Winner of the 2013 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize for best book on East African Studies (sponsored by the African Studies Association)

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

In 1900, the Appalachian region of northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia began to change. The inhabitants were dependent on the resources of the rural land, but the arrival of railroads spawned industrialization. Over the next several decades, families moved down from the mountains into the valley of East Tennessee as workers took jobs in the developing urban centers. Country stores, two-lane roads, and cornfields would eventually give way to cities, multi-lane highways, and new housing. The Tri-Cities—Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol—were starting to form.
    
In this carefully documented book, Tom Lee uses archival material, newspapers, memoirs, and current scholarship in Appalachian studies to examine the economic changes that took place in the Tri-Cities region from 1900 to 1950. With modernization and urbanization, an urban-industrial strategy of economic development evolved. The entry of extractive industry into the mountains established the power of the urban elite to shape rural life. Local businessmen saw the route to financial strength in the recruitment of low-wage industry. Workers left struggling farms for factory jobs. This urban-rural relationship supported the Tri-Cities’ manufacturing economy and gave power to the area’s elite.
    
The New Deal and the Second World War broadened this relationship as federal funding sustained the economy. The advantages of urban centers after decades of development left rural communities on the verge of disappearance and dependent on the jobs, opportunities, and economic vision of the cities. By 1950, the power of Appalachia’s elite over the people of the region had extended beyond urban boundaries and brought about the conditions necessary for the creation of the metropolitan Tri-Cities area of today.
    
Readers will gain a better understanding of the complexity of modernization in Appalachia and the rural South from this engaging book.

Tom Lee earned a PhD in history from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is assistant professor of history at Hiwassee College in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Though modern urban planning is only a century old, it appears to be facing extinction. Historically, urban planning has been narrowly conceived, ignoring gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. In Transformative Planning, Tom Angotti argues that unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. This book emerges from decades of urban planners and activists contesting inequalities of class, race, and gender in cities around the world. It compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, a North American urban planners’ association. Original contributions have been added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for a new generation of activists and planners.