The subject of this volume is the varieties and intricacies of city living: everyday patterns of travel, work or shopping; the creation of individual and collective meaning through the shared experience of space; the high visibility of the young as much as the invisibility of the newly arrived immigrant. Subject and method are well matched as all of the contributors to these twelve essays use oral history in one form or another, most often via interviews. Further, the varieties and intricacies of methodology are discussed at length as authors reflect on the power imbalance of their role as professional knowledge makers, on the possibilities in collaborative authorship and the agency of their ‘subjects’. Ten years or so on from two milestones of scholarship in this field, Chamberlain and Thompson's Narrative and Genre (1997) and Perks and Thomson's The Oral History Reader (1998), it is evident that the practitioners of oral history continue to develop a sophisticated set of methods and self-critical techniques. A series of intriguing questions is also raised in the editors’ introduction as well as in the essays: on the nature and content of urban history, on the nature of historical evidence and the available analytic tools and on the status of the researcher.

Thinking first of what constitutes urban history as a discipline, Testimonies of the City groups its contributions into four overlapping categories: social identities; community, neighbourhood and daily life; responses to urban change; and finally, migration and methods. Foregrounding oral history interviews inevitably leads to an emphasis on subjective experience among individuals and small groups, the accretion of everyday social relations as they build up across time and in a particular location, for example among teenage gangs in late 1960s Budapest (Sándor Horváth), or heavy-industrial workers in post-war Glasgow (Ronnie Johnson and Arthur McIvor). In this way questions of mis-representation or non-representation emerge together with vivid detail of social relations experienced among particular segments of the city population.

Other pieces use the physical environment as a backdrop to the constitution of these social identities: the development of a post-war housing estate in socialist Zagreb, for instance (Valentina Zrnić); or the connections between space and everyday activities in inter-war Paris (Caroline Varlet). Effectively this allows a meditation on human responses to the lived environment as it alters across time. Social change as a category of analysis brings a wider set of criteria, and brings physical surroundings to the forefront, hence the account of complex negotiations and interventions in the rebuilding of socialist Bucharest (Maria Raluca Popa), or the use of fragmented ‘oral history’ commentaries in art works to ‘celebrate’ the history of Japanese and Chinese Americans in Los Angeles (Ruth Wallach). Finally, two contributions depart further from what might conventionally be understood as urban history to consider why certain subjects may be marginalized, for example recent Turkish or Yugoslavian immigrants in Vienna (Wladimir Fischer); or how the complex variables in relations between interviewer and interviewee (age, gender, ethnicity) can alter the type and content of the testimony that is elicited (Joanna Herbert).

On the nature of evidence and analytic tools used to examine it, it seems that approaches and degrees of success vary. Those researchers who stressed both ‘relevant’ and ‘narrative’ data, for example by analysing repeated and contradictory tellings of the same story, are most convincing here. Eszter Tóth, for instance, who clearly has a talent for conjuring up a group atmosphere where people can talk freely, in her analysis of the lives of Budapest factory workers c. 1970. Valentina Zrnić adds another dimension by drawing on cultural anthropology for her notion of ‘experiential communities’, so that

In this sense meanings are not ‘constructed’, but emerge organically from encounters over time with physical space and personal expectation as well as individual and collective imagination.

The role of the researcher – sometimes a subject within the research project itself in this volume – is also discussed perceptively, especially the ways in which the account is shaped and the subject matter influenced by her presence. Joanna Herbert's essay on cross-cultural interviews is in this sense the most self-reflexive. Yet questions such as whether ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ can best elicit interview material, correct power imbalances or whether the very presence of the interviewer inadvertently provokes damaging images (in Herbert's discussion, arranged marriage, racism, anti-Muslim sentiment) seem impossible to resolve conclusively.

Strikingly, throughout this collection there is also a welcome sense that any answers oral history provides in understanding city life must have an inconclusive, provisional quality. Subjectivity can be contextualized historically and theorized, but it will always have a uniquely intimate, human aspect which depends on the temperament and character of the researcher as much as that of the subject. There is a richness and variety in this collection, then, which demonstrates why the argument that ‘there is nothing else available’ is the least important reason to turn to oral history.