This book is not for everyone, and it is certainly not for those hoping for a comprehensive history of Quito from the 1880s to the 1940s. Instead, Ernesto Capello offers a more idiosyncratic selection of topics, focusing on what he terms the construction of ‘chronotopes,’ or variously, ‘phantasmagorical chronotopes’ (p. 159), the ‘synechdochal chronotopical’ (p. 171), ‘heuristically developed chronotopes’ or the ‘polyvalence of multiple chronotopes inflected by an extended history of refraction’ (p. 213).

What interests Capello is the unmasking of the essence of Quito's urban milieu. To do this he has selected several episodes in the city's history – moments, he thinks, when the shared perspective ‘of a particular group … [was] at the center of a global metanarrative’ (p. xvii). Capello considers in turn the ‘totalizing discourse[s]’ (p. xvii) of rich white intellectuals, city map-makers, some members of a nearby indigenous community, and the Durini family architectural firm that worked for a time in the city. When the Spanish first came to the highlands of Ecuador in 1534 the local indigenous people understood the valley's name, Quitu, to mean ‘the center of the world’. Today the equator marker – mitad del mundo – lies just north of the city. Capello translates this phrase also as ‘the center of the world’, and to him many Quiteños saw their city in this way.

After President Eloy Alfaro took office in 1895, more national revenues generated by the busy commerce of the coast started flowing into the capital. Tapping into this resource, Quito enjoyed a time of urban renewal. There was special national attention given to dressing up the capital for the 1909 and 1922 centennial celebrations of key events in the process of independence. Capello does a fair job in exploring the struggles for local control over the building of potable water lines, sewers and other urban sanitation measures in these years.

To Capello, however, what most defined Quito in this era was its determination to market itself as a tourist destination, with the colonial old city as the principal attraction. It succeeded in this effort, he argues. Especially after the railway reached the capital in 1908, Quito developed ‘a vibrant tourist economy’ (p. xv) and ‘transcended its relative provinciality to become a site of world historical importance’ (p. 215). The city, he concludes, ‘was established at the center of the world’ (p. 217). But distant Quito, tucked away in the towering Andes, is hard to see as a big draw for tourists during these decades. Some convincing regarding ‘the growing tourist trade’ (p. 52) is surely in order. Even if one cannot accurately count the number of visitors, it should still be possible to count the number of new hotels. Capello does not do this. Nevertheless, he asserts that the tourist industry soared as city fathers acted forcefully to protect the old colonial city's architecture. It is not clear, however, how much forceful protection was really needed. Indeed, if it were the case that not much new business was actually coming to the city, it may have just been easier to add such structures as were needed outside of the old town in the open lands to the north.

Capello spends a good deal of space offering his thoughts about city maps from the era. To him maps were used not so much to find one's way around as to convey culturally coded messages. Although it takes him many words to decode these discourses, the uncovered messages do not always surprise – for example, that maps made for the rich focused on area businesses and did not always sketch in the poor neighbourhoods.

Many pages are given over to Capello's examination of several minor Ecuadorian works of fiction from this period. He labours through the content of a small journal, Caricatura, justifying this time allocation by stressing how popular and influential the publication was. The trouble is that the journal folded after just three years. Capello likewise presents a detailed family history of the Durinis, but aside from having designed a few city buildings and statues, it is not clear how important this family was.

Capello then turns to scrutiny of a minor land dispute involving the Tumipanba family in Santa Clara, a tiny hamlet away from the city. This ‘tussle’ (p. 189), as he terms it, concerned a small, unworked and evidently abandoned plot. It is hard to share in Capello's enthusiasm for working through the court records of what appears to have been a rather inconsequential quarrel.

This book is marred in several ways. Several of the map reproductions are so dark that they cannot be read. There are many errors of fact. Ecuador joined Gran Colombia in 1822, not 1824. Gabriel Garcia Moreno took power in 1861, not 1858. The Julian Revolution in 1925 installed a government that was in some ways mildly reformist, but was certainly not ‘socialist’. Elected presidential candidate Neptalí Bonifaz Ascasubi was born in Quito, not in Peru. The writing is an issue, too – to Capello, people aren't rich, they ‘perform … prosperity’ (p. 198).

I do not know if what Capello is attempting is in fact doable. It may not be possible to find a core essence of a city, a ‘totalizing metanarrative’. Cities are at least as complex as the people who live there, and whatever they may think of their cities, there are surely more opinions than there are people, depending on the day and one's mood. Capello's core assertion – the centrality of Quito – remains highly problematic. Quito is not now nor has it ever been at the centre of things, and it seems unlikely that many Quiteños ever really made this claim. Quito is a city near the equator. Quito is not a city at the centre of the world.