86 – Book Review: Concrete City

Wangui Kimari

Wangui Kimari is an urban anthropologist based at the American University Nairobi Abroad Program, and an Honorary Research Associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), University of Cape Town. Her work draws on many local histories and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches – including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology and the black radical tradition – to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. She is also an editorial board member of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC), on the editorial collective of Antipode, and a co-organizer of the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop, an annual critical urban studies ‘summer’ school that encourages young, predominantly Africa-based, scholars, to theorize and valorize the various praxes that emerge through and with dynamic African spaces.

Prince Guma

Prince Guma is an interdisciplinary social and political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of critical urban studies, infrastructure studies, and technology studies, with a focus on development, political economy, and social justice. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, where his research explored the diffusion and adoption of new plans, ideas, and technologies in urban and infrastructure domains. He is currently a Guest Researcher at Linköping University and Honorary Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, where he previously served as Assistant Country Director. 

Alice Hertzog

Alice Hertzog is a social anthropologist – she works on questions of migration, mobility and circulations. Her first focus in the field of urban anthropology, questions the social transformations occurring with post-migrant cityscapes. The second focus, situated in museum anthropology, investigates the circulation of contested cultural heritage held in ethnographic museums. She is the incoming director of the Ethnographic Museum of Uni Zurich – where her research has played key role in restitution of the Benin Bronzes.

Armelle Choplin

Armelle Choplin is Professor of Geography and Urban Planning at the University of Geneva and Director of the Institute of Environmental Governance and Territorial Development. Her research focuses on how cities are produced, planned and experienced in the Global South, especially in Africa. Her recent work explores the political economy of concrete and the social and environmental impacts of the construction boom in Africa. She has published Matière Grise de l’urbain, la vie du ciment en Afrique (MétisPresses, 2020) and Concrete City, Material flows and Urbanization in West Africa (Wiley, 2023). 

Nitin Bathla

Nitin Bathla is a Zurich-based scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of urbanization, the environment, and society, bridging the disciplines of urban studies, ecology, geography, and sociology. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary film Not Just Roads.

As part of the Spotlight project at UZH, he is investigating the political ecology of nocturnal urbanization and public illumination in Switzerland. His transdisciplinary and pluriversal research approaches actively combine academic inquiry with artistic practices such as filmmaking and socially engaged art.