No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi

Bettina Ng'weno

Book cover for No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi
Book cover for No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi
Image for variant 9780520421219
Image for variant 9780520423206
Book cover for No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi
Book cover for No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi
Image for variant 9780520421219
Image for variant 9780520423206

No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi

No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi

Bettina Ng'weno

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Description

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Nairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New City traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads, and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng'weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, they imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures.

About the Author

Bettina Ng'weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis and author of Turf Wars: Territory and Citizenship in the Contemporary State. She was born in Nairobi.

Critical Reviews

"An accessible, historically rich, methodologically rigorous and comprehensive ethnography of urban life in Nairobi. . . . essential reading for scholars and graduate students interested in urban life in postcolonial Global South cities."

-- "Canadian Journal of African Studies"

Publishing Information

Publisher: University of California Press
Pub date: 2025-09-09
Length: 238 pages

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