The title is pertinently revealing of the book's content: Allison Goebel's On Their Own: Women, Urbanization and the Right to the City in South Africa is a straightforward intervention in urban studies, which offers a well-supported case for gender analysis. It encapsulates an impressively broad overview of various manifestations of women's differentiated lived experiences, thus demonstrating the relevance of gender analysis in urban scholarship. Beginning with South Africa's historical context, Goebel challenges the myth of women's new presence and migration into urban spaces, particularly the city of Pietermaritzburg (Msunduzi) in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, which is her main case study area. She then delves into issues as diverse as access to economic opportunities and unequal health outcomes, questions of love and intimacy, national housing policy and women's political activism through voting and protest. On Their Own is therefore an informative outline of gender inequality issues, built on a vast reference list of existing literature and current debates.

The volume is certainly a solid work of feminist scholarship, not least because of Goebel's methodological choices. She draws her data from household surveys, as well as from in-depth interviews with women, whose voices are given a proper place in the publication, both in word and in visual imagery. Women as single mothers and gogos (grandmothers), as unemployed household heads, grant recipients, and homeowners, as disenchanted lovers and abandoned wives, are the cornerstone of the book and it is evident that the author is not indifferent to their destinies. As a feminist scholar, Goebel also uses gender as a relational category and engages with intersecting systems of power and oppression, especially class, race and age. These hierarchies place Goebel's research participants – poor, black urban women – at the margin, both literally with regards to physical landscape of the city, and figuratively, in the social value order. However, the book often stops its analysis on the surface level and concurs with existing arguments presented by other authors. An experienced reader is left yearning for more theoretical propositions to be drawn out of Goebel's observations and for more interrogations of concepts and assumptions. For example, the book touches on important issues of different types of masculinities and femininities, as well as notions of whiteness and Zulu-ness, as they relate to the lives of Goebel's research participants, but they are left unchallenged and unexplored. Similarly, Goebel's use of the ‘right to the city’, which stems from the Habitat development discourses, seems more of an additional concept rather than an integral part of her overall thinking. As an issue of social justice it is certainly an adequate complement to the rights discourse of gender equality (p. 27), but it does not advance her already strong gender-based argumentation.

While On Their Own does not challenge readers already conversant in South African gender discourses, as the book comes out within a series on urban governance in Canadian academia, it certainly meets the needs of the readers, who wish to familiarise themselves with gender analysis of urban life. The book's conceptualisation as an updated collation of Goebel's earlier works contributes to this overall accessible, straightforward feel of the publication, although maybe stifling the innovation. Nevertheless, the issues that the author tackles in her work remain highly pertinent in 2017. In March of this year millions of poor South Africans were anxious and afraid that the Ministry of Social Development and the South African Social Security Agency will not be able pay their grants come 1 April. This near-crisis of the welfare system underscored that poor urban women's struggle is far from resolved and as the book argues, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) continues to grapple with implementing the often existing gender-sensitive policies. It is one of the key strengths of the book that it strives to point out government deficiencies, but at the same time recognises the advances that have been achieved since the end of Apartheid. The fact that Goebel is nuanced as a feminist scholar and aligns herself with progressive left academia in South Africa is not only commendable, but it also makes her work a balanced introduction to gender discourses in South African urban context.