The first English-language collection of critical essays by Gianni Celati, one of Italy’s most important contemporary authors.

Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian essayist Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Its topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge to street theater, writing, photography, cinema, and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical, and artistic movements of the past fifty years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural, and biographical contexts.

Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary tempts readers to wander and become lost in the webs of his daring thoughts. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of his writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. This collection offers a taste of his adventures of the mind and body, led by a lithe sensitivity not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but also very much engaged with the everyday lives, places, and tales we all constantly share.
 

Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to “pageant fever.” Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.
 
Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change—and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of “pageant fever” can still be seen in Britain today.
 

A full account of the St Petersburg Panopticon, the only panopticon built by the Bentham brothers themselves.

The jurist and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, and his lesser-known brother, Samuel, a talented naval architect, engineer, and inventor, had a long love affair with Russia. Jeremy hoped to assist Empress Catherine II with her legislative projects. Samuel went to St Petersburg to seek his fortune in 1780 and came back with the rank of Brigadier-General and the idea, famously publicized by Jeremy, of the Panopticon. The Bentham Brothers and Russia chronicles the brothers’ later involvement with the Russian Empire when Jeremy focused his legislative hopes on Catherine’s grandson Emperor Alexander I and Samuel found a unique opportunity to build a Panopticon in St Petersburg—the only one ever built by the Benthams themselves. Setting the Benthams’ projects within an in-depth portrayal of the Russian context, Roger Bartlett illuminates an important facet of their later careers and offers insight into their worldview and thought. He also contributes to the history of legal codification in Russia and the demythologizing of the Panopticon, made notorious by Michel Foucault.
 

Novel histories of people who experienced physical, social, political, or cultural compulsion in the course of paid work.

Broad in scope, Coercion and Wage Labour examines diverse areas of work including textile production, war industries, civil service, and domestic labor, in contexts from the Middle Ages to the present day. This book demonstrates that wages have consistently shaped working people’s experiences and failed to protect workers from coercion. Instead, wages emerge as versatile tools to bind, control, and exploit workers. Remuneration mirrors the distribution of power in labor relations, often separating employers physically and emotionally from their employees and disguising coercion.

The book makes historical narratives accessible to interdisciplinary audiences. Most chapters are preceded by illustrations by artists invited to visually conceptualize the book’s key messages and to emphasize the presence of the body and landscape in the realm of work. In turn, the chapter texts reflect back on the artworks, creating an intense intermedial dialogue that offers mutually relational “translations” and narrations of labor coercion. Other contributions written by art scholars discuss how coercion in remunerated labor is constructed and reflected in artistic practice. The collection serves as an innovative and creative tool for teaching and raises awareness that narrating history is always contingent on the medium chosen and its inherent constraints and possibilities.
 

Practical guidance for teaching languages from scratch in higher education, using German as a case study.

As entries for UK school exams in modern foreign languages decrease, this book serves the urgent need for research and guidance on ab initio learning and teaching in higher education. Drawing extensively on the expertise of teachers of German in universities across the UK, the volume offers an overview of recent trends, new pedagogical approaches, and practical guidance for teaching languages at the beginners’ level in the higher education classroom that will be useful for teachers of both German and other languages.

The first chapters assess the role of ab initio provision within the wider context of modern language departments and language centers. They are followed by sections on teaching methods and approaches in the ab initio classroom, including the use of music, textbook evaluation, effective use of flipped classrooms, and the contribution of language apps. Finally, the book focuses on the learner in the ab initio context and explores issues around autonomy and learner strengths.
 

An examination of projects designed to enable community groups to create their own solutions to global crises.
 
Co-designing Infrastructures tells the story of a research program designed to bring the power of engineering and technology into the hands of grassroots community groups in order to create bottom-up solutions to global crises. The authors examine in detail four projects in London in detail that exemplify collaboration with engineers, designers, and scientists to enact urban change. The projects at the heart of the book are grounded in specific settings that face challenges familiar to urban communities throughout the world. This place-based approach to infrastructure is of international relevance as a foundation for urban resilience and sustainability. The authors document the tools used to deliver this work, providing guidance for others who are working to deliver local technical solutions to complex social and environmental problems around the world.
 

An ethnographic examination of the effects of structural inequalities on cancer treatment around the world.
 
Taking an ethnographic approach, the contributors to this book offer new examinations of cancer and its treatment to show how social, economic, race, gender, and other structural inequalities intersect, compound, and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain by explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. Its diversity and innovation ensure its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology, and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine, and health equity.
 

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain more than 1,300 letters written to and from Bentham over fifty years, beginning in 1752 at the age of three and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national plan for the provision of poor relief. The letters in Volume 1 (1752-1776) document his difficult relationship with his father—Bentham lost five infant siblings and his mother—and his increasing attachment to his surviving brother, Samuel. We also see an early glimpse of Bentham’s education, as he committed himself to philosophy and legal reform. The exchanges in Volume 2 (1777-1780) cover a major event: a trip by Samuel to Russia. This volume also reveals Bentham working intensively on the development of a code of penal law, enhancing his reputation as a legal thinker. Volume 3 (1781-1788) shows that despite developing a host of original ideas, Bentham actually published little during this time. Nevertheless, this volume also reveals how the foundations were being laid for the rise of Benthamite utilitarianism. The letters in Volume 4 (1788-1793) coincide with the publication of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which had little impact at the time. In 1791 he published The Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House, in which he proposed the building of a circular penitentiary house. Bentham’s letters unfold against the backdrop of the French Revolution and show that his initial sympathy for France began to turn into hostility. Bentham’s life during the years in Volume 5 (1794-1797) was dominated by the panopticon, both as a prison and as an indigent workhouse. The letters in this volume document in great detail Bentham’s attempt to build a panopticon prison in London, and the opposition he faced from local aristocratic landowners. 

Antimigrant populism is on the rise across Europe, and diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly presented as threats to social cohesion. Yet diversity is also a mundane social reality in urban neighborhoods. With this in mind, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture explores how we can live together with difference. What is needed for conviviality to emerge and what role can research play? This volume demonstrates how collaboration among scholars, civil society and practitioners can help to answer these questions. 
Drawing on a range of innovative and participatory methods, each chapter examines conviviality in different cities across the United Kingdom. The contributors ask how the research process itself can be made more convivial and show how power relations between researchers, those researched, and research users can be reconfigured—in the process producing much needed new knowledge and understanding about urban diversity, multiculturalism and conviviality. Examples include embroidery workshops with diverse faith communities, arts work with child language brokers in schools, and life story and walking methods with refugees. Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture is interdisciplinary in scope and includes contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists, as well as chapters by practitioners and activists. It provides fresh perspectives on methodological debates in qualitative social research, and will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and policymakers who work on migration, urban diversity, conviviality and conflict, and integration and cohesion.
 

Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviors.

By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.

A wide-ranging interrogation of aspects of private law doctrine and its development, ordering, and application.

New Directions in Private Law Theory brings together some of the best new work on private law theory, reflecting the breadth of this increasingly important field. The authors adopt a variety of different approaches and contribute to ongoing and important debates about the moral foundations of private law, the individuation of areas of private law, and the connections between private law and everyday moral experience. Questions addressed include: does the diversity identified among claims in unjust enrichment mean that the category is incoherent? Are claims in tort law always about compensating for wrongs? How should we understand the parties’ agreement in a contract? The contributions shed new light on these and other topics and the ways in which they intersect and open up new lines of scholarly inquiry.

This book will be of interest to researchers working in private law and legal theory, but it will also appeal to those outside of law, most notably researchers with an interest in moral and political philosophy, economics, and history.
 

Sri Lanka has been at the center of far-flung networks for millennia—a key part of trade routes, the spread of religions, and Asian and European empires. This book sets out to use contemporary scholarship that focuses on that role as a crossroads to set Sri Lanka more firmly in the fields of Asian and global history. Contributors draw on the archaeology, history, literature, and art of the island from 500 BCE to 1850 CE to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. Showing the subtle ways in which foreign elements can be simultaneously resisted and embraced, the book presents a distinctive, but deeply connected, Sri Lanka, one that is defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.

The green belt has been one of the UK’s most consistent and successful planning policies. It has limited urban sprawl and preserved the countryside around cities—but what is its role in an era of unprecedented urban growth and potentially catastrophic climate change? Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century examines the history of the green belt in the UK and how it has influenced planning regimes in other countries. Despite the undoubted achievements of the green belt, the authors argue, it is time to review it as an instrument of urban planning and landscape design, now that the problem of the ecological impact of cities and the mitigation measures of major climate changes are at the top of the urban agenda across the world.
 
Through an examination of practice in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany, Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century proposes a framework for a reconsideration of the critical relationship between the city and its hinterlands. It will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students of planning, landscape architecture, urban design, architecture, and land economics, as well as practitioners in design, planning, and real estate.
 

Design for London is the product of a unique experiment in urban planning, design and strategic thinking. Set up in 2006 by then-Mayor Ken Livingstone and his Architectural Advisor Richard Rogers, the brief for the team was “to think about London, what made London unique and how it could be made better.” At the time, large-scale state investment was often not an option, and political consensus was fragmented. In addition, cities, by their nature, are fashioned through complex negotiation and deal making that involves many different stakeholders with different agendas. All of these factors complicated the assignment—and made the resulting projects and ideas more interesting. This book aims to provide an engaging account of the strategic approaches and work of Design for London. It outlines how key projects such as the London Olympics, public space programmes, high street regeneration and greening programs were managed.
 

The debate over whether class size matters for teaching and learning is one of the most enduring—and aggressive—in education research. Teachers often insist that small classes benefit their work, but many experts argue that evidence from research shows class size has little impact on pupil outcomes, and therefore does not matter. That dominant view has informed international policymaking. In Rethinking Class Size, the lead researchers on the world’s biggest study into class size effects present a counterargument. Through detailed analysis of the complex relations involved in the classroom they reveal the mechanisms that support teachers’ experience, and they conclude that class size matters very much indeed.
 
Drawing on twenty years of systematic classroom observations, surveys of practitioners, detailed case studies, and extensive reviews of research, Peter Blatchford and Anthony Russell contend that common ways of researching the impact of class size are limited and sometimes misguided. While class size may have no direct effect on pupil outcomes, it can have a significant impact on interconnections within classroom processes. In describing these connections, the book opens up the everyday world of the classroom and shows that the influence of class size is felt everywhere.
 

An empirically grounded analysis of the repurposing of ancient and medieval European history in digital-age populism.

How was the Roman Empire invoked in Brexit Britain and in the United States during  Donald Trump’s presidency, and to what purpose? And why is it critical to answer these kinds of questions? Heritage and Nationalism explores how people’s perceptions and experiences of the ancient past shape political identities in the digital age. It examines the multiple ways in which politicians, parties, and private citizens mobilize aspects of the Iron Age, Roman, and Medieval past of Britain and Europe to include or exclude others based on culture, religion, class, race, and ethnicity.
 
The book uses quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how premodern periods are leveraged to support or oppose populist-nationalist arguments as part of social media discussions concerning Brexit, the Italian Election of 2018, and the US-Mexican border debate in the United States. Analyzing millions of tweets and Facebook posts, comments, and replies, this book is the first to use big data to answer questions about public engagement with the past and identity politics. The findings and conclusions revise and reframe the meaning of populist nationalism today and help to build a shared basis for the democratic engagement of citizens in public life in the future. The book offers a fascinating and unmissable read for anyone interested in how the past and its contemporary legacy, or heritage, influence our political thinking and feeling in a time of hyper-connectivity.

The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music.

Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.

A diverse collection of global educational research.

Young people around the world are calling ever more urgently on policymakers to address today’s global challenges of sustainability, structural inequality, and social justice. It is little surprise that learning in a global society, understanding sustainable development, and being active global citizens are increasingly popular themes for education at all levels. Educational research makes a crucial contribution to knowledge that can address the great questions of our time, and evidence from a diversity of studies is vital if we are to build a clear picture. Research in Global Learning showcases methods and findings from a range of early career researchers who conducted illuminating studies located around the globe, specifically Brazil, China, Ghana, Greece, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Flexibility of approach is key to successful educational research in differing contexts. The studies in this volume use a range of approaches to investigate four important themes: the relationship between policy and practice, opportunities and constraints within the education system and the role of teachers, challenges and opportunities for higher education, and the perspectives of young people and students. Case studies, quantitative and qualitative research, participatory action research, longitudinal studies, and analysis of textbooks through critical discourse analysis are all used to demonstrate how learning about global citizenship and sustainability can inspire learners and contribute to quality education.
 

Bringing together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology.

Elements, Government and Licensing covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody, and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalization of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government.

In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalizations.

The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles and Parameters program, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology.
 

Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco documents and interprets the physical remains and afterlives of South America’s first “modern” armed conflict, the Chaco War (1932–35), and its effects on modern-day Paraguay. Esther Breithoff not only focuses on conventional archaeological remains but also takes an ontological approach to heterogeneous assemblages of objects, texts, practices, and landscapes shaped by industrial war. What she shows is that these assemblages are not simply dead memorials to a bloody war, but rather have been, and continue to be, active in making, unmaking, and remaking worlds—both for those who saw the war itself and for those who continue to live with its effects in the present.
 
Framing the study as an exploration of modern, industrialized warfare as a sort of “hyper object”, Breithoff shows how the material culture and heritage of modern conflict fuse together objects, people, and landscapes, connecting them physically and conceptually across vast, almost unimaginable distances and time periods. This book makes a major contribution to key debates in anthropology, archaeology, critical heritage, and material culture studies on the significance of conflict in understanding the Anthropocene, and the roles played by its persistent heritages in assembling worlds.
 

For 50 years, educator and sociologist Geoff Whitty resolutely pursued social justice through education, first as a classroom teacher and ultimately as the Director of the Institute of Education in London. The essays in this volume - written by some of the most influential authors in the sociology of education and critical policy studies - take Whitty’s work as the starting point from which to examine key contemporary issues in education and the challenges to social justice that they present. Set within three themes of knowledge, policy, and practice in education, the chapters tackle the issues of defining and accessing ‘legitimate’ knowledge, the changing nature of education policy under neoliberalism and globalization, and the reshaping of teacher workplaces and professionalism – as well as attempts to realize more emancipatory practice. The essays open windows on life in the sociology of education, the scholarly community of which it was part, and the facets of education policy, practice, and research that they continue to reveal and challenge in pursuit of social justice.
 

An international exploration of creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon, with practical insights for application in educational settings.

Creativity has become a buzzword across all disciplines in education, from early years through to higher education. Although the meaning of creativity might depend on its cultural context, it is impossible to ignore the applicability and relevance of creativity as an educational tool, philosophical framework, and pedagogical approach.

This collection explores the case studies of ground-breaking work undertaken internationally to support and develop learners with, and for, creativity. The chapters are based on empirical research, which provides the scholarly framework for reconceptualizing creativity in the country-specific context of each study. Each case study is supplemented by critical, reflective, and analytical responses from contributors from different countries, which provide a dialogue for educators into how methods and approaches from a certain context can be transferred, translated, and contextually mediated for different environments.

Creativity in Education thus provides practical insights for application in a wide range of educational settings, as well as philosophical approaches to teacher education, leadership for learning, and creativity as a universal phenomenon.
 

Rather than embracing difference, academic ecosystems seek to normalize and homogenize ways of working and of being a researcher. As a consequence, ableism is an endemic experience in academia, though to date no attempt has been made to theorize those experiences. Ableism in Academia provides an interdisciplinary outlook on ableism that is currently missing. Through reporting of research data and exploring personal experiences, the contributors explore the concept of what it means to be and to work outside the so-called norm.
 
The volume brings together a range of perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism, Derridean and Foucauldian theory, crip theory, and disability theory, and draws on a number of related disciplines. Contributors use various schools of theory to raise awareness and increase understanding of the marginalized. These theories are placed in the context of neoliberal academia, and used to interrogate aspects of identity and how disability is performed, and to argue that ableism is not just a disability issue. This timely collection will be of interest to researchers in disability studies, higher education studies, and sociology, as well as to those working across the social sciences.
 

How the pandemic has changed and reinvigorated the arts and humanities.

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities have responded to the dominant crisis of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the roles of engineers, epidemiologists, and, of course, medics are assumed, this volume illustrates some of how the humanities understood and analyzed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as a testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.
 

Mongolia’s mining sector, along with its environmental and social costs, have been the subject of prolonged and heated debate. This debate has often cast the country as either a victim of the ‘resource curse’ or guilty of ‘resource nationalism’. In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state, and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first-century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies. Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North-East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state.
 

Cities have been some of the most visible manifestations of the evolution of globalization and population expansion, and global cities are at the cutting edge of such changes. Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism examines changes in governance, property development, urban politics, and community activism in two key global cities: London and Toronto. By taking these two cities as empirical cases, the book engages in constructive dialogues about the forms, governmental mechanisms and practices, and policy and community-based responses to the concerns facing modern urban centers. Through three central issues, governance, real estate and housing, and community activism and engagement, the authors seek to understand London and Toronto from a nuanced perspective, promoting critical reflection on the experiences and evaluative critiques of each urban context, providing insight into each city’s trajectory and engaging critically with wider phenomena and influences on the urban governance challenges in cities beyond.
 

Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice presents a selection of essays, architectural experiments, and works that explore the diversity within the fields of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. The book pays particular attention to the question of how and why architecture can and should manifest a critical and reflective capacity outside of its primary function; it also closely examines the ways the discipline currently resonates with contemporary art practice. It does so by reflecting on the first ten years of the architectural journal P.E.A.R..

The book features contributions by architectural practitioners, design researchers, artists, architectural theorists, historians, journalists, curators, and even a paleobiologist, all of whom contributed to the journal. Here, they provide a unique presentation of architectural discourse and practice that seeks to test new ground while forming distinct relationships to recent, and more longstanding, historical legacies.

An ethnographic exploration of the challenges faced by South African municipalities to make the urban world a better place.

Why are even progressive local authorities with the will to improve seldom able to change cities? Why does it seem almost impossible to redress spatial inequalities, deliver and maintain basic services, elevate impoverished areas, and protect marginalized communities? Why do municipalities in the Global South refuse to work with prevailing social informalities, and resort instead to interventions that are known to displace and aggravate the very issues they aim to address?

Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities analyzes these challenges in South African cities, where the brief post-apartheid moment opened a window for progressive city government and made research into state practices both possible and necessary. The book interrogates city officials’ practices through a comparative gaze into other ‘progressive moments’ in large cities in Brazil, the United States, and India. It considers the instruments that these officials invent to implement urban policies, the agency these officials develop, and the constraints they navigate in governing unequal cities. Claire Bénit-Gbaffou captures in this book actual officials’ practices through first-hand experience, state ethnographies, and engaged research. This reveals day-to-day practices that question generalized explanations of state failure in complex urban societies as essential malevolence, contextual weakness, corruption, and inefficiency.

This book opens the black box of the workings of the state, with the hope of opening paths for the construction of progressive policies in contemporary cities.