Chapter Six considers how the suburban home reflects aspirations of social mobility and cultural belonging. Throughout, Mercer persuasively argues that “the suburban frontier [is] the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped” (6). 

This shaping of the middle-class is deeply intertwined with the history of land ownership in the region, a history in which colonial rule imposed sweeping changes on longstanding land practices. A key point underpinning this book and argument is the absence of a “Swahili concept of private land ownership,” with colonial power bringing sweeping changes to the organisation and control of the land (26), as seen in the German Imperial Decree on Land Matter (1895), which established “the concept of private property, and the bifurcation of land rights along racial and spatial lines” (27). The story told in The Suburban Frontier relates to the creative use made by the aspirational residents of Dar es Salaam who bought, sold, built, sublet, and squatted in and around the township. Native dwellers may have been granted customary land rights by the amended Decree in 1896, but they recognised their rights were not considered equal to the rights of foreign settlers. As a result, domestic dwellers found loopholes in colonial law and used their knowledge of government projects or known natural disaster sites to guide their land selection and settlement. Essentially, they settled and built their modest houses quietly, tenaciously holding onto these homes until long-term occupancy conferred a quasi-residency status if not ownership to the dwellers. 

Mercer’s approach thus reinforces the relationship between the physical landscape and the suburban arena as home to an aspiring and socially negotiated middle class. In this context, the African middle class emerges as a key sociological concept with significant implications, both historical and future-oriented, for aspirational African residents. The middle class on the frontier is composed of residents with generational ties to the land, those who purchased land through cash transactions, squatters, and those relocated from the urban centre. Suburban residents who inherit land can gradually acquire more, increasing their social and physical capital over time. In contrast, those without inherited land often resort to squatting, strategically renovating unclaimed land. Interestingly, squatting on the African frontier is not as harshly criminalised as it is in Western suburban contexts, like Toronto, where squatters in city parks are frequently evicted with the aid of local authorities and police. Due to the legal ambiguities introduced by colonial rule, which racially segregated the land into three zones – “uzunguni” (European), “uhindini” (Indian), and “uswahilini” (Swahili) – squatters are permitted to renovate the land they occupy, provided they do not encroach on another’s territory. There is, however, an active system of self-policing in place, as Mercer’s on-site interviews reveal: those who are forced to relocate due to poor planning are not well-regarded by the African middle class.

The Suburban Frontier is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of suburban life beyond Western norms

This book’s engagement with African history, urban planning, and cultural geography provides an important – and often fascinating – assessment of how African suburbanisation and middle-class culture emerged as a byproduct of colonial influence on the land. While The Suburban Frontier aligns with Euro-American and Australian studies like Richard Harris’ Creeping Conformity (2004) and Ruth Fincher’s Everyday Equalities (2019) that define the suburb as a community on the fringe of the urban centre, it calls for more attention to the distinctive development of African suburban culture. 

The book makes a significant contribution to expanding this growing field of urban study by focusing on the African suburb, offering a wealth of new information and resources. This includes original images of suburban dwellings and construction, showing the before and after images to reveal dramatic changes, along with maps of the studied areas, and charts that guide readers through this African suburban frontier. It challenges Euro-American scholars to reconsider the limitations of their suburban definitions and to question the relationship between suburban built form and culture. Ultimately, The Suburban Frontier is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of suburban life beyond Western norms – shattering the confines of Euro-American urban theory and redefining what it means to belong to middle class on the African frontier.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Robert Harding Video on Shutterstock.

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The post Suburbanisation and the making of the African middle class first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together. Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin. Bloomsbury. 2023 (hardback); 2024 (paperback).

In a metropolitan area of approximately 22 million people, Mexico City ranks as not only one of the three largest cities in the world but also one of the most difficult infrastructures to maintain.  Since the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, the elimination of rivers, swamps and vast acreages of wetlands in the name of a European notion of “progress” – commercial development, industrial manufacturing and concrete – has set the stage for water scarcity. The recent acceleration of climate change and its attendant high temperatures has caused rapid desiccation of land in Mexico. As a result of this, combined with lower levels of rainfall and decaying aquafers Mexico City now rations water on a regular basis. Today, hundreds of cities around the globe face similar, simmering crises related to resource management, job creation, affordable housing and new dimensions of human alienation.

Since the publication of The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford in 1961, debates have reignited over how cities contribute to and/or detrimentally affect our civic and socio-economic lives. Over the past two decades, right-wing populists have often castigated cities as overcrowded, elite-dominated repositories of crime, undocumented immigrants and failed progressive policies – inconsistent and at odds with the “traditional” more conservative values of the larger nation. In Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together, an Oxford University professor and a contributor to The Economist, Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin respectively, attempt to rehabilitate the place and role of urban centres in society on a historical-level and offer a blueprint to remediate current challenges.

Since the mass exodus of white, urban professionals from the cities to the ever-expanding suburbs from the 1950s toward the end of the 20th century a resurgence of cities began in the 1990s

After setting the parameters of their study over the initial dozen pages, the authors begin by highlighting the impact of the often-overlooked impact of climate change throughout the centuries in Chapter Two (Engines of Progress). Yu the Great of the Xia Dynasty (said to be the first dynasty in classical Chinese historiography c 2050 BC) is celebrated for his efforts to successfully engineer flood control in ancient China (20-21). As populations battled to control and harness nature, cities formed from ancient Greece to The Renaissance to serve as centres of learning, hubs of commercial trade and capitals to govern territories and empires. In the ninth century, Baghdad (Iraq) exemplified the civilisational power of a city in its prodigious scholarship and artistic achievement and became a cosmopolitan destination for talented artists and savants from afar. By the advent of the Industrial Age in the late 18th century, the division of labour and rise of manufacturing defined many towns and cities, and the production of textiles, machinery and other goods created a robust network of trade and financial links throughout Europe and the United States to expand trade and end scarcity to a significant degree (25-31). 

In Chapter Three (Levelling Up) and Four (Divided Cities), the authors begin by recalling the detrimental effects of de-industrialisation from the 1960s onward. From Detroit to Pittsburgh, the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas eroded the tax bases of cities and towns across America’s heartland and relegated these once prosperous, working-class communities to urban blight, unemployment, higher crime rates and despair (37-42). At the same time, corporate America continued to consolidate production in various fields of technology – resulting in a growing chasm between college-educated, service economy professionals and a dwindling, underappreciated pool of factory and trade workers. In turn, a political path opened for right-wing populism steeped in anti-government and nativist rhetoric. Rather than being a baleful influence on American society, however, recent immigrants not only have not committed more crimes than longer-established American citizens (despite false claims to the contrary) but they have created new businesses and generated wealth disproportionate to their numbers. In fact, “63% of start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area were founded or co-founded by immigrants” (49).

Insufficient housing, inadequate employment opportunities and rising poverty levels plague many cities and communities – including Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos and Rio de Janeiro

Since the mass exodus of white, urban professionals from the cities to the ever-expanding suburbs from the 1950s toward the end of the 20th century a resurgence of cities began in the 1990s, on which Goldin and Lee Devlin offer a salient analysis. Japan bolstered its teeming metropolises (Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama) with additional rail-lines (including high-speed trains) and improved its already highly regarded education system by replacing local, tax-based funding to public-financing of schools at the prefecture-level. As such, the Japanese educational system now operates on a far more egalitarian basis (75-76). 

In Chapter Five (“Remote Work: The Threat to Cities”) and Chapter Six (“Cities, Cyberspace and the Future of Community”), the authors summarise the seismic shift of our social spheres as wrought by the digital age. From the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, government-imposed mitigation efforts drove work from the office to the private homes of millions of people worldwide. Consequently, a new era has emerged with less commuting road traffic and both a decline in worker productivity and a sharp increase in employee alienation due to the absent or infrequent in-person contract between workers. To combat the isolation produced by virtual connectivity, several companies, including Google, have developed office-centres for their remote-based workforces to gather, reconnect and team-build (89-103).

City-dwellers and their elected representatives clearly face a series of critical policy decisions with respect to preservation and quality of life for all eight billion people on the planet

Toward the end of the book, Goldin and Lee-Devin reach their scholarly stride by delivering a robust investigation into the widening disparity of wealth (Chapter Seven: Beyond the Rich World), threats to global health (Chapter Eight: The Specter of Disease). As a result of the ongoing trend of metropolitan expansion and spikes in the population densities of cities in Asia, Africa and South America, air pollution, insufficient housing, inadequate employment opportunities and rising poverty levels plague many cities and communities – including Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos and Rio de Janeiro. (107-122) Despite significant progress in reducing mortality rates through national vaccination programs over the past two centuries, urban sprawl, the closer proximity of animals to humans with an attendant higher possibility of virus transmission and the emergence of fact-free, anti-vaccination propaganda online has made human beings more vulnerable to diseases and future pandemics (137-140). 

In turning to “A Climate of Peril” in Chapter Nine, the authors paint a harrowing picture of the threat of climate change and the efforts by cities to remediate its impact. After decades of largely unchecked carbon emission into the atmosphere, extreme weather has become the norm with often devastating consequences – including the loss of more than 1,800 lives in Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans, 2005). In the same year London reached a record 40 degrees Celsius over a summer of blistering heat (2022), entire communities were washed away from massive downpours and floods in Pakistan (149-150). As cities account for 70 per cent of Carbon emissions, Goldin and Lee-Devlin rightly advocate the replacement of fossil-fuel reliant automobiles with train networks and also highlight greater opportunities for recycling (161-163). 

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus (c. 1602), one of the characters exclaims “What is a city but the people?”. From the pages of Age of the City, city-dwellers and their elected representatives clearly face a series of critical policy decisions with respect to preservation and quality of life for all eight billion people on the planet. In demonstrating how cities prove instrumental to the social, civilisational and economic growth of both nations and our international order, Goldin and Lee-Devlin have produced a superb study for academics, organisers and policymakers to reflect upon – and act upon – in reclaiming and/or further transforming urban areas into thriving centres of culture, tolerance and environmentally-sound living.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash.

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