In his newest book, Ato Quayson provides a rich description of the local and global characteristics of the bustling commercial Oxford Street to discuss the larger historical and urban processes that have transformed – and are still transforming – Accra's urbanscape. The book is based on almost a decade of research; data presented are gathered from various archives, media reports, (participant) observation, online sources, fictional literature, focus group interviews and in-depth interviews. Throughout the book, Quayson pays attention to historical processes. By approaching Oxford Street as an archive, he details the impact of colonial and post-independence processes, but also the processes of transnationalism and globalization, on urban planning and socio-cultural relations in the city of Accra.

In the first part, aptly named ‘Horizontal archaeologies’, Quayson details the evolution of Accra over time by analysing a number of neighbourhoods as spatial aggregations of social forces. In Chapter 1, socio-cultural space-making in the historic Ga Mashie area is discussed. The author questions notions of hybridity, transculturation and multi-ethnicity as shaped by the colonial politics of indirect rule by presenting the case of the Afro-Brazilians of Accra or the Tabon, who, despite being ethnically assimilated into Ga culture, retain fragments of their cultural memory in ritual hybridities such as food with Bahian genealogy, Afro-Brazilian names and certain customs in marriage ceremonies. In Chapter 2, the impact of the colonial administration on the spatial diversification of the city of Accra is analysed. The author provides a multiaxial perspective on urban space, combining the effects of demography, interethnic relations, race and environment as social ecologies that impacted and shaped the city's evolution. The author discusses the colonial preoccupation with sanitation and disaster management and the Europeanization of Accra's residential and commercial areas, as well as the social impact of the land-use conversion from agrarian to urban, and the planning logic of the Trevallion and Hood Plan of 1958, just after Ghana's independence. In Chapter 3, Quayson describes the history of the neighbourhood of Danish Osu, where Oxford Street is located, showing that this area has always been the spatial conduit for transnational circulations by detailing its role in Danish–African relations from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

‘Morphologies of everyday life’, the second part of Quayson's book, employs a decidedly ethnographic view of space-making to analyse urban representations and urban performativity. In Chapter 4, which forms the bridge between the two parts, the author creatively examines the discursive, symbolic and material (re)appropriations of the form of the city in everyday life by analysing the diversity of urban scripts in Oxford Street in the form of billboards and slogans on various surfaces. Quayson provides a catalogue of inscriptions past and present on tro-tros (privately owned minibuses or shared taxis); these are firmly rooted in the local as they incorporate songs and proverbs, while the giant mobile phone advertisements that appear in Accra's streetscapes are transnational and delocalized, with images associated with material cosmopolitan desire. These seemingly different styles of urban writing – one rooted in local cultural mediation, the other transnational and commercial – are tied together by an analysis of the discourse of enchantment. This discourse is firmly associated with (transnational) self-making and prosperity, heavily informed by global consumerism patterns but also by the discourses of the rising evangelical churches in Accra; as Quayson formulates it: ‘this street is the explicit materialization of the dream of prosperity invoked in the prayers of the evangelical churches themselves’ (p. 154).

In Chapters 5 and 6, the author focuses on two activities of urban youth culture – salsa and ‘gymming’ – and provides an in-depth analysis of these bodily practices of self-making and discusses related notions of beauty, leisure and cosmopolitan identities. The voices of various pioneer actors of salsa in Accra provide a detailed history of this growing transnational scene, and Quayson analyses salsa as a way of cosmopolitan self-fashioning. Gymming, on the other hand, is a lifestyle choice grounded in different aspects of urban culture, equally shaped by transnational imagescapes of Hollywood muscular masculinity and also by local notions of muscular military masculinity. According to Quayson, gymming is highly informed by aspirations of self-transformation, a way out of unemployment and underemployment or even a chance to ‘cut out’ (i.e. make it abroad). This chapter paints a particularly complex picture by detailing the discourses used (‘keeping fit’, ‘going to the gym’, ‘doing gym’), the continuous referencing to proverbs, the space of the gym and its place in the community, and the social identity and motivations of the ‘gymmers’. A more nuanced description of the oppositions that are made between gymming and salsa, however, would have added to the ethnographic value of these two chapters. In Chapter 7, the author discusses literary representations of Accra by focusing on the spatial traversal of the lead characters of Amma Darko's novel Faceless (2003) and Kofi Awoonor's This Earth, My Brother … (1972). References to fictional literature are present throughout the book, adding not only to the descriptions of Accra but also to the discussions of the various actors that operate in the urban context.

Quayson is a compelling writer, and the chapters effortlessly oscillate between local and global, past, present and future, which makes for a richly detailed story. This book is a must-read for people interested in African history, urban studies, transnationalism and the city of Accra.