What role should universities have in revitalizing rust-belt motor cities left to decay by economic and political transformation? In City of Broken Dreams, author Leslie J Bank addresses this question through a detailed case study of East London, a city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Here, as in American motor cities like Detroit and Flint, the car’s cultural power and association with the endless possibilities of modernity lie at the heart of the refusal to seek alternative development paths leading away from racially inscribed automotive capitalism. Rooting the university in a history of industrialisation, placemaking and city-building, this book examines contemporary debates about the role that urban universities should have in building economies, creating jobs and reshaping the politics and identities of their communities. In South Africa as in many other nations, institutions of higher education represent potentially powerful cultural and socioeconomic agents, but the 2015 #FeesMustFall student protests against rising tuition costs highlighted the limits of their power. Firmly grounded in the particulars of East London, this thoughtful study illuminates questions common to rust-belt cities and universities around the world.

Leslie J Bank is a Deputy Executive Director at the Human Sciences Research Council in Cape Town and an Adjunct Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Fort Hare. His other books include Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City, Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (coeditor), Imonti Modern: Picturing the Life and Times of a South African Location (coauthor) and Anchored in Place: Rethinking the University and Development in South Africa (coeditor).

— Roger Southall, Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

— Robert Morrell, Research Professor in the Vice-Chancellor’s Office, University of Cape Town