Emotional Cities

Joseph Prestel is one of the first scholars to deploy the approaches of the recent emotional turn in historiography for the benefit of modern urban history... In a scholarly field in which so much of our knowledge still harks back to the history of a handful of Western metropolises, one can only hope that the approach Prestel proposes in this book inspires many to follow. * Anneleen Arnout, Journal of Modern History *
Prestel has written an innovative work that complements the classic studies of nineteenth-century urbanization, like those by Frederick Engels and Charles Booth which laid out in meticulous detail the terrible conditions of housing, sanitation, and diet endured by the urban poor. In joining the two cities he challenges urban historians and perhaps even city-dwellers to divest themselves of their myopic focus on their own cities as unique and on European cities, in general, as defining the global norm. * Diana Wylie, Boston University, H-Africa *
In this study of Berlin and Cairo, Joseph Ben Prestel offers an approach to comparative urban history that avoids normative Eurocentric assumptions about urbanization and modernity. Rather than examining the cities themselves, he instead focuses on the emotional experiences of those who lived in cities... Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this work will prove as useful to the advanced undergraduate student as for the specialized researcher * Sace Elder, German History *
Providing an outstanding theoretical framework, [this book] can be seen as a piece of pioneer work in recent cultural history concerning the combination of urbanization and history of emotions ... Based on a broad range of sources and literature from various disciplines, the study represents a transdisciplinary work par excellence. * Jens Wietschorke, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich *
Joseph Ben Prestel demonstrates that foregrounding emotions eschews stagist models of comparison (such as 'Cairo in 1900 was as modernised as Berlin in 1870'). An emotions approach thus globalises one of the last bastions of non-globalised history -- urban history. This is an excellent book with a forceful narrative and scintillating stories drawn from prodigious primary research in Arabic, German, French, and English. * Jan Plamper, Goldsmiths, University of London *
This is a highly interesting project, promising to fill a number of gaps in existing scholarship through its dual focus on urban history and the history of emotions. It is conceptually fresh and innovative, well researched, and elegantly written. * Lucie Ryzova, University of Birmingham *