No discussion about it: we live in an ‘urban world’. What this entails, however, is a matter of hot debate among urban scholars across disciplines. One feature of this urban world is clear though: it is a highly segregated world. In A Global History of Divided Cities, Carl H. Nightingale argues that segregation is historically a key characteristic of all urban settlements: the history of urban development is a history of segregation. More specifically, it is a history of racial segregation. The breath of his transnational and historical analysis is impressive, though the underlying argument of the book is familiar to post-colonial and critical scholars: segregation is propitiated and sustained by the convergence of international dynamics that involve the interplay of land agents and property markets who benefited from colonial enterprises and administrators, who in turn trusted to urban planners and intellectuals the task of shaping and producing cities and urban populations that would grant and protect the white supremacy.
The book is an impressive piece of transnational urban history – it describes the ‘networks of intellectual exchange’ that supported colonial and imperial projects in spreading the justifications, practices and management of ‘city-splitting’ from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Although, according to Nightingale, the history of segregation begins in Mesopotamia, 70 centuries ago, when in the midst of human cities the gods demanded the construction of special places to live. Those proto-instances of segregation, however, are pale when compared with the levels of urban inequality experienced with modernization. Mainly organized following a chronological vein, the book moves from this early form of city-splitting to ancient and medieval forms of categorizing populations through the urban fabric. Despite these arguments, it is clear that not all separation strategies have a segregationist and discriminatory underpinning. A key question, then, is when did this practice of separation and classification become segregationist? The author's answer is the major achievement of the book: a description of the interconnected colonial histories that have made race and colour-lines a distinctive pattern of urban development. Nightingale places the modernization project of capitalism, its hunger for private property and its expansion through imperial projects as a core cause of cross-colour patterns of segregation that aimed to justify white superiority. Following a civilizational and urbanization endeavour, colour-lines spanned through the Atlantic across the world: from imperial England and France to India, China and the Pacific, with examples also in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa (especially focused on South Africa), the US (especially focused on Chicago) and brief references to Nazi Germany. The book reveals the interconnectedness of these histories in making race fundamental to urban development and central to segregation as we know it.
The period between the 1890s and early 1920s is described as a time of ‘segregation mania’, namely times when the imperial projects promoted through public policy, especially with health and sanitation reforms, produced an ethos of segregation that influenced not only city planners and managers, but most strikingly shaped the demeanours of lay city dwellers, justifying segregation as a reasonable strategy of urban expansion. This mania of segregation, however, reaches its peak levels of ‘archsegregationism’ during the Nazi Holocaust and in the long-lasting experiences and experiments of urban segregation in South Africa and the United States, outlasting civil rights movements and anti-racist campaigners.
Neither the market developments, nor the democratic revolutions or the enterprises of scientific knowledge production have been colourblind. Yet, Nightingale recognizes that the pervasive logic of colour-lines has been ‘messy’ and also contradictory at times. For instance, when the same segregated population is obligated by its rulers to build or pay for the devices that segregate them, or – even more conspicuously – when despite the existence of a division lines, populations move across borders to provide various forms of menial and domestic work and illegal exchanges, demanded by those same populations that aim to segregate.
This ‘messy’ feature of segregation is also a consequence of the ways in which it mutates and adapts according to the populations and landscapes involved. Another way of phrasing this messiness would be to acknowledge it as intersectional: colour-lines are emphasized or made more elusive and obscure when they are ensued by other dynamics such as class divisions, power dynamics, religion rivalries and, not least, gender. This ‘world history of urban segregation’ is successful in identifying the connecting patterns of urban segregation across the globe, while establishing a clear description and categorization of the prevalent dynamics that made segregation in Chicago also different from that in Johannesburg.
Segregation charts out the multiscale connections, causalities, contingencies and contrasts of a phenomenon that characterizes our contemporary cities in this otherwise described ‘planet of slums’. It is clear that even today, policy and urban developers, academic and political discourses keep on observing and discussing segregation in terms in which there is a ‘vilification of the “slum” and a glorification of the exclusive suburb’ (p. 79). Despite the great contribution this book makes to understand and frame how and why this has happened, the task that remains is for the slum dweller, or those segregated, to be able to tell their story by themselves. Most importantly, those of us who live under supposed conditions of non-segregation must be able to recognize the extent to which we do so at their expense. We are active partners in reproducing the segregation patterns that shape our cities; the hope is that we can also recognize our partnership in a plea for urban justice.
