Asher Ghertner continues his work as a creative and profound scholar with his first monograph, "Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi". This book is a great read yet also manages to be impressively detailed in its data and textured in its ethnographic feel. Ghertner proves particularly agile in his movement among sites in Delhi as well as among concepts and modes of academic engagement, shifting from exposition and explication to conceptual development and back again.

"Seeing Like a City" is a testament to the evolution of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s urban thinking. This book is about doing urban theory without the safety net of established narratives, in the hopes of grasping new viewpoints from which to see the urban corners, patchworks, and dynamics that are either over-simplified or utterly dismissed by mainstream scholarship.

This book is condensed and challenging, and it is a must-read for scholars, professionals, and urban activists, as it explores not just the well-known work of Agamben that was translated to English, but also some less familiar texts translated and discussed by Boano.

Aware of the limitations of previous strategies of social control, bourgeois reform appropriated many of the aforementioned proposals and reframed them in its own agenda a few decades after the inception of Central Park, creating more dynamic but closely monitored small parks and playgrounds in working-class neighborhoods, in New York City and across the US. A more nuanced elucidation of the problematic agency of design, therefore, is needed.

Rather than defining a priori what and where the margin is, the book’s essential task is to rethink processes of marginalization through the lived experiences and contexts in which they unfold. The book pushes assemblage thinking’s most important contribution, exactly this attention towards the constant shifts within the making and re-making of marginality.