To interrogate the relation between governmental practices and the slew of recent technologies developed and deployed in the name of sustainability—whether ‘green’, ‘resilient’, ‘ecological’ or otherwise—is of course to interrogate the political status of such technology itself.

A frequently referenced forerunner of the smart city is this proposal by the British architectural collective, Archigram, for a “Plug-In City,” which supplanted fixed buildings with a moveable network of spaces and interchangeable “programs” for urban inhabitations. 

Nick Dines’ book is the result of an extended ethnographic and archival research conducted in Naples during and after the second half of the 1990s, a period of intense physical and symbolic restructuring of the city under Mayor Bassolino’s administration known as the Neapolitan renaissance. Through the case of Naples, Dines provides an interesting critique of the literature that illustrates the demise of public space in contemporary western cities, outlining the relational process that constitutes public space through its everyday use and experience, together and beyond policies of control or closure.

This book’s concision and careful scholarship are all the more impressive when dealing with a thinker like Lefebvre, whose work is so voluminous and ranges across so many different substantive topics. On top of these evident strengths, Butler also reads Lefebvre in just the right way (in my opinion). That is, he understands Lefebvre’s work to be primarily an exploration of the possibility of radical politics.

This book presents the ways in which cosmopolitanism was practiced and sustained in them and discusses its decline in nationalistic contexts as well as its transformation in our contemporary globalized world. A sense of nostalgia for something precious being lost underpins this diverse collection of case studies that include the cities of Odessa (three chapters), Tbilisi, Warsaw, Venice, Thessalonica, and Dushanbe.