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.
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.
"Through the technique of combining the intellectual and the emotive, in the best traditions of ethnographic analysis, the author compels the reader not only to ‘see’ what the struggle for (and against) belonging in the city entails but also to ‘feel’ it."—Wale Adebanwi, author of How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria
"A truly multidisciplinary piece of scholarship that weaves personal experiences, colonial history, and post-colonial city planning with critical conceptions of time and space."—Awet Weldemichael, author of Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation
"The discourse surrounding urbanized Africans has been a perennial topic in colonial and postcolonial studies of Africa. Yet Anti-Urbanism has never been written about in such a personal, thoughtful, and vivid manner. Ng’weno’s book offers a new and erudite perspective on this contested subject."—Kenda Mutongi, author of Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi
"No Place Like Home in a New City is an innovative analysis of space, belonging, and the reverberations of colonial city planning in Nairobi. Bettina Ng’weno’s incisive and engagingly written book seamlessly threads the city's history through the lived experiences of, and struggles against, discriminatory state policies, illuminating alternative urban visions that likewise defined Nairobi. With implications for cities around the world, this book deserves a wide audience."—Jeremy Prestholdt, author of Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization and founding co-editor of Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim
238 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 color illustrations, 3 maps
9780520423206$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Sep 2025