European Cities: Modernity, Race and Colonialism engages multiple theoretical, empirical and methodological streams of Social Science research to interrogate and reimagine the 21st-century European urban from global and historical perspectives. While the Introduction sets in motion postcolonial and decolonial theories, mutually combined via critical race approaches, to dislodge the Sociological canon on The European City from its most widely-shared certainties, the ten chapters in various ways empirically compose alternative and typically unnamed modalities of urban life and politics.
Primarily inspired by Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000), the edited volume is organized in three sections: Provincializing Historicism, Provincializing (Urban) Geography, and Provincializing (the Urban) Political. The ten chapters are in-depth empirical analyses of contextual and intersectional ways in which race and racism shape socialities in such various urban corners as Hamburg, Mitrovica, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, Barcelona, Cottbus, Madrid, Sheffield, Paris and Genoa. From post-colonial and de-colonial angles, the European urban ultimately emerges as a shifting web of nodes, at times interlinked through material and representational flows with various linkages to racial histories of colonialism and Nazi-Fascist ideologies.
The Introduction starts by calling into question typically Eurocentric and “developmentalist” urban epistemologies through an engagement with Chakrabarty's (2000) double critique of historicism and the political; inspired by Michael Keith’s (2005) insights, we also engage a critical reflection on provincializing urban space. Accordingly, after a review with the 21st-century scholarship on urban Europe, we stress the importance of establishing three to-date missing connections: firstly, connections between the Sociological and Anthropological scholarship on the relevance of colonial urbanism for understanding contemporary European cities, and the Social Science scholarship on 21st-century European cities; second, connections between a mounting empirical evidence of the relevance of race and racism in structuring European urban socialites, and the relative absence of race critical theories in analyses of the European urban; finally, the connections between the scholarship on so-called “Post-Socialist” cities and the one on what Attila Melegh (2006) called The East-West Slope.
All chapters are contributions to establishing one or more of these connections. While the Provincializing Historicism section includes studies of typically-overlooked material and epistemic linkages between colonial and contemporary European contexts, the Provincializing (urban) Geography section is more concerned with the contested production of spatio-racial articulations. Provincializing the (urban) Political presents cases of radical critiques of powerful political and epistemic structures inviting the reader to imagine districts, forms of knowledge, communities, politics and urban economies from decolonial and anti-racist angles. Simone’s Coda continues such an invitation by centering the idea of provisioning in a Europe, which “is not what it thinks it is”.
This project started with a session titled Provincializing European Cities that we organized and chaired at the RC-21 Annual Conference in Delhi in August 2019. Our gratitude goes to the conference organizers and those who raised questions. Our editing work gradually grew into an exercise in kindness and collegiality, as most of it happened during the challenging COVID-19 times. Within the space of the distance between us, we and the authors allowed one another delays, silences and uncertainties while keeping discussions and the sharing of drafts alive. We are sincerely grateful to all authors for their enthusiastic engagement with the move to provincialize European cities that, as a scholarly endeavor, is just - we think - at the very beginning.
References
Chakrabarty, D (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keith, M (2005) After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism. London: Routledge.
Melegh, A (2006) The East-West Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press.
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).
