Abstract
Since the nineteenth century, “slums,” “shanties,” and other low-income dwellings have elicited moral panics among government officials and middle classes across the world. The history of these panics is global, as they are embedded in transnational visions of an ideal city, values of bourgeois domesticity, and prejudices against migrants and working classes, especially racialized ones. During the twentieth century, as urban historians have documented, these visions of an ideal city justified the razing of low-income neighborhoods, the displacement of their residents, and the construction of different types of housing projects to replace them.
Our understanding of this history of urban renewal is modeled upon the experience of a handful of North Atlantic cities. As Alan Mayne’s Slums recounts, barely two decades after the term “slum” was first printed in 1810s London, the word was on the go, and by the turn of the twentieth century myriad municipal authorities had declared war against slums. Policymakers and scholars assumed that cities across the world were following the same path toward urban modernity (and dystopia) embodied by cities like London.
The history of the past century reveals the parochialism of this belief: there is not one urban script, no original model. This makes the writing of urban history as exciting as it is challenging. A prime difficulty to overcoming these deep-seated ideas of universality lays in the enduring power of concepts and narratives that have not only described historical processes but reshaped them. “Slum” is a case in point. The concept of informality, analyzed critically by Helen Gyger in Improvised Cities, is another. Despite their analytical shortcoming and heavy historical baggage, these words cannot just be cast aside. They have acquired a life of their own, justifying policies with far-reaching (planned and unintended) consequences. Slums and informal dwellings have also generated tangible fears and prejudices, and—not least—produced scholarly and editorial niches. Hence the irony at the heart of Mayne’s book. If the word “slum” is to be discarded for good, for the very convincing reasons the author offers (it is deceitful and politically counterproductive if our goal is helping their residents), why then title his book Slums? Moreover, why use a stock image of Rocinha—Rio de Janeiro’s most famous favela—as the cover image? Are we simply adding fuel to the fire?
I say “we” deliberately, as I have used the word “slum” in writings with a similar intent as Mayne: to reconstruct the history of the term and evaluating its consequences. Indeed, this is one possible way of deprovincializing the field of urban history. A historical examination of the discipline’s key concepts, metanarratives, and theories, following them across particular histories and cities, can upend traditional geographies, cast light on new cities, and stimulate fresh comparisons. In different ways, the books reviewed here—which focus on slums, shanties, and other improvised dwellings across the world—open such possibilities. I will review these books chronologically, following the period they cover, and offer some concluding remarks on what they tell us about the field of urban history.
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The shanty, a forgotten architectural form that flourished in the United States between 1840 and 1940, is recast at the center of American culture in Lisa Goff’s evocative Shantytown, USA. Goff’s descriptions of nineteenth-century New York are at times reminiscent of cities like Rio de Janeiro—in both past and present. In both cities, residents of self-built shantytowns in areas of difficult access like hills or swamps lay the ground for capitalist urbanization by paying rent, leveling the ground, and providing cheap labor for the urban economy. American shantytowns were stigmatized and misunderstood by middle-class observers. And as is the case with Brazilian favelas, shantytowns were often viewed in a romanticized way, as spaces of freedom and community.
The word “shanty” first appeared in print in the United States in the 1820s, as a description of a dwelling in Ohio, then part of the western frontier. References to shanties were common in nineteenth-century frontier writings; described as temporary dwellings, they were nothing “to be ashamed of unless [. . .] occupied for too long” (p. 39, emphasis in the original). Traces of a history of migration and frontier colonization, shanties bore testament to the industriousness and hard work of frontiersmen. On the contrary, shanties and shantytowns in cities—a growing dwelling option for the urban poor—carried a more ambivalent meaning, “simultaneously an eyesore and an ideal” (p. 55). On one hand, shantytowns represented an “alternate vision of urban settlement” that broke the uniformity of the city grid while expressing “the values, needs, and demands of poor migrant laborers” (p. 56). At the same time, shantytown dwellers were stigmatized as squatters (even though they payed rent for their lots) whose homes represented a public health hazard. This ambivalence characterized representations of shantytowns until the Depression Era.
In chapters 3 through 6, Goff zooms in on New York’s shantytowns, analyzing them through journalistic writings, broadsides, musicals, and paintings. New York shantytowns are much less known than its central tenements, which became the iconic representations of urban poverty. Located in the city margins, shantytowns were also marginal in contemporary representations of the city, for they did not fit in the narrative of progress and modernity that New York was starting to embody. Nineteenth-century writers and illustrators—Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are the best-known examples—suffered from a “documentary amnesia” that led them to present shantytowns as located “outside of time and beyond the bounds of community” (p. 73). Foreshadowing arguments about “urban marginality” common in 1960s Latin America and the “Third World,” shantytown dwellers were stigmatized as lazy and uncivilized squatters when, in reality, they were thrifty workers paying rent and carving a living in what we would call today the informal economy.
Targeted for demolitions and evictions, shantytowns started to vanish from cities in the 1880s. This disappearance added a powerful dose of nostalgia to views on shantytowns, increasingly seen as indictments of middle-class values and as “iconic respites from modernity” (p. 154). These perceptions are beautifully captured in the paintings reproduced in the book, as well as in Goff’s perceptive analyses of them. These images inspire our historical imagination, prompting us to envision a New York that was not preordained to become today’s city. Shantytowns and their artistic representations capture different temporalities, class and ethnic identities, and relationship between city and countryside.
In Reconstruction-era Atlanta, emancipated slaves constructed shantytowns in defiance of government pressures to return to plantations or to relocate to other cities with available manufacturing jobs. To live in the “box houses” that characterized Atlanta shantytowns was, for these African American newcomers to the city, a way to “subtly declare your mobility and, by extension, your ownership of your own labor, and your body” (p. 189). Goff uses series of fascinating sketches by artist DeLancey Walker Gill to document the dissemination of Caribbean architectural elements—louvered doors or latticework windows—that “communicated racial identity” in southern cities like Washington, D.C. (p. 201). These sketches occasionally portray the interiors of shanties, offering an invaluable window into family life and material culture. This self-built landscape would soon be erased as Reconstruction reached its end and public works transformed, modernized, and segregated the capital at the turn of the century.
The myriad possibilities—of self-sufficiency, independence, and community—that shantytowns offered their residents narrowed dramatically in the 1930s, when shantytowns were “reconceptualized as slums” (p. 237). Such reframing ignored the resourcefulness, self-reliance, and independence displayed by shantytown dwellers that became stigmatized as lacking moral character or, in the best of cases, as helpless victims. Homelessness became a national crisis during the Great Depression, dislocating the lives of millions who moved to tenements and shantytowns, notoriously relabeled as “Hoovervilles.” In the following years, the federal government essayed different solutions to the homelessness crisis; but it never considered shantytowns as a viable housing option. Reframing shantytowns as slums erased many of the positive features that, in the best of cases, these dwellings provided for their residents—the proximity to work and nature; the pride and sense of ownership that stemmed from self-construction; single-family occupation; and a feeling of community.
To a large extent, the erasure of the history of U.S. shantytowns was produced by the worldwide visibility of slums starting in the late nineteenth century. The dissemination of the concept “slum” from Britain throughout the world is the topic of Alan Mayne’s Slums. Mayne follows the use of the word from Victorian London to the twenty-first century, when the United Nations’ 2005 Millennium Development Goals (“Making Slums History” and “Cities without Slums”) brought back its use in policymaking projects and debates. The word “slum” galvanized anxieties surrounding urban growth, poverty, and inequality, disease, political disorder, and—once the term was transplanted to colonial cities—racial difference. The concept “commanded attention [. . .] because it rationalized the inequalities and environmental degradation underpinning modern capitalist cities” (p. 49). Such rationalization consisted of a familiar moral explanation that slums and poverty were the product of their residents’ individual failings.
Mayne’s thesis is simple, compelling, and familiar to those acquainted with the literature on urban studies. The word slum is “unhelpful,” for it “misrepresents the complex social realities of urban social inequality [. . .] it marginalizes poor-people and low-income areas as supposedly deficient and dysfunctional by-products of urban development” (p. 8). Slum residents never describe themselves in this way, as the connotations of the word are too negative. The word lacks analytical edge, it brings no benefits to social scientists and policymakers. Slum clearance projects, often described as progressive policies aimed at helping the urban poor, are usually profit-oriented ventures detrimental to their purported beneficiaries. The word can elicit the righteous indignation of the middle classes, but this indignation is often mired in repulsion and ignorance. “Slum” simply carries too much stigma and baggage to be helpful, no matter how good our intentions might be. Since the 1960s, scholars such as William Mangin and Janice Perlman—and more recently Ananya Roy and Brodwyn Fischer—waged similar critiques. 1 Yet the word refuses to go away.
The first part of Mayne’s Slums guides the reader through the literary, cultural, and official representations of nineteenth-century British slums, all powered by the “attraction of repulsion” that “slummers” of all stripes felt toward these places. Mayne then shifts to policy, specifically the “War on Slums” that began in the late nineteenth century and reached its apogee between the 1930s and the 1970s. Millions of houses were demolished in the United States and Britain in this period. They were not categorized as slums but as “unfit for human habitation,” a seemingly neutral term that was, in actuality, quite subjective. The “War on Slums” was deaf to the needs of residents who had invested time and work in homes that they had no desire to abandon. But the bellicose echoes of the formula were politically useful for politicians and developers who reaped the financial benefits of slum clearance projects. Despite its devastating consequences for slum residents with little political clout, the War on Slums was not undermined until a coalition of social scientists and liberal middle-class activists recast slums as working-class communities that merited protection.
As slum clearance projects lost their legitimacy in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, the word took on a new life in Britain’s former colonies: “the slum was ‘Orientalized’” (p. 132). Slums in India and Singapore carried the same “attraction of repulsion” that characterized their European counterparts, but they were also racialized. Colonial slums embodied the racist assumptions at the heart of imperialism, evidencing “native” backwardness and justifying colonial rule. Decolonization did not change these views. The slum was as useful for postcolonial governments as it had been for European powers in need of legitimizing their authority. Postcolonial nations “incorporated slum stereotypes into their postcolonial development programmes, forged partnerships with international aid agencies and explained their social policies and modernizing strategies” by resorting to a term both “familiar and credible” across the world (p. 132).
Mayne’s analysis of postcolonial slums is largely based on India, the first country that gave legal teeth to the term in the form of the Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act of 1956, a “global game-changer” (p. 171). This proclamation represents a high-water mark in slum clearance policies in India and the “Third World.” In the same decade, however, policies to improve slums through cooperation between governments and neighborhood associations were tested in India, Peru, and other countries. The overlap between clearance and improvement measures evidences the difficulty of establishing clear breaks in policies toward slums. Today, slum demolitions are still widespread, prompted by government efforts to attract tourism, investment, and profit from redevelopment schemes (this is particularly obvious in cities hosting Olympic Games and similar massive events). Conversely, policies and languages of participatory planning, community development, and aided self-help have proved remarkably resilient, visible in periods of developmentalism and neoliberalism, as well as under authoritarian and democratic leaderships.
While identifying a global chronology of slum policies is difficult, the policy shift from clearance to improvement is meaningful. In the Indian case, the change was partly a pragmatic government response to scarce resources, but slum improvement was also driven by a critique of the authoritarian premises of clearance projects. Inspired by community development experiments in India and Latin America, the United Nations developed a “more and socially progressive approach” to slums codified at the Conference on Human Settlements (HABITAT I) in Vancouver in 1976 (p. 190). HABITAT I abandoned the use of the word slum. The conference represented, in Mayne’s telling, a possible new dawn, “a refreshingly new approach to human settlement planning” (p. 191). This promising trend was continued at HABITAT II. Held in Istanbul in 1996, HABITAT II was characterized by a “respect for vernacular housing and neighbourhood design, sensitivity to the broader strengths and aspirations of ‘urban informality,’ and advocacy of community participation in designing and implementing self-help projects” (p. 234). Mayne writes with sympathy about this period but describes many projects as paternalistic and nondemocratic. The HABITAT years also coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, increasing the participation of private capital in the financing and design of slum upgrading projects. Ultimately, the rhetoric democracy and community participation amounted to little more than lip service, hiding the continuity between old and new slum clearance projects. Accordingly, the United Nations’ 2005 goal of “Making Slums History” is something of a return of the repressed. According to Mayne, little has changed since the War on Slums at the turn of the twentieth century.
Shifting the vantage point to Peru, Helen Gyger’s Improvised Cities studies aided self-help housing in the period between the 1950s and the 1980s. Gyger’s approach to aided self-help—an architectural mode where government authorities provide technical assistance to self-builders—is nuanced, detailed, and attentive to the “points of contact between the articulation of political and ideological principles, the negotiation of housing and urban policies, the formation of design proposals, and the implementation of projects on the ground” (p. 375). Gyger translates slum as tugurio, a term that in the Latin American context refers to “degraded housing of various kinds, generally occupied on a rental basis and situated in inner-urban areas” (p. 8). Nonetheless, as Gyger explains, most of Peru’s urban poor do not live in slums but in “informal” neighborhoods. “Informal” is another word that carries a heavy baggage; as Gyger points out, the term is used to describe two different things: (1) neighborhoods (or houses) that break urban regulations and/or lack property titles; and (2) neighborhoods or houses that are self-built. In the Peruvian case, terms such as barriada, barrio marginal, or pueblo joven—all examples of informal neighborhoods—belong to different decades and carry different political, legal, and social meanings. These are important distinctions that are glossed over in sweeping narratives such as Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums. 2 But at the very least they caution us against painting the world’s slums with broad brushstrokes.
Improvised Cities follows the national and international experts who studied Peru’s squatter settlements (barriadas). An important housing form for the urban poor since at least the 1920s, barriadas became more prominent in the 1950s, both as features of the built environment and as targets of public policy. This visibility is comparable to that of India’s postcolonial slums, but in the Peruvian case it was not only (nor mainly) the result of foreign conceits being transplanted onto new settings. Peru gained its independence in the early nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, housing policies would be framed around long-lasting national preoccupations with indigeneity and progress (or lack thereof). Urbanization, housing, and rural-urban migration would be reframed in the 1950s, when Peru became a key site within a transnational dialogue on these matters (with modernization replacing progress as a historical horizon).
Two main approaches framed Peru’s housing problem in the 1950s: a “developmentalist” approach that held squatter settlements should be eliminated and replaced by planned communities, and a “free-market” one that advocated self-built neighborhoods should not be dismissed out of hand since they offered a path to homeownership. Throughout the remainder of the century, barriadas became the sites where this seminal opposition were reframed by different disciplines and in different political contexts.
After describing early architectural and anthropological studies of barriadas, Gyger focuses on the practice of aided self-help through the figure of British architect John F.C. Turner. Gyger interviewed Turner and had access to his personal archives. From a source perspective, these sections of the book are superb (the pictures from the early days of barriadas, for example, are stunning). The British architect arrived in Peru in 1957 at the invitation of architect and government official Eduardo Neira. Turner came as an expert who could contribute to the regulation and improvement of squatter settlements. His time in Peru was eventful, moving across bureaucracies and cities while experimenting with targeted urban planning interventions, aided self-help projects, and the development of building prototypes. Turner also became acquainted with the webs of political patronage that linked residents, their associations, and different levels of the Peruvian government. Over time, he grew increasingly skeptical of the state’s capacity to regulate urbanization and of his own position as an expert, reaching the conclusion that “the state should work with rather than for the people” (p. 138). Turner’s early interest in anarchism and the work of Patrick Geddes facilitated his adoption of these ideas. His experience in Peru, however, was fundamental to developing his praise of self-construction for which he is best known.
Turner landed in an exciting urban laboratory, where traditional understandings of planning were being upended through experimentation with different modes of aided self-help. The 1961 Law 13517 galvanized many of these ideas that rejected “slum clearance” and “proposed an entirely different approach to directing urban growth” (p. 152). Law 13517 opened the door for legalizing informal neighborhoods on the condition that “their urban services were upgraded and that individual dwellings were rehabilitated” (p. 151). (The law also sought to halt uncontrolled urbanization, dictating that self-built settlements constructed after September 1960 would have to be supervised by architects and follow an urban plan.) Surveying houses and neighborhoods, counting their residents, and assessing their tenure status—which the implementation of the law required—were a Sisyphean ordeal fraught with political conflicts, as the law prompted settlers to make legalization claims. Drafters of the law sought to negotiate “between improvised, self-generated construction [. . .] and the dictates of official planning” (p. 152). They recognized the reality and potential of self-construction but aspired to harness it and use it to push for larger urban visions. Nonetheless, as Turner observed (and as the experience of other Latin American cities confirms), coordinated planning was undermined by conflicts and disagreements between residents and government agencies. Furthermore, housing and planning agencies were under-resourced, which reduced the number of government-supported projects completed and cut off the poorest residents.
Aided self-help continued to be discussed, interpreted, and used to advance an array of political projects following the passing of Law 13517. In the early 1960s, Peru’s housing programs dovetailed with the U.S.-sponsored Alliance for Progress. Credit for housing, American policymakers and bankers agreed, could provide shelter, foster economic development and social stability, and create investment opportunities. Beginning in 1963, the developmentalist government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry approved the PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) project, which brought to Peru a cohort of international architects with the goal of devising architectural and technical solutions to the housing deficit. PREVI combined modernist architecture, cutting-edge technology, and aided self-help “to provide a viable alternative for the provision of low-cost housing” (p. 280). But its expert solutions often did not match resident needs. For instance, the high-cost of houses precluded low-income workers from purchasing homes. In 1968, Belaúnde was overthrown by a leftist military regime. The Revolutionary Government that replaced him continued to support self-construction, using it to push for a revolutionary democracy. The “focus of self-help action would not be on housing per se but rather on fostering civic engagement” and developing a new relationship between state and society (p. 293). Pueblos jóvenes [young towns]—as barriadas became known—thus become the building blocks for Peru’s “social democracy of full participation.”
Gyger illustrates how “remarkably resilient” the concept of aided self-help housing has been, how easily it has accommodated developmentalist, revolutionary, democratic, liberal, and neoliberal projects. In her last chapter, Gyger analyzes economist Hernando de Soto, whose neoliberal arguments and praise of Peru’s informal revolution reverberated across the world in the 1990s. De Soto was the best-known defender of land-titling policies geared at stimulating individual entrepreneurship, generating capital, and driving economic growth. These ideas echoed Turner’s praise of self-construction, but both authors targeted different versions of the “state.” Whereas Turner emphasized the freedom to build and was suspicious of government expertise, de Soto criticized mercantilist regulations hindering individual entrepreneurship. Turner believed self-construction “empower[ed] individuals and their communities,” de Soto was convinced that informal settlements were a potential “generator of capital and an engine of economic growth” (p. 363). The comparison is significant, I believe, because it offers clues on the transition between the anti-authoritarian spirit of HABITAT I and the neoliberal retrenchment of the state starting in the 1980s. Mayne praises the former but does not fully consider the possibility that HABITAT I prefigured or set the stage for neoliberal policies toward slums in the 1990s and beyond.
Franz Mathis’ Industrial Development Through Urbanization is a departure from the studies reviewed above. Mathis writes from the discipline of economic history and only tangentially touches on the dwellings of the urban poor. He is primarily interested in the relationship between industrialization, urbanization, poverty, and prosperity. Prosperity, Mathis argues, can only be reached through industrialization. Industrialization, in turn, requires the kind of mass markets that only large cities—or heavily urbanized regions such as the U.S. northeast or central Europe—can provide. Cities, therefore, represent our best hope for ending poverty.
Industrial Development Through Urbanization exemplifies the North-Atlantic narrative of urbanization to which I referred above. Therefore, Mathis’ universal arguments about the economy can be read against the insights offered by Goff, Mayne, and Gyger. Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mathis explains, did cities—or clusters of cities—with populations in the millions emerged, creating the conditions of possibility for industrialization. By establishing this causal relationship between cities and industrialization, the author rejects “traditional” explanations for industrialization: religious orientations, climatic conditions, institutional framework, raw materials, and capital (p. 23). (I suspect that these “European or Occidental” explanations are less widespread than Mathis presumes, at least within the field of urban history.) The author also rejects the proposition that the “so-called First World developed at the expense of the Third” (p. 19). Indeed, his “global approach” does not consist of analyzing relationships (of exploitation, trade, or emulation) between world regions but in studying history to formulate a “theory of economic development” that explains such “global developments” as urbanization and industrialization.
Mathis argues that urbanization and industrialization are global in “the sense that they follow the same or similar patterns everywhere in the world” (p. 19). His theory is therefore universal and unapologetically modeled after the history of North-Atlantic cities. Following a theoretical introduction, the bulk of the book consists of an “economic-historic tour” across the five continents. This tour is swift, rich in graphs and tables, but at times uneven. For example, the section on Europe is much longer than the one on Africa. Mathis offers little discussion on what terms like development mean across different geographies and historical periods. Development is mostly measured through indicators such as automobiles, computers, and industrial workers. Poverty also remains undertheorized. It can be measured through material indicators, but Mathis never provides a definition or an argument about poverty and its relationship with the built environment. Mathis claims to shift away from the “West and the Rest” narratives but this division of the world in discrete regions reproduces problematic geographies that should be challenged. For example, in what sense are cities like São Paulo and Buenos Aires “Latin American”? As historian José Moya has shown, São Paulo and Buenos Aires became two of the largest cities in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Both received millions of migrants from the peripheries of Europe while becoming centers of production and export of coffee, wheat, and beef. Aren’t these cities better understood as hubs of the Atlantic economy, comparable to New York or Chicago? 3
As an urban historian, I was at first skeptical of Mayne’s claim about the power that the word “slum” continues to hold, particularly in the scholarly literature. But references to slums are tellingly peppered in Industrial Development Through Urbanization (a book originally published in German). Mathis refers to slums alternately as drags on development and as places removed from it; slum dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have “very little purchasing power, which diminished the cities’ positive influence on economic development” (p. 222). In the case of India, the uneven benefits of industrialization ensured that migrants living in “urban slums [. . .] did not enjoy this kind of prosperity” (p. 143). But slums are not always obstacles to industrial development; they can also be a precondition or the outcome. As Goff demonstrates, cheap houses built by workers with low salaries were critical for capitalist urbanization in New York. Likewise, “slums” in contemporary Mexican border towns are a consequence of Mexico’s very low salaries—the reason why transnational industries set up shop there in the first place. Such configuration, where international capital looks for the best conditions for production—such as low salaries and environmental regulations—across borders is not accounted for in Mathis’ theory. This model of industrialization challenges the notion of a virtuous circle between industrialization, urbanization, and development.
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The books under review hint at a history yet to be written: a history of self-built neighborhoods and a history of the laws, projects, and policies enacted to harness this construction process. Mayne argues that the conceit of the slum has been powerful and detrimental to the urban poor across the world. But its effects ought to be studied on the ground, through histories that analyze the relationship between ideologies, the formation of urban policies, and the implementation of housing projects. As Gyger writes, the “chain of effects” from political and economic principles to housing policies is “confounded by a mess[y] reality” (p. 375). Mayne possibly overplays his case. While the conceit of the slum impelled urban renewal policies across the world, the outcome of these policies varied immensely across different cities, depending on the resources of, and interplay between, bureaucracies, developers, and slum “communities” (including all the hierarchies and conflicts that this last term usually hides). Judging from the example of countries like Peru, housing policies can be less consequential than expected. Notwithstanding how many housing projects government officials could devise, slum communities were often able to oppose them or adapt them to their own needs. Instead of destroying slums, many Latin American governments ended up integrating them into the city, and into the political system as well.
Studying the interplay between governments and residents is easier said than done. The authors under review employ sources such as official reports (by national governments or international organizations), architectural projects, newspaper articles, urban reportages, ethnographic and sociological studies, and artistic representations of slums, shantytowns, and other improvised neighborhoods. These sources were created by middle-class experts and government officials who saw these places as a problem in need of fixing. Goff points out that writers and artists often resorted to the passive voice in their portrayals of shantytowns. Understandably, the authors under review frequently resort to the same voice. Shanties and slums are persuasively analyzed as urbanistic challenges and as figments of middle-class anxieties. But descriptions of how dwellers built their homes and organized to defend them are more fragmentary. However, there are noteworthy exceptions. Gyger revealingly analyzes the back-and-forth between planning offices and the barriada residents who undermined their projects. In her analyses of musical theater, a cultural form consumed and created by working classes and immigrants, Goff understands shanties as places where class and ethnic identities were generated. Mayne uses oral histories to illustrate the feeling of belonging that residents attached to their homes—targeted as slums by planners.
This is not a critique but an acknowledgment of the difficulty of writing in-depth social histories while mapping broader (transnational or global) intellectual histories. The tension between transnational categories and local histories has always been at the heart of urban history. Read together, these authors probe this tension by making new comparisons, charting itineraries of production of knowledge, and documenting how global designs are messily implemented in cities across the world.