‘Seeing like the masa’ might be a good alternate title for this intriguing new edited collection, after the Venezuelan term referenced in chapter 2 to describe the variegated inhabitants of modern metropolises. Each of the seven chapters, ranging from Caracas to Zagreb, explores narratives of ordinary life as expressed through the notion of ‘the everyday’, and in particular how these narratives relate to the use of space in an urban setting. The editors state that their intention to ‘understand the meaning of narrations in and about the city, and how they create spaces of the everyday’. With varying degrees of success, this concern for the ordinary ensures that the volume does indeed pull us down to the level of the masa and their lived experiences.

Whilst comprehensive, the introduction is a little misleading, seeming to argue that ‘understanding the meaning of narrations in and about the city’ is a novel phenomenon with the context of urban history. Although undertaking an exhaustive review of narrative theory, the implication that historians or indeed social scientists have not generally either ‘[listened] to stories or [read] written accounts as stories’ is an odd claim in light of the chapters, which are openly indebted to precisely this kind of past scholarship. Andriy Zayarnyuk's study of the influence of Ukrainian nationalism in contemporary memoirs of L'viv draws out how a fictitious portrait of a ‘comfortable and peaceful city’, detached from its multiethnic and violent past, can shape the present. Similarly, Leeke Reinders’ chapter focuses on a contested multiethnic setting, requiring his interviewees to create personal maps of their lived space around and on the Nieuwland estate in Schiedam in the Netherlands. Reinders aims for a ‘shoulder-height’ look at the regenerated estate, and he finds in residents’ maps a clear dividing line between white Dutch residents and those of other ethnicities, with the ‘empty spaces’ on maps depicting ‘the regulation of space to exclude undesirable elements’. In Ann Schober's piece on kino klubs in the former Yugoslavia, she draws out an interesting but fairly familiar tale of how a radical film movement can act as a space of dissidence in an otherwise totalitarian state. Denazifying post-war Vienna is the setting for Matthew P. Berg's more compelling chapter on housing allocation, which draws upon letters to the bureaucratic institutions of allocation to analyse the rhetorical strategies used by Social Democrats, victims of fascist crimes and ex-Nazis themselves to justify better accommodation. Ronald Johnston and Arthur McIvor make good use of oral history to demonstrate how workers in Clydeside came to be aware of the dangers of asbestos and organize against it through urban information channels, which more than anything else exemplifies how valuable, yet lamentably underused, the scope of industrial relations is to urban histories. In their study of the aptly-named Mamutica or ‘Mammoth’ block of 4,500 inhabitants in Zagreb, Tihana Rubić and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits draw upon anthropological understandings of kinship to demonstrate how the transition away from communism has broken bonds of neighbourliness in childcare. Where the space of Mamutica was previously communal in a Yugoslav era of guaranteed apartments, the increasingly transient renting patterns of post-communist Zagreb have shifted the burden of childcare back to the extended family.

It is the single chapter that takes us beyond Europe that is perhaps most emblematic of the possibilities of narration. Arturo Almandoz examines the coming of modernity to and rapid urbanization of Caracas as expressed through mid-twentieth-century Venezuelan literature. The formation of the masa – the new classes of the metropolis already mentioned – is a key part of this, and Almandoz gives an intriguing account of how many novels describe the negotiation of urban space between an established urban population and rural newcomers drawn to the growing oil industry. Almandoz's discussion of how the bourgeoisie of Caracas gradually withdrew from the city proper as an urban proletariat came into being is especially vital in light of recent events in Venezuela. He makes a strong case for taking literary representations of social-economic change more seriously in our thinking on how urban space was transformed in the twentieth century, as well as encouraging us to move beyond European examples.

Narrating the City offers some stimulating new perspectives on how we might develop research into the everyday urban environment, though it perhaps promises too much in its championing of ‘narration’ as wholly unconventional. Indeed, each individual chapter for the most part relies on methodology and forms of thought that are relatively well established across the humanities and social sciences, though this is not to the detriment of quality. In this regard, the greatest benefit of this volume is in pushing us that little bit further to think about cities and the construction of the everyday at ‘shoulder-height’.