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Narratives of urban life

O n one level this is a delightful collection of urban stories. It lingers on the estates and streets of South London; it pauses on East London markets to smell the mangos; it chases down the Africa Hackney and in Peckham, the pigeon and the weave; it ponders community cohesion and dread culture in Birmingham; it looks at suburban driveways in Essex; it takes in urban relegation in Gothenburg; it visits Bosnian refugees in Denmark and goes to Turkey on an Armenia Diaspora tour; it looks at Jamaicans through European and American eyes; it notes defiance and pride in the demolition of a Puerto Rican housing estate; and it celebrates a 60-year anniversary along with the residents of a Mexico City estate. Each chapter presents intimate and compelling stories of people, places and situations; transporting the reader through vivid and detailed ethnographic writing. This is urban ethnography at its best: lively, fascinating and passionate about understanding urban issues, city neighbourhoods and the people who live in them. Herein lies the book’s appeal. But its easy storytelling belies its conceptual sophistication. The book is arranged to take in landscapes of ever-increasing scale; beginning in South London in the neighbourhoods where the book’s editors’ main field-sites are based and working outwards to other parts of the UK, Scandinavia, the Caribbean and North and Central America. In the smallest of scales—in Peckham—we glimpse the wider world in the streets. And in macro-landscapes of the wider world we see the intimacies of small local places and lives. In these scalar shifts, in the book’s skilful interweaving of the global and the local, the authors offer a refreshingly novel account of complex compositions of globalisation and the ways in which they run through neighbourhoods and lives. The richness of this book lies in its empirical engagement with cities: with people and their everyday lives and the places in which lives are lived, felt and imagined. It evokes sensuous urban landscapes through which multi-strands of globalisation are routed and enacted, in contrast to the formal, abstract economism of mainstream globalisation theory. I found myself wanting the authors to push some of these global/local entanglements a bit further using their vivid empirical material to challenge existing conceptions of globalisation. But this wasn’t the main thrust of their book. It is the book’s subtitle—emotion and location—which unlocks the collection’s originality. Each chapter pursues in different ways, the feelings and emotions people attach to places and to routine and not so routine aspects of urban life. Connections between motion and emotion, examining the affective dimensions of motion, run through the collection in different and surprising ways. This is particularly effective in chapters dealing with issues of urban relegation, neighbourhood stigmatisation and demolition. Urban scholars of