Published in the McGill-Queen's studies in urban governance series, Welcome to Greater Edendale is an ambitious cross-disciplinary book spanning nearly two hundred years of history that focuses on the peripheral city of Greater Edendale and the policies and policymakers that made it. From the outset, Epprecht positions himself as the historian on a project team working in Greater Edendale on a case study investigating ecosystems and human health in South Africa. His brief, as he understood it, was to ensure that the principal researchers ‘properly contextualised’ their findings. This role informs his approach to the book and enables him to adopt an advisory and activist tone as he comments on the history of policy — that is, the individuals who developed policy ideas, the debates around them, and their application in the Greater Edendale area.

A sprawling set of communities north of Pietermaritzburg on the Msunduze river, Greater Edendale was to Pietermaritzburg as Soweto was to Johannesburg — a parallel black city with an overwhelmingly African population of somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 in 2016. Once ethnically and racially diverse, this urban area became almost exclusively African through the implementation of segregationist and apartheid policies. The various residential areas that comprise Greater Edendale are identified on four maps at the beginning of the book; their unique and combined histories are discussed in the ensuing chapters, particularly from Chapter Three onwards. The first two chapters are largely devoted to a discussion of selected historiographical issues that lay the groundwork for an exploration of the themes of environment, health, gender, and governance around which this history (or these histories as Epprecht prefers) coheres. Chapter Two sets out one of the key arguments of the book, namely that certain present-day tropes resonate with ideas from the colonial era. The remaining chapters follow a broad chronology and are thematically arranged; they can be read as stand-alone pieces or as connected moments in this thematic history of policy, place, and people.

Drawing on archival sources, the book is as much a history of ideas as it is of place and people. Each chapter discusses the debates that led to the formulation and implementation of policies on health, environment, and governance in the making (and unmaking or destruction) of Greater Edendale. As author, Epprecht is strongly interventionist in his approach to and analysis of these debates. For example, Chapter Three seeks to contribute to the ‘decolonisation of knowledge’ by showing how ordinary people experienced the stresses of a poorly managed environment; Chapter Four corrects misconceptions in the South African debate on the sanitation syndrome which is fixated on the contribution of historian Maynard Swanson; and, with a view to making a contribution to debates on HIV and AIDS policy, Chapter Five demonstrates the impact of colonial health programmes on gender relations. The final chapter explores and exposes tensions between environmental health, social justice, and the post-apartheid growth model from a ‘de-growth’ perspective, a concept that seems to follow on the socialist, feminist, and environmentalist orientation that the author sets out in the introductory chapter.

While there are many illuminating vignettes of African intellectuals and paternalistic administrators, the historian might be frustrated by the strong sense of present-mindedness and the overwhelming focus on best practices that underlies each chapter. The author's desire to correct ‘wrong’ approaches obscures the narrative and the use of jargon and acronyms can be annoying. In its aim to demonstrate the continuities between colonialism, apartheid, and the present, the book is provocative and useful, but it is sometimes too ready to make claims with which some might take issue. Contrary to Epprecht's view, ‘struggle’ scholarship has (in fact) been criticised for paying too much attention to divisions between black people and for seeing class as more important than race, an emphasis informed by a reaction to an earlier liberal scholarship. Sadly, the photographs are disappointingly unhelpful and poorly reproduced. That said, this book could be very useful in the classroom (for students of history, politics, or medicine) as each chapter stimulates debate and discussion on policy, social groupings, political perspectives, and medical social history. It might also be put to use in workshop settings where practitioners are trained or activists come together to debate. These are presumably the author's primary audiences and in that sense the book achieves its aim.