The first book on my list is Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities by Carl Nightingale (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the world history of segregation, highlighting the notorious role played by South Africa in dividing communities along racial lines (a central case study is Johannesburg). As Nightingale reminds us, segregation in South Africa began long before it became formally instantiated as apartheid. And while divisions between people in cities goes back to Mesopotamia, the practice became entrenched as part of European colonialism’s urban planning, glaringly depicted, for instance, in the separation between the Casbah and the European quarter in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

In his examination of segregation in the United States, Nightingale looks at how division along racial lines continued after the abolition of state-sanctioned segregation laws. Certainly in the second half of the twentieth century apartheid laws were the exception rather than the rule, and it does us well to think about how urban patterns of racial division persist when the state no longer directly enforces them.