Urban built environments are spatial and material archives. Streets, buildings, open spaces, or infrastructures are registers of historical negotiations and repositories of data. Stories of power, geopolitics, economic systems, labour and culture can be revealed through road names and construction materials, portals and pediments, park benches and chimneys. Embodying our desires, needs, and resources, they condition how we live and interact with each other, and trigger countless reinterpretations and re-appropriations. Most of this dense layering is not immediately legible; it has not been decoded. Rather it is part of a more intuitive, lived sense of “urbanity” that generates contemporary individual and collective senses of identity and belonging. These complex urban palimpsests form the constitutive stages upon, with and against which everyday and extraordinary cultural life is performed.

Where is the link between an immigrant from Lebanon opening a falafel shop in Berlin, and a man who has lived in Dar es Salaam for thirty years, selling maize and snacks next to the bus stop for a living? What connects the anecdote of a woman recalling the wastelands of the Moabit district of Berlin, and a young man describing his memories of childhood games in the sandy fields of Sinza? This book presents urban narratives from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Berlin, Germnay. Juxtaposing the stories to provoke associations, it explores contradictions and draws parallels between the seemingly dissimilar cities. Based on interviews with local residents in a variety of neighbourhoods in both cities, the stories consider urban heritage ‘from below’. They address the cultural or spatial practices that contribute to a sense of community, the buildings that people identify with, and the places that make a neighbourhood special.