W
e are sincerely grateful to the authors of the four commentaries, as they all respond to our overarching need to critically scrutinise the canon of European cities; their comments provided us with such thoughtful and enriching feedback. All the comments gave us the inspiration and the urgent need to expand the analytical platform we were aiming for with our book. Our gratitude is all the greater as we see that our motives and hopes for undertaking this project have been welcomed not only by the ten authors of the chapters -- whose generous commitment we would like to acknowledge here once again -- but also by four other scholars. Indeed - a point Boatcă emphasizes - our hope to “open up a variety of venues for reflexive, critical and global perspectives on urban Europe” (14) seems to be slowly being fulfilled. There is nothing more encouraging for us, both as editors and as citizens.
The analytical paths taken by the four commentaries are compelling and require longer consideration than we can give them here, but we will address what seem to us to be their key points. As with all the commentaries, we feel that they encourage us to think further about the questions that we and the authors of the chapters in this book raise. We hope that there will be many other forums in the future where we can move this conversation forward together.
The four commentaries seem to appreciate the decentering epistemological effort we undertake in the introduction by attempting to strip the (sociological) canon on urban Europe of its certainties, while leaving to the authors of the chapters the task of discussing generative sites for the empirical repositioning of what we are theoretically unsettling. We could not be more inspired by the fact that our efforts - while challenging, as Beebeejaun suggests by questioning “the veneration of a culture of whiteness protected within European urbanism” - have been met with vivid appreciation.
At the same time, Murji suggests that dislodging the (Sociological) canon from its certainties cannot be easily done by a generic appeal to “global perspectives”. Conceptual clarity and consistency are needed, especially concerning two issues, according to the author: the relationship between research, policy and the (idealized) construction of the European city on one hand, and the concept of “racialization” on the other. Indeed, the European City scholarship is primarily concerned with planning, governance and the welfare state, three aspects we do not distinctively address in the introduction, while all chapters offer a wealth of empirical and theoretical discussions of them. Simone’s (2022: 262, original emphasis) Coda in particular highlights the importance of a kind of provisioning that moves “away from expansive production […] to[wards] extended social reproduction.” Race-conscious, comparative-historical discussions of European state provisions and policies would be very welcome contributions -- we see our book as an encouragement in that direction.
As far as racialization is concerned, the uses and meanings of the concept actually vary across the eleven chapters. Understanding it as a meta-concept “connecting contemporary imperial racisms” sounds to us a very valuable suggestion -- in line, it seems to us, with Goldberg’s (2009: 1273) idea that “local resonances [...] are almost always tied to extra- and trans-territorial conceptions and expressions.”
And yet the vagueness of “global perspectives” remains for us a sharp criticism that raises further questions when it comes to our use of Eurocentrism, a concept that Boatcă wonders why we have chosen it over the more globally-framed “Occidentalism”. The main reason we chose to engage with Eurocentrism is that Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000) does not engage with Occidentalism (which is a noteworthy point in itself), and we wanted to be consistent with our guide -- while in fact borrowing certain sensibilities from such decolonial-inspired references as Coronil. We realize that our choice might have required more clarity about our borrowings.
As our volume consists of a variety of borrowings, directions and inspirations, we found Vincze’s point about understanding labor dependencies between urban peripheries and urban cores in Europe very inspiring. Focusing on such interdependencies, the author suggests, “can act as a potential bridge crossing the variegated directions followed in urban studies.” In general, we concede in the introduction the lack of a critique focused on political economy. Studies such as the recent monograph by Stefan Kipfer and the various contributions by Vincze are crucial to this conversation. This point also resonates with Murji’s call to consider racialization as a meta-concept. Could this meta-concept also help to combine a political economy analysis of race and a more representational/discursive view of race? Chamberlain's chapter on Hamburg, for example, touches on labor migration as a structural condition of urban development. The author’s main argument, however, concerns the voices and experiences of racialized laborers, explaining how racism, both as a material and representational phenomenon, affected not only their own socioeconomic conditions, but also the development of Wilhelmsburg as a whole. As Vincze seems to suggest, our project aimed from the outset to focus on some of the presuppositions of political economy (and sociology) -- the act of 'provincialization' is indeed epistemological.
With respect to the analytic relations between the material and the representational in analyses of race, several empirical discussions in the book could be mentioned. For instance, Eneva’s note that in Madrid “only 51 per cent would rent their flat to foreigners” (219) calls into question both political-economic logics of housing markets and widespread racial conceptions of humanhood intertwined with nationalism and nativism in the production of the urban space. Another example: Rexhepi and Azarmandi’s quote of poet Jazra Khaleed, “My words are proletarian, slaves like me / They work in sweatshops night and day” (184) account not only for the variety of the materiality-figurativity relations, but also for the importance of keeping in focus the position from which analyses are carried out, hence our and other scholars’ epistemological premises grounding our analyses, i.e. our scholarly representations.
Depoliticization, intimately connected to positionality as it is, directly jumps in this conversation. Beebeejaun makes it clear that “the language and politics of anti-racism has frequently been captured by the state in order to depoliticize these [anti-racist] movements,” suggesting “further reflections” on this point. We could not agree more. From "DE&I" rhetoric to the establishment of parliamentary commissions 'against hate', the state’s language of anti-racism seems to be increasingly 'post-racial' -- recognising racism while erasing the possibility of calling it racial injustice. Sometimes our understanding of race is labelled “radical”, and perhaps we accept such a connotation. Nevertheless, it seems important to us to recognise first and foremost that if anything, it is the effects of race and racism that are radical - rooted in European Middle Ages, colonialism, and the Shoah/Porrajmos - as the eleven chapters illustrate.
In thanking again the four contributors to this symposium, we would like to express our hope that our book reaches multiple audiences, encouraging to attend to the shifting material and representational entanglements of race and the urban across Eastern and Western Europe, while grounding anti-racist engagements on generative grounds.
References
Chakrabarty, D (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldberg, D. T. (2009) Racial comparisons, relational racisms: some thoughts on method, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 32:7, 1271-1282.
Noa K. Ha is Scientific Director of the German Center of Integration and Migration Studies (DeZIM) in Berlin. She has taught at TU Dresden (Center for Integration Studies), TU Berlin (Center for Metropolitan Studies), and kunsthochschule weissensee (MA Spatial Strategies). She has published on urban informality, racism and public space in neoliberal Berlin, and has written extensively about decolonization, the European city and the coloniality of urban space.
Giovanni Picker is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow (UK). He has held research and teaching positions in Romania, Hungary, Russia, Germany and England. Giovanni has published widely on cities and race-critical theories, and is the author of Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe (2017).
