In the secular spaces of the city’s art museums the last judgment has receded, replaced by the permanent judgment of the present — there is only a future of more crisis and more actions on that crisis. Catastrophe is everywhere and ever-present.

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.

Now, in the post- Cold War era, East and Central European cities are not so much carriers of specific developments, trends or classes, but can be considered showcases or laboratories for post-socialist transformation at large. In "Chasing Warsaw" Monika Grubbauer and Joanna Kusiak try to chase one of these cities and its transformations.

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.