I
n 2019 the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, stated that “This is the team as diverse as Europe is…” when introducing her 27 commissioners. However, each and every one of these commissioners were white and the situation remains the same today. Despite only 24 of the 705 EU Commissioners being people of color, the EU only adopted an anti-racism strategy in September 2020. The disturbing absence of engagement with race as an important dimension of European identity at the highest level of political governance is not unimportant. Von der Leyen’s assertion that these racially unrepresentative commissioners reflect Europe’s diversity draws upon an enduring idea of whiteness and Europeanness as intertwined in ways that occlude wider historical scrutiny. These narratives continue to exclude European people of color who remain marked as outside dominant conceptions of what European belonging and identity entails.
The absence of clear engagement with a Europe that is racially diverse is not an innocent act of oversight but a calculative rationality rooted within the wider historical project of European colonialism. These historical legacies have profound repercussions for how we understand urban space and for the multi-faceted experiences of everyday life for its racialised denizens. Noa K. Ha and Giovanni Picker’s edited collection European Cities: Modernity, Race and Colonialism thus makes an important and essential contribution to the field of urban studies. Located within urban sociology, the collection opens with a strong introduction that seeks to set out the agenda for urban sociology that rejects a hegemonic reading of urban space that embeds whiteness within both analysis and policy “solutions”. What follows are ten chapters that offer precise cases and examples of how race has unfolded within specific urban arenas with each author engaging with a process of reading against dominant national or disciplinary strands of thinking that have sidelined or stereotyped racial groups within their area of attention. The collection concludes with a Coda by AbdouMaliq Simone.
The book turns to the work of provincialising Europe developed by the postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty in his 2000 book of the same title. Chakrabarty emphasises the conceit contained within the historical representation and political project that is modern Europe, and that places itself as integral to political “advancement”. For such a project to unfold there has to be a collective forgetting of colonialisation, a theme that has also been turned to by the sociologist Gurminder Bhambra (2016: 193) in relation to European cosmopolitanism:
"The articulation of cosmopolitanism as a specifically European phenomenon rests on a particular understanding of European history that evades acknowledging European domination over much of the world as significant to that history."
As Ha and Picker emphasise in their wide-ranging and impressive opening chapter, the task of provincialising is a multi-faceted set of challenges. They divide their collection of chapters into three sections: 1) Provincialising historicism, 2) Provincialising (urban) geography, and 3) Provincialising the (urban political). Ha and Picker (2022: 1) emphasise the limitations of the field through the neglect of colonialism, the marginalization of race, and the limited comparative work considering cities in central and Eastern Europe, noting that:
"Analyses that theoretically and historically outline major common properties across European cities seem to gloss over the role played by five centuries of circulation between colonies and metropole of technologies of governance, wealth, knowledge, and affect."
The editors set out an expansive terrain for urban studies and argue for a more nuanced understanding of how the urban has emerged as part of a historically and politically racialised project. European urbanism cannot be understood outside of a longer history of colonialism. Ha and Picker address in diverse ways the critical gap created not just by the absence of a stronger focus on race, but also by the distortions emerging through a lack of connection with colonialism in the shaping of European urbanism.
The contributors challenge not only the academic canon but the way that race has played a peripheral or distorted role within the field of European urban studies. The collection highlights the neglect of race within European urban research and planning discourse. In particular, the collection reveals the degree to which policy debates have failed to disentangle questions of race from the more narrowly defined field of migration studies. The chapters question how racialised citizens are problematically framed within mainstream European urban sociology, including the limitations within existing bodies of national scholarship in France, Germany, Portugal and elsewhere. A particular strength of the collection is the critique of German urban sociology and a series of foundational texts concerning the putative characteristics of the “European city”. The use of postcolonial theory to both shed light and speak back to European academic discourse offers new ways of thinking for scholars and policy-makers alike.
A striking example is Anke Schwartz’s critique, in Chapter 1, of how prominent German sociological analysis of the urban has been conceptualised around problematic notions of “authentic communities” and that these ideas extend to contemporary interest in the “intrinsic logic” (Eigenlogik) of cities. Schwartz moves forward the idealisation of urban space based on an unproblematised notion of community into what they term “nostalgic reconstructions”. Here the desire to physically plan and remake the city draws upon the desire to return to an earlier imperial age drawing on the notable example of the reconstruction of the Berlin castle on the site of the former DDR era people’s palace. In another compelling contribution, Julie Chamberlain (Chapter 10) examines the racialisation and denigration of the Wilhelmsburg neighbourhood in Hamburg, drawing on a rich range of empirical data through which to “theorise from the South”. In particular, Chamberlain (2022: 248) points to the role of urban planning as racialised practice:
"To theorise from the South means approaching this, and the racialisation of space, as an aspect of the normal functioning of the city and of urban space within racial capitalism.”
As metropolitan and colonial sets of practices, these interlinkages between the technologies and practices of urban planning form an integral part of the process of provincialisation. The chapters within European Cities: Modernity, race and colonialism challenge claims that European planning has emerged solely from ongoing progressive agenda. The persistence of these ideas wilfully neglects how planning’s rootedness in practices of colonial violence and exploitation have impacted on both metropole and colony in the development of the discipline. Conventional historiographies also obscure the articulations of racial difference within urban planning and governance as a tool of racial and ethnic management.
There is much to enjoy in reading these contributions. The collection is an important and much needed contribution that challenges the veneration of a culture of whiteness protected within the European urban studies and professional discourses of urban planning. I would be interested to know more about the rationale for the choice of cases: did this reflect emerging research networks or perhaps a wider comparative agenda? The chapters forcefully set out how race has been systematically obscured within European urban discourse, and I concur that we can only fully understand European cities through a renewed postcolonial and decolonial set of scholarly practices. One particular theme that might form the basis of further reflection is the ongoing depoliticisation of race within policy discourse. Returning to ideas of diversity espoused by the EU in the opening of my commentary, the language and politics of anti-racism has frequently been captured by the state in order to depoliticise these movements. This collection is one of a series of important interventions, but there are significant challenges when the depictions of the European urban agenda are persistently portrayed as progressive, inclusive, and diverse. As AbdouMaliq Simone states in the Coda of the book, “Europe clearly is not what it thinks it is” (2022: 258).
Of course, the task of provincialising the European city and our forms of knowledge based within urban studies and associated disciplines is an immense and unfolding intellectual project. In this collection Ha and Picker emphasise the damage that this absence of critical interrogation has made within the urban theoretical and policy realm. This timely book goes some way to address the continuing absences and tensions within our current epistemological repertoires.
References
Bhambra, GK (2016) Whither Europe? Postcolonial versus neocolonial cosmopolitanism. Interventions, 18(2), pp. 187-202.
Montalto Monella, L (2019) Is von der Leyen’s new Commission team really as diverse as Europe? Euronews, 15 September 2019.
Yasminah Beebeejaun is Professor of Urban Politics and Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. She is co-editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City and is writing a book about postwar race and planning in British cities.
