No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti‐Urbanism and Life in Nairobi. BettinaNg'weno. University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2025, pp xiii +239. <scp>ISBN</scp> 978‐0‐520‐42121‐9 (pbk).

I have heard such lines of interaction countless times – from introductions in high school, at office drink receptions and even while overhearing flirtatious moments in public spaces. Bettina Ng'weno, in her book, No Place Like Home in a New City, traces the logics behind these questions, discourses, laws, beliefs, attitudes, practices and actions from an exemplary mix of personal stories, ethnography across Nairobi neighbourhoods, the archives and the daily navigation of her and her family's life in the city they call home. Through this methodological diversity, Ng'weno argues that these logics emanate from a form of urbanism that is ‘a form of knowing, imagining, planning, designing, and administering cities,' whose ‘organising principle maintains that the majority of people cannot, should not and must not be permanent residents of a city. It is a refusal of the idea that the city can be home' (p.3). She aptly terms this form of urbanism ‘anti-urbanism', which she exposes across laws, attitudes, actions, drama and more. Following the introduction, which sets the scene in Chapter 1, the author traces the accidental founding of Nairobi as a stopover town during the construction of the Mombasa-Uganda railway line. The town develops into a city quickly, and as she shows, a central logic governing this formation is anti-urbanism against any attempt by Kenyans to make Nairobi a permanent home in any way. Their place was to be labourers living in racially segregated areas during their working years, after which they were to retire back to their rural villages. This was seen as a solution to the native question that preoccupied the colonial government. In Chapter 2, the author follows the intimate history of the railway workers' neighbourhood where her dad grew up. Through it, she shows how the houses were designed to discourage and impede family settlement. The workers eventually found ways around this and created complex socialities to bring up families in the estate. Chapter 3 is a rich archival documentation of race and class, spatialised around the parklands neighbourhood where the Asian community came to settle through constant fights against racialised and classed anti-urbanism. Chapter 4 follows this theme of plotting and creating life through the cultural scenes that Kenyans set forth against the logics of anti-urbanism in their curation and enjoyment of dances and music, and even engagement in politics in social halls across Eastlands. Chapters 5 and 6 follow the same breath with new cases – 5 on the history of City Park and 6 on racialised cemeteries and the story of Kenya's first post-flag independence political assassination of Pio Gama Pinto, with anti-urbanism intermingled throughout his life and that of his friend, the second vice-president of Kenya, Joseph Murumbi. Chapters 7 and 8 sit more with the very visible and violent act of anti-urbanism – demolitions, which Ng'weno describes as ‘the foundation upon which housing, race, and urban belonging are built in Nairobi' (p.13) and has historically been a tool of urban governance. Ng'weno shows the story of riparian demolitions of a mall in an affluent area of Nairobi and a riparian collapse in Eastlands. Through a detailed juxtaposition of these two cases, she shows the continued anti-urbanism segregation through class and race. She also follows how demolitions are justified and created through always-changing land laws, particularly in the quest for government infrastructure projects. Through these cases, the book's main contribution to literature – the exploration of the making and unmaking of Nairobi as shaped by anti-urbanism – is brilliantly explained. What Ng'weno puts together is thus an archive that will be helpful across disciplines. The book's chapters are poetically named from the Introduction called Dawn (p.1) to the last one, Chapter 8 ‘No Place Like Home' (p.150) and the Epilogue, named ‘Civil Twilight' (p.167). Ng'weno is an anthropological storyteller; she opens each of these chapters with a hook—a story that pulls one in with a new dimension of anti-urbanism, whether through policy, attitude, action, or drama. These openings are warm and at times painful, eliciting anger as we follow the author's dad and her other interlocutors. In Chapter 5, for example, we see the joys of children visiting the city park. In Chapter 8, we see Elizabeth, a distressed socioeconomist who arrives at the author's parental home to explain why the impending demolition of their childhood home is important in the production of modern Nairobi (modernity is a key force behind anti-urbanism agendas). These stories—particularly auto-ethnography—are important for a young Kenyan researcher like myself, who rarely encounters personal stories about or by Nairobians in academic texts, since research of our cities is so often conducted by scholars of the Global North. The writing style, storytelling and auto-ethnography are another contribution of the book. As I read through the book, I was, however, left craving more theoretical engagement. For example, the author repeatedly mentions being out of place and time across the chapters. Particularly in Chapter 2, where she shows how life in the railway neighbourhood was structured by time with sound instruments such as king'ora governing social and economic lives. She says ‘it (king'ora) held the power to shape everyday life and create a working class from the 1930s onward' (p. 36). However, greater engagement with theoretical scholarship on time, particularly from critical Marxist and urban geography perspectives, would have strengthened the analysis and placed the book in broader interdisciplinary conversations. By the end of the book, we can clearly see and agree with Ng'weno that ‘anti-urbanism maintains that the majority of the people cannot, should not, and must not be permanent residents of a city' (p. 3). We also get to appreciate the people who ‘love being from Nairobi' —those to whom Bettina Ng'weno dedicates the book, alongside her father. Their existence and claim to Nairobi as home is an act of resistance against the logics and practices of anti-urbanism that continue to shape the city.