Volume 34.

1 March 2010 225–39 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00946.x

BOOK REVIEWS

Review Essay — Youth and Violence

Amadeu Recasens (ed.) 2007: Violence between Young People in Night-Time Leisure Zones.
Bruxelles: Vub Press.

David Waddington, Fabien Jobard and Mike King (eds.) 2009: Rioting in the UK and France.
Cullompton: Willan.

An English-language publication presenting European comparative and interdisciplinary

research carried out in non-English-speaking cities is unusual enough to merit our
attention — all the more so when the topic is relevant to concerns of our time. What
happens in cities at night when young people (that is, aged from 14 to 25) go out? What
kind of risks do they face? Car accidents? Overconsumption of alcohol or cannabis? Bad
encounters, assaults or sexual aggression? Contexts provide answers to such questions,
as Violence between Young People in Night-Time Leisure Zones, a deeply original study,
edited by Amadeu Recasens and supported financially by the European Community,
reveals.
The cross-urban and qualitative research was carried out in 14 urban sites in five
countries — Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. A British scholar and an
anthropologist were invited to comment and offer their observations. Social concern over
the urban youth issue is explained by a double phenomenon. First, young people’s
purchasing power for leisure increased during the 1990s while, at the same time, bars and
discos, eager to attract these new clients, widened the range of what they had on offer.
Second, the economic and social triage of young people operated in leisure resorts has
been a major source of conflict between the ‘ins’ who get admitted to the clubs and the
‘outs’ who get rejected. The two sides of this phenomenon cannot be dissociated.
As is often the case, the study supports the view that place matters. The phenomenon
takes different forms, depending on whether one lives in Barcelona, Bologna or London.
Social and spatial spaces are indeed segmented by class and by diverse subcultures. In
Southern European cities, youngsters reach the discos after undergoing a long and
complex process of selection and admission by bouncers eager to avoid ‘trouble’. In
Bologna, some of them move on after one club to other clubs or to bars which are still
open or to after-hours places (p. 94). Others choose to join big gatherings of young
people, such as all-night raves. They also have the choice of remaining in public spaces.
‘The different economic capacity channel young people in different routes of leisure’,
Rossella Selmini notes (p. 102).
In Italy, Portugal or Spain, the authors observe, ‘binge drinking’ is not a priority
problem. ‘The uses and meaning of alcohol are both socially constructed and historically
contingent’ (Hadfield, p.176). They are woven into the social fabric of daily life; in those
cities, people know how to drink and not exceed the level at which they become alegre
(merry). Drunkenness is disapproved of as a sign of weakness. The use of public space
‘implies a certain continuity of culture wherein the young follow patterns established by
previous generations in their appropriation of the public realm . . . It does not require
participation within the competitive consumer-oriented environments of licensed leisure’
(p. 181). By contrast, the ‘new culture of intoxication’ among a minority of young
Britons is perceived as a threat at home and abroad, the British author remarks. A

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226 Book reviews

small-scale study carried out in 2002 is quoted: it found that leisure districts in four
Northern European cities (Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin and London) experienced similar
problems in relation to noise, crowds, litter and social disorder (p. 175). Drinking to
intoxication was widespread and often regarded as socially acceptable for young people.
The idea that conflicts arise from the selection processes operated in places where
young people go in their leisure time was also tested by Eric Marlière, who compared
youth behaviours at night in central Paris and in the periphery. Admission to discos in the
urban context ‘perpetuates segregation and ratifies discrimination by excluding the poor,
undesirable and marginalized’, he observes (p. 55). Their violence appears to be the mere
consequence of competition in a consumption-oriented society that attracts, screens and
excludes. The frustration and aggressive attitude of the excluded then targets the bouncers,
the police and, most of all, privileged young people when they leave the discos. The most
peaceful areas nonetheless remain the city centres where middle-class youth spend their
leisure time. Threats, incidents and disorder occur more frequently in immigrant areas
located at the margins of the city where other factors intervene: clashes with the police,
rebellions against stigmatization, assertions of cultural patterns that make these young
people very visible in public space. Finally, this collective research unfolds the
contradictions of the city. In selecting its clients on the basis of their appearance, features
and purchasing power, the night leisure economy is eager to avoid violence, which would
bring trade and legal problems for club and bar owners. But risk-taking, masculine and
excessive behaviour on the part of young men stimulated by an overconsumption of
alcohol or cannabis in public and private places, runs counter to the orderly regime valued
by local authorities and the market. Confronting the conflicts that some youth generate and
that hurt business, elected officials thus face a dilemma: either to comply with their
constituencies’ desire for order by suppressing the licences of the noisiest bars and discos
or to collect the benefits of a flourishing economic activity. The conclusion of the editor,
Amadeu Recasens, is that in the Southern European cities studied here, young people are
equipped with mental maps of violence, conflict, secure and insecure zones (p. 24). They
know where and when to go. On the whole, there is no particular alarm regarding the risks
they take. This assertion will raise more than one eyebrow . . .
The media do indeed convey other perceptions: youth are violent and they are
trouble-makers. But, as scholars point out, trouble-making such as rioting is part of the
repertoire of the ‘weak’ and it only mobilizes a minority of youth. How singular, how
similar have urban outbursts been in French and English cities in the last three decades?
These questions are at the core of an important contribution to European cross-national
approaches carried out by twenty researchers and presented in a volume edited by David
Waddington, Fabien Jobard and Mike King. In each of the two countries covered by the
two parts of the book, several aspects of rioting have been selected. (It might have been
more ambitious to submit each of the chosen themes — events, police, politics, rioters’
profile, rumours, etc. — to a comparative analysis. But, it seems, the national funds
allocated to this research limited its range; and, in particular, the quality of the translation
from French to English, which is a problem.) The introduction and overviews as well as
the conclusion of the work written by the three editors meet the comparative challenge
successfully. For instance, an effort is made to clarify why the term ‘riot’ is preferred
here, although its use remains controversial. A useful glossary of French terms, acronyms
and leaders’ names is provided.
The French case allows the British authors in the book to test the theories that they
have accumulated in the last 30 years.
One asset of the book is that it goes beyond the strict French–English comparison.
Why aren’t there urban riots in Germany, for instance? According to Tim Lukas, a
scholar from the University of Freiburg, withholding German citizenship from
immigrants and their children prevents them from ‘voicing’ grievances or frustrations,
which, in the two other countries, lead rioters to act out (p. 217). Furthermore, the poor
education and isolation of young Turks, an important fraction of immigrants to Germany,
restrain their claims. The major difference in the comparison, however, has to do ‘with

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the high percentage of German and non-German young people sharing a strong or very
strong trust in the courts and in the police’ (p. 221). In their contacts with police forces,
discrimination plays only a minor role by comparison with other fields, which is not the
case in France and the UK.
A study by David Waddington of riots in Cincinnati in 2003 also extends the range of
the comparison by pointing to a specific American approach consisting, after riots
occurred in a very deprived African-American neighbourhood, of a resort to problem-
oriented policing and joint decision-making involving policemen and residents. Such
processes are perceived as a path to restoring peace, if, that is, new repressive policies do
not jeopardize their success.
Focusing on ‘riots’ in France and the UK since 2000, the core of the book is
sufficiently stimulating and unusual to deserve praise. Fabien Jobard recognizes honestly
that, because French scholars started to write about riots ten years after their British
counterparts, they lack the accumulation of theoretical insights. The context of the riots
in French cities before 2005 that he sets is most useful and allows the reader to draw
comparisons. Convergences between the two cases are familiar: massive and
inhospitable public housing projects (cités) provide the setting in which large immigrant
families live; clashes oppose idle youth and police forces. But the French analysis
questions the urban policies that have been chosen in order to calm social tensions in
these areas since 1981: they appear inefficient in light of the deterioration of the wage
conditions and job instability that have transformed a number of working-class residents
into a useless residual stratum parked in dormitory cities. ‘Authoritarian powerlessness’
characterizes the style of the French state with a ‘proliferation of paramilitary police
units in the cités and a radicalization of the nature of confrontations between the youth
and law enforcement forces’ (p. 36–7). Researcher Hugues Lagrange has drawn a
correlation between the neighbourhoods on the periphery of Paris where very large
sub-Saharan families settled and new sites of riots in 2005. Rather than unemployment,
the segregation affecting those families is the variable that explains school failure, a
feeling of unfairness and a general disinvestment in these areas. Renaud Epstein, for his
part, holds that those in charge of urban renewal programs who did not communicate
about their plans were responsible for the disorganization felt by anxious families, too
disempowered to exert authority over the young.
Several chapters deal with the political impact of the ‘riots’ and this aspect reveals a
major difference between the French and the British cases. Between 2001 and 2005,
disorders in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, also working-class areas with massive
immigration, displayed the involvement of a local far right, hostile to immigrants and in
competition with them over declining local resources. ‘It is important to view the riots as
a point of intensity within the routine of daily lives which are marred by omnipresent
conflict of varying degrees’ (p. 44). All the more so — and this is another divergence —
as identity politics in each of the groups exacerbate the potentiality of conflicts,
powerfully echoed by biased local news reporting (p. 51). While French contenders exert
their anger against the symbols of the state, thus demonstrating that they require more
respect, more equity, less discrimination as French, the emphasis put on identity
differences in the UK leads to ‘an exacerbation in the levels of distrust and
misunderstanding between . . . communities’ (p. 51) as well as to interethnic violence,
sheltering the state and the powers that be from uncomfortable questions.

Sophie Body-Gendrot, University of Paris-Sorbonne

Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst 2005: Globalization and Belonging.
London: Sage.

This book’s starting point is that we are all familiar with social theorizing that anticipates
the demise of people’s local attachments as a result of social change. Much of this

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literature is speculative, and the rationale for Savage and his colleagues’ study can
therefore be stated bluntly: ‘There is no shortage of sophisticated theoretical
frameworks, but there is very little empirical research which allows us to explore what
globalization “on the ground” entails’ (p. ix). The book sets out to make good this gap.
Its conclusion can also be expressed pithily: ‘attachment to place remains remarkably
obdurate’ (p.1). The authors can be confident about this unexpected conclusion because,
unlike so many contributions to the debates about the contemporary significance of
place, it is founded on painstakingly collected and rigorously analysed evidence. Where
their findings run counter to various expectations, their style of presentation of that fact
is simple but effective. Thus: ‘We have not come across much evidence of this kind of
belonging’ (p. 103), ‘this argument no longer seems a useful one to draw’ (p.152), ‘this
argument is interesting in view of the common assumption’ (p.174), ‘there is evidence
that new kinds of cultural distinction are emerging’ (p.180), ‘[t]his assumption of
increased national homogeneity and urban centrality looks very different from the world
conjured up by our respondents’ (p. 203).
The authors are quite right in their belief that the book’s greatest strength ‘lies in the
quality of the interviews that we carried out’ (p. ix). The 182 respondents were drawn as
evenly as empirical research allows from four broadly middle-class neighbourhoods
around Manchester, England, and their accounts of how local connections figure in their
lives are conveyed with great authenticity. Although aspects of the lives of certain
respondents are highlighted by the use of vignettes in order to illustrate particular points,
it is nevertheless the case that nearly 90% of the people who participated in the study are
referred to individually at some point in the main body of the book (and the remainder
are listed alongside them in the appendix). The authors deliberately resisted the
temptation to quote disproportionately from the most articulate respondents with
especially interesting stories to tell, preferring to draw ‘on the wide array of material
from across most of the sample’ (p.15). This dovetails nicely with their commitment to
highlighting the ordinariness of everyday life and their respondents’ concern in
interviews to ‘protect their ordinariness’ (p.164). The suburbs of Manchester are not
home to the pursuit of social distinction in the way that Bourdieu famously characterized
metropolitian France.
Indeed, Savage and his colleagues claim that the classic distinction of community
sociology, that between insiders and outsiders, is fast becoming redundant. Feeling at
home in a neighbourhood is, they argue, no longer a product of having been born and
bred there, but rather a matter of what they term ‘elective belonging’ (p. 53). People’s
sense of belonging reflects their comfortableness in living among people whom they
deem to be like themselves. The respondents are people who can make sense of their
lives in terms of ‘their “chosen” residential location’ (p. 29), and on this basis the
conclusion is offered that: ‘One’s residence is a crucial, possibly the crucial, identifier of
who you are’ (p. 207). Put another way, you are where you live. The language of choice
is used here, appropriately enough for a sample of middle-class homeowners. One
wonders, however, whether a rather different terminology would be needed for working-
class tenants in the comparative study that is invited by Savage and his colleagues’
concluding question regarding the applicability elsewhere of the approach adopted here.
For anyone undertaking such a study, this book provides a model of methodological
rigour and theoretical sophistication on which to base such research.

Graham Crow, University of Southampton

Martin J. Murray and Garth A. Myers (eds.) 2007: Cities in Contemporary Africa. New York:
Palgrave.

Cities on the African continent are possibly the most rapidly changing socio-cultural,
economic and political constructs on our globe, yet they are also the least understood in

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conventional urban studies. The immense variation between cities across the continent is
often suppressed by generalized statements about ‘the African city’. These tend to
emphasize that an estimated majority of the populations of African cities live in ‘slums’,
do not have access to basic services and are employed in the informal sector if at all, and
point to a crisis in planning and governance. Challenging such generalizations, Cities in
Contemporary Africa has two overarching aims. One is to move beyond preconceived
normative ideas about African cities that are based on urbanism elsewhere on the globe,
particularly in regions of global economic centrality, to an approach that captures urban
reality from a variety of perspectives. The book does acknowledge the existence of
studies that examine cities in Africa in unpreconceived and meaningful ways. Its second
goal, therefore, is to embrace and promote this scholarship, much of which is generated
by African scholars themselves. The book achieves its aims. It does not claim to be
comprehensive, either geographically or in terms of approach. Instead, it provides a taste
of the complexity, diversity and dynamism unfolding in African cities today. In doing so
it casts light on linkages, networks and relationships that shape urban life.
The contributions in this collection are grouped into three parts, each prefaced by a
synopsis of the particular group of chapters. The editors’ introductory chapter locates the
entire collection within the urban studies literature. While primarily stating a case for the
book, Myers and Murray’s chapter in itself is an invaluable map and critique of the urban
literature on Africa.
Part One of the book deals with urban space and place from the perspective of culture
and imagination. While each chapter in this section focuses on a particular city, cultural
and aspirational linkages are often traced beyond the boundaries of a single city. Across
these chapters, longing, fear, horror and ridicule emerge as popular perceptions in a
context where digital connections, improvisation, hazard, ethnic tension, violence,
tragedy and criminalization shape the urban experience. Part Two focuses primarily on
work, livelihood and consumption. The context of these chapters is largely one of a
political economy that is shaped by globalized economic linkages, both formal and
informal. City dwellers are portrayed as conduits and agents as well as captives and
victims of transnational economic interests. The chapters also reveal unexpected social
changes and responses at the household level when economic opportunities are scarce.
Part Three brings together contributions on the failures as well as perverse uses of
planning and urban governance. The chapters discuss contestations over access to basic
services, and the persistent as well as erratic imposition of control, particularly over
urban informality and flexibility.
No chapter in this book sets out to provide a full analysis of any one city. For some
cities, more than one perspective is provided. Thus for Nairobi, Kenya, Joyce Nyairo in
Part One explores discourses of the city revealed in popular lyrics. Nyairo traces a
symbiotic relationship between music and place, and in so doing provides a window onto
new and populous parts of Nairobi which defy urban planning. Her analysis of lyrics
explains how these areas and their inhabitants are perceived in a society differentiated to
a large extent by class. In Part Two, Elizabeth Campbell homes in on an older and
formerly Indian part of Nairobi, Eastleigh, where, despite xenophobia, African
foreigners and in particular Somali refugees have found a trading niche, informally
transforming old residential tenements into shopping malls. Campbell traces the
transnational networks into which these traders tap, and which provide them with a
comparative advantage over their Kenyan counterparts for whom they now create
employment. Both chapters on Nairobi predate the post-election ethnic violence of
January 2008, thus painting a picture of relative cosmopolitanism in which intra-Kenyan
ethnic tensions are not at the fore.
Much of what unfolded in Kenya in January 2008, as well as the growth in vigilantism
in that country, has parallels with politically charged ethnic violence and vigilantism in
urban Nigeria, which Daniel Smith analyses in Part One. Religious difference however,
plays a more central role in the Nigerian conflicts than in those in Kenya. Smith explores
migratory linkages between a semirural community among the predominantly Christian

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Igbo in the southeast of Nigeria, and an Igbo part of the northern, predominantly Muslim
city of Kano. He points to the historical roots of inequality in Nigeria, which continue to
fuel discontent. Nigeria is also addressed in Part Three, where Matthew Gandy explores
the limits of planning in the de facto ‘self-service city’ (p. 252) of Lagos. Gandy shows
that, despite the rapid spread of mobile phone access, inequalities in Lagos have
increased, a situation that is compounded by ethnic polarization. Among several
reflections, Gandy looks to Lefebvre’s conceptualization of ‘the right to the city’ for
direction beyond urban management and humanitarian solutions.
AbdouMaliq Simone’s short unreferenced essay (originally a conference
presentation) on South African urbanism, also in Part Three, links ‘the right to the city’
to the pursuit or realization of ‘multiple aspirations’ (p. 244). The diversity of these
aspirations presents challenges to urban governance. Simone uses this conceptualization
of the right to the city to expose the inflexibility of South African urban areas, in
particular the largely unaltered residential areas planned by the apartheid state for the
poor urban majority. He uses the term ‘refugee camp’ to capture the limits and
inflexibilities, in essence the controls, which these urban areas continue to impose on
their residents, ‘an endless present unavailable to politics’ (p. 243). However, one may
question this analogy. Soon after the May 2008 xenophobic attacks across urban South
Africa, the closure of (real) refugee camps and much criticized forced reintegration of
justifiably apprehensive foreigners has highlighted the very impermanence of such
camps and the political use of their impermanence.
Continued social control by the South African state is also a theme in Greg Ruiters’s
chapter (also in Part Three), which critically reviews contradictions in the Free Basic
Water Services policy and its roll-out in a broader neoliberal economic policy context.
He examines in particular the controversy over pre-paid meters, which have contributed
to a reduction in standard of living. Though in a different part of the book, Martin Murray
and Juanita Malan’s photographic essay of Johannesburg provides, among a number of
reflections and images, another dimension of control in South African cities, namely that
protecting the gated retreats of the wealthy.
Prefacing their criticisms, Ruiters and Simone both acknowledge institutional and
technical innovation and real achievements by the post-apartheid South African state.
Their chapters therefore provide a contrast to the Zimbabwean situation captured by
Deborah Potts in Part Three and Miriam Grant in Part Two. Potts analyses the June 2005
Operation Murambatsvina in which an estimated 570,000 urban people were left
homeless and close on a further 100,000 lost their livelihoods in the informal sector. She
exposes the impact of this operation, while also grappling with the lack of consistent
political logic behind it. In the context of economic decline and informalization, which
is also the backdrop in Potts’ chapter, Grant unveils the role of social capital, and in
particular intergenerational mentorship as opposed to formal training, in ‘the economic
pathways of the youth’ in a low-income residential area of the city of Bulawayo.
The family within the economy is also the focus in Guillaume Iyenda and David
Simon’s chapter in Part Two on Kinshasa. Their finding is that the pervasive economic
downturn has required women to take part in economic activities, thus reducing gender
inequality. Iyenda and Simon too touch on the informal, sometimes contraband
transnational networks from which these women source the goods they trade. A
counterpart on the formal economy is provided by Darlene Miller (also Part Two). Miller
explores the impact of the South African multinational retail company Shoprite on
‘regional imaginaries’, in particular in the workplace it creates in Lusaka, Zambia and
Maputo, Mozambique. Elite consumer culture, portrayed in Miller’s chapter by the
shopping mall enclaves in which Shoprite stores are located, has another, more pervasive
presence in African cities in the form of expensive and consciously branded motor cars.
This is the topic of M. Anne Pitcher with Aubrey Graham’s chapter on Luanda, Angola
in Part Two. These authors use many dimensions of the motor car to explore economy,
society and politics in oil-rich, post-war Angola. They have complemented their chapter
with a brief photographic essay on Luanda.

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This leaves us in Part One with two chapters that are somewhat slippery when
contrasted with the remainder of the book. Both are on the city of Douala, Cameroon.
Dominique Malaquais finds echoes of New York and Johannesburg in a painting in a
barber shop in the Douala neighbourhood Nylon and reflects on the meaning of
these linkages. She refers to Douala as ‘a place of the imaginaire’ (p. 34) where
‘architectural rumour is a powerful force’ (p. 43). Basile Ndjio builds on descriptions of
decay and decline in Douala. Besides ‘ghettopolis’ and ‘hedonopolis’, he applies the
concept of ‘necropolis’ to capture the informalization, criminalization and terror of
everyday life. This labelling is substantiated in part through gory media reports, but no
analysis is provided of the extent of sensationalism or the orientation and readership of
the newspapers cited. One is left asking, perhaps unfairly, whether similarly depressing
essays could not be written about almost every city by scraping the bottom of the media
barrel. Anticipating such a response, the editors explain that Ndjio is a longstanding
researcher and survivor of Douala and that his is ‘a truth stranger than fiction’ (p. 29).
Throughout, the book arouses curiosity and will spark research questions not only
about cities in the 16 or more other sub-Saharan African countries not covered in this
volume, but also about cities in the nine countries that the chapters span. The book is
intended for ‘mid-level undergraduate students’, but has a much wider appeal to anyone
interested in cities and African city studies in particular.

Marie Huchzermeyer, University of the Witwatersrand

Mario Luis Small 2009: Unanticipated Gains. Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Unanticipated Gains examines why people differ in the quality of their networks. Based
on a multi-method study of childcare centres and parents (mothers, mainly) who have
enrolled their child(ren), this book shows how organizations act as ‘brokers’ and in a
more or less successful way facilitate the exchange of resources among parents and
between parents and (other) organizations. In this way Small shows how ‘context
matters’ for acquiring social ties and social capital. It is one of the few studies that engage
with ‘how people make social ties’ — an essential but missing question, Small rightfully
argues, if we want to understand the mechanisms that account for inequality in networks
and access to resources.
The study is based on a nationally representative survey among mothers in cities, survey
data on childcare centres in New York City, and interviews with directors and parents in a
subset of these centres. Mothers with a child in a centre appear to have more friends, are
less likely to be socially isolated or depressed, and face less hardship than mothers who do
not. Some of these effects are mediated through whether mothers had made new friends
through the childcare centre, and non-poor mothers reap the greatest benefits. This is the
starting point for a detailed investigation into two mechanisms (social ties and institutional
ties) that link enrolment in childcare centres and personal wellbeing.
One of the ways in which centres facilitate and structure the formation of social ties
(Part II), is through restricted pick-up and drop-off times, parents’ involvement in
activities such as field trips and fund-raising, and meetings of the parents association
(PA). This is not just dependent on the willingness of parents: government-funded
centres are required to have a PA and Head Start centres are mandated to seek parent-
volunteers. The state thus has a role, Small concludes, albeit an unanticipated one, in
shaping friendships. Hence, participation in an organization in itself will not necessarily
facilitate interaction and exchanges of resources between people; what matters is what
kind of organization people are involved in.
How this works is further unravelled in Part III of the book where Small examines
parents’ ties to organizations and their resources: ‘A mother enrolling her child in a

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centre today is not simply acquiring a babysitter . . . she is enrolling in a complex

broker of information, services and material goods’ (p. 153). Chapters 6 and 7
convincingly show that social capital is also about ties to organizations, because
centres operate at the intersection of multiple fields. Next to childcare these fields are:
education (schools but also afterschool programs and adult-education centres),
healthcare (including domestic abuse centres, HIV/AIDS testing centres and nutritional
supplement businesses), community development (e.g. youth-leadership programs and
neighbourhood churches) and culture (theatres, zoos, museums, etc.). Organizations
and their employees act — generally purposively but also non-purposively — as
‘brokers’ and in various ways (through storage, validation, referral and collaboration)
disseminate information and make resources accessible. Centres, for example, put up
fliers with information about ‘minimum daily dietary guidelines’ or how to acquire
health insurance, and in this way not only offer information that parents are looking
for, but also information parents did not know they should be looking for. Centres
organize collaborative sessions on a wide range of topics — some expected (child
health and nutrition), but others more surprising and a service to the parents rather
than their children (e.g. drug abuse support, employment opportunities, housing and
legal aid). Parents further benefit from such things as membership and admission
discounts for cultural facilities. This shows that social capital is not only dependent on
whether people can or will ‘mobilize’ their ties but also on whether ties are mobilized
by others — in this case the childcare centre and the organizations to which they are
connected.
It is not until the near-end of the book that Small discusses the significance of
high-poverty neighbourhoods by describing ‘a paradox of place’ (p. 172): centres in poor
neighbourhoods may buffer against the negative consequences of neighbourhood poverty
because these centres are often better connected than those in non-poor neighbourhoods.
Centres located in a high-poverty neighbourhood have more referral ties (i.e. directors
refer parents to other organizations) and more collaborative ties (brokering services of
other organizations). This is because organizations’ strategy to select the neediest
families was not to look at the proportion of poor children in the centre, but to look at the
conditions of the neighbourhood where the centre was located. This leads Small to argue
that ‘neighbourhood effects’ may be mediated by the connectedness of organizations.
This would further refute the thesis of Chicago School sociologists that poor
neighbourhoods lack effective organizational ties; much depends on the presence of a
strong nonprofit sector in cities (New York has a strong nonprofit infrastructure whereas
Chicago has a history of ‘institutional neglect’). It is urgent to include this in research on
poverty neighbourhoods, because, Small argues, ‘in a society increasingly structured
around formal organizations, the organizational isolate is the person increasingly
guaranteed to be left out’ (p. 197).
In Villa Victoria (2004, University of Chicago Press), Small found two other
paradoxes, namely that services tend to cluster in high-poverty neighbourhoods and that
the abundance of local institutions contributed to residents’ social isolation. Together
with the third paradox described in Unanticipated Gains Small is setting up a convincing
argument for unanticipated ways in which neighbourhood effects might work. In any
case Small demonstrates the need to differentiate between social ties and organizational
ties. Organizations in high-poverty neighbourhoods may broker resources between other
organizations and residents, but may still contribute to residents’ lack of resourceful
social ties, because these organizations — childcare centres or otherwise — cater
only for the poor population. Finally, it urges scholars and local practitioners to think not
just in terms of community participation, but participation in any neighbourhood
institution — whether for the benefit of the community or not — and particularly
participation in well-connected institutions, in order to understand, and intervene in,
neighbourhood effects on personal wellbeing.

Gwen van Eijk, University of Amsterdam

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Annette M. Kim (2008): Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition

Economy. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Learning to be Capitalists provides a rare glimpse into the role played by local agents in
the formation of land and housing markets in contemporary Vietnam. This contribution
builds on lengthy fieldwork during which Annette Kim investigated the rise of the first
generation of private land developers in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The result is a rich
analysis of the emergence of real estate development activities in Vietnam’s leading
metropolis.
The book opens with the idea of trying to account for the ‘mystery’ of Vietnam’s
sustained economic growth of the last two decades. Vietnam’s recent economic reform
runs counter to the suggestions proffered by the Washington Consensus of restricting
governments from market participation or regulation; the apparent success of
Vietnam’s economic reforms to date gives the lie to those prescriptions. Unabated
economic growth persists in spite of an authoritarian political regime, a highly
interventionist state, a poorly established rule of law, and loosely disciplined finance
institutions. The Vietnamese experience (like that of China) demonstrates the
possibility of alternative development models off the neoliberal reform path. We have
yet to fully understand, Kim points out, how Vietnam achieved such a profound
transformation of its economic system, though this work represents a foray into trying
to do just that.
Amongst the explanatory models recently used to try to account for the unorthodox
outcomes of Vietnam’s transition are de Soto’s (2000) single magic bullet — property
title registration — and explanations based on developmental state models. Kim rejects
both of these and with respect to the latter reminds the reader that the Vietnamese state
has limited means to enforce its plans and policies (p. 9). There is, however, an emerging
stream of literature trying to account for the changing economic and social structures in
Vietnam that gives a much bigger role to Vietnamese society, in contrast to the state
and/or Communist Party, with which Kim concurs. Vietnamese society, by this account,
has a more important role in setting the parameters of the reform than the Vietnamese
Communist Party would dare to acknowledge, or than many analyses have so far
recognized (e.g. Fforde and de Vylder, 1996; Beresford, 1988).
Kim’s book expands on this idea by putting forward a so-called ‘New Social
Cognition Theory’ (pp.14–18). This explanatory model builds on the idea of a
transformative feedback loop between agency and structure. In this view, economic
agents generally behave according to rules dictated by social institutions, but they also
have some leeway to experiment with these rules, especially in a transitional
environment. Through these experiments, the agents reconstruct cognitive schemes and
social institutions, progressively transforming the rules of the game in their field of
activity. The rest of the book sets out to demonstrate that real estate development
practices observed in HCMC during the transition period cleverly experimented with a
highly structured political economy and, along the way, created new ways of thinking
about and producing urban space.
This proposition is put to the test using the case of 14 private real estate firms that
developed land in the periphery of HCMC throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The book
presents the results of this investigation in two substantive parts.
Part 1 portrays the real estate firms, their business environment, and their evolving
practices. Kim characterizes the new real estate entrepreneurs of HCMC as a group of
individuals with strong interpersonal skills, many networks and relationships —
including tight connections to state agencies. Kim also finds that political capital
inherited from the era of central planning was not sufficient for an individual or a firm to
succeed in the transitional environment. This is an unexpected finding in the Vietnamese
context where state employees are (at least) part investors in many emerging real estate
ventures, and where state ownership means that local authorities have a monopoly on
land supply. This heightened importance of cultural capital over political capital is well

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illustrated by a discussion of how different firms dealt with the 1997 Asian economic
crisis (p. 83). Kim observes that, during this period, the difference between success and
failure was not so much dependent on privileged access and support from the state, but
rather on individual firms’ creativity in adapting development projects to new market
conditions.
Part 2 conceptualizes the institutional arrangements created by the state, real estate
firms, and home-buyers throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Kim calls this emerging urban
space production system ‘fiscal socialism’ (pp. 90–99). In this system, local authorities
supply developable land by facilitating reversion of rural land use rights to the state for
reassignment to urban uses. The firm can thereafter buy the land and develop it subject
to the condition that the development project provides some public amenities or
improves upon adjoining infrastructure. Finally, home-buyers play the role of investors,
buying building ownership and land use rights certificates in a few upfront instalments.
Kim notes that local government is supportive of this arrangement. Vietnamese
municipalities have scarce expenditure allocation and limited tax revenues and are glad
to transfer some of the burden of population growth management and public services
provision to the private sector (p. 98). Middle- and upper-middle-class households are
also relatively well served by this system which generates much needed housing at the
periphery of the city.
Two social groups stand out as the obvious losers in this ‘new deal’. First are the
low-income and poor households who cannot afford to buy the dwellings produced by
private real estate firms. Second are the periurban people whose land-use rights are
reclaimed by the state to be transferred to development firms who capture the price
differentials associated with its conversion to an urban designation. Sadly, the fate of
these two groups only receives limited attention in this book, whose main focus is on
the real estate entrepreneurs. Local resistance to land claim processes is discussed, but
the wider social costs engendered by ‘fiscal socialism’ in HCMC remain to be
addressed.
This book provides a wealth of information and opens up new ways of thinking about
land development and urbanization in Vietnam. Yet, the author makes a number of
questionable claims. At the outset of the book, Kim rejects the idea that path dependency
could help explain the formation of the real estate sector in HCMC. This claim is hardly
supported by her research, which does not explore pre-reform institutions involved in
urban space production (e.g. Ministry of Construction, state-owned enterprises, etc.) and
which provides little information on individual entrepreneurs’ biographies and activities
during the subsidy era.
Kim also concludes that ‘firms did not emerge in Hanoi as they did in HCMC,
even though both cities have the same basic legal and governmental framework,
transition policies, and high market demand’ (p.132). Much more nuanced treatment
of this topic — engaging with notions of public–private interpenetrations — is found in
Laurent Pandolfi’s (2001) excellent PhD dissertation, which unfortunately remains
unpublished. That said, Kim has produced a substantive and noteworthy addition to the
literature on urbanization and the transition toward capitalism in Vietnam.

Danielle Labbé, UBC, Vancouver

Beresford, M. (1988) Vietnam: politics, transition in Vietnam. Westview Press,

economics and society. Pinter, London.
de Soto, H. (2000) The mystery of capital: why
capitalism triumphs in the West and fails
everywhere else. Basic Books, New York.
Fforde, A. and S. de Vylder (1996) From
plan to market: the economic
Boulder, CO.
Pandolfi, L. (2001) Une terre sans prix:
réforme foncière et urbanisation au
Viêt-Nam, Hanoi, 1986–2000.
Unpublished PhD dissertation, IFU/
Paris-VIII, Paris.

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Book reviews 235

Malcolm Miles (2008) Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative
Settlements. Abingdon: Routledge.

In an age of increasing social division and environmental destruction another book with
utopia in its title may well be added to the growing stack of excursuses into an
unachievable future. However, this book sidesteps the usual criticisms about utopia being
forever distant from contemporary reality. Rather than opting to support or reject utopia,
Miles instead brings together insights gained from alternative settlements scattered
across the world. In their own way each of the short case studies supports the thesis that
‘the lesson of practical or utopian settlements is that they are not ideal but real places,
where much of the daily practice of a new society consists of finding ways in which
people can collaborate on an equitable basis, respecting rather than obliterating
difference’ (p. 1).
By way of context, Part I offers a decent discussion of the literature that will be
familiar to geographers and utopian studies scholars alike. More’s Utopia, Campanella’s
City of the Sun and Bacon’s New Atlantis are used to note inter alia the distancing of a
utopian image to the faraway places of European colonization. Miles then follows a more
metaphorical slant through the work of Descartes to mark a shift from intention to the
actual planning of cities and the reordering of the social world in the nineteenth century.
From this point the book moves from literary utopias to writing that envisions a practical
transformation of society. The discussion focuses on two examples of practical
utopianism in Fourier’s phalanstery and Owenite settlements to suggest that: ‘neither is
revolutionary in the sense of supporting popular insurrection and both, in different ways,
seek radical change by constitutional means’ (p. 51).
Part II takes the reader forward in time to the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to compare the utopian aspects of Cerda’s plan for Barcelona, Howard’s
Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Modernism. This discussion is by no means new in
drawing links between urbanization and civil order and their differences with English
Garden Cities. In the case of Paris specifically, the discussion makes little of the
connections between Le Corbusier, Baron Haussmann or his predecessor Berger. In his
book on Paris, Harvey (2003) makes the point that ‘no social order can achieve changes
that are not already latent within its existing condition’ (p. 1). In this vein of reasoning
what is claimed to be ‘new’ is called into question as the boundaries between past,
present and future become more porous. However, Miles does open up this porosity
through a chapter on ‘social utopias’ where connections are made between ‘non
productive’ groups such as the San Francisco Diggers and the Situationists in Paris. As
‘moments of potentially utopian culture’ (p. 91) the ‘intentional’ communities are then
compared and contrasted with prescriptive ecotopian frameworks and the rise of eco-
villages as a utopian practice. The more general point here is the links between eco-living
and grass roots activism. Miles exemplifies these links effectively through drawing
together a rich variety of case studies from the anti-roads protests in Britain and North
America, the Donga Tribe at Twyford Down to eco-villages in Europe and Australia.
Part III continues the book’s emphasis upon realized material utopias through the
work of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy and his mud brick buildings: the village of New
Gourna and the cooperative of New Baris. Both these sites are testament to Fathy’s
‘appropriate technology’ that in the West at least remains ‘a romantic idea of the
countryside’ (p.151) mainly because it ‘lacks the social architectures by which dwellers
shape habitats for themselves’ (p.157). This is not to say that social architectures cannot
be successfully transplanted into other locations, as the case of Barefoot College shows.
This rural campus in Rajasthan India and its associated Social Work Research Centre is
based upon Gandhian principles that aim to benefit the poorest of the poor ‘for whom
there are no alternatives’ (p. 160). Part III ends with brief personal reflections from the
author’s experience of the Coventry Peace House, a commune in the English Midlands,
to further explore what it means to work with asylum seekers as a marginalized group in
Western society.

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Part IV is by far the most empirical offering inasmuch as Miles discusses his own
experiences of visiting nine alternative settlements spread across the US, Europe and
India. Each of the short case studies provides enough description to give a flavour of a
historical site, experimental city, autonomous settlement or contemporary alternative
settlement. Despite their differences in social organization and physical planning, each of
the case studies also shows that a more utopian world is possible. As to whether this more
utopian world will fully materialize, Miles refuses even to provide any definition of
utopian. Instead, he concludes by drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Marcuse to call
attention to the injustices permeating the polarized world feeding off competitive
capitalism. This modest conclusion sets the book apart from wider academic debates
which attempt to ring utopia as something overly idealistic and thus unachievable.
However, it is Miles’s ethereal conclusions and his rejection of a prescriptive utopianism
that we should welcome as means to open a more discursive space for alternative futures.

Gareth Rice, University of Helsinki

Harvey, D. (2003) Paris, capital of

modernity. Routledge, New York.

Xiangming Chen, with Zhenhua Zhou (eds.) 2009: Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local
Transformations in a Global Megacity. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

This volume is a welcome addition to our understanding of urban China. Shanghai, the
‘dragonhead’ of the lower Yangtse Valley, where it links up with such important regional
cities as Suzhou, Hangzhou and Ningbo that are all within a roughly 100 kilometer
radius, is China’s flagship city. The larger region over which its dominance extends vies
strenuously for global city status with Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta in southern
China. But, as several of the chapters explicitly state, Hong Kong’s lead in the
competitive race for globality may be difficult to overtake. Hong Kong is a service city
and financial hub, with a per capita GDP of nearly $23,000 in purchasing power parity
(PPP) terms, compared to $8,941 for Shanghai, which despite the rapid growth of its
business services sector in recent years is still largely a manufacturing city. As Fulong
Wu, among others, explicitly states: ‘Shanghai is not a global city, and perhaps will never
be reglobalized in the sense of its glorious history as “Paris of the Orient” — if we
regard . . . the dominance of international capital’ (p. 140).
Since the 1990s, Shanghai has greatly benefited from foreign direct investment (FDI),
but it is one of the curious anomalies of China’s statistics that much of this investment
actually came from the Hong Kong SAR (special administrative region) and from
Taiwan, the island nation officially claimed by the PRC as a province of the motherland.
For statistical purposes, both are treated as ‘foreign’.
Be that as it may, over the last 20 years, the heavy contributions of both these regions
to Shanghai’s phenomenal transformation raise questions concerning the endogeneity of
the Shanghai ‘miracle’. As Fulong Wu points out: ‘In the global city literature, no one
seriously denies the importance of local conditions in overall urban development’ (ibid.).
Globalization may be used symbolically to justify the local agenda, he writes, but the role
of the state at all levels has been and continues to be dominant. Countering Saskia
Sassen’s argument that global cities are at least partially a ‘denationalized’ space claimed
by global capital, and that this raises the question of to whom the city actually belongs
(p. 20), we can confidently assert that this claim is not descriptive of Shanghai’s
globality. Transnational influences have certainly contributed, but all the while, the local
entrepreneurial state, backed by the central government, has been firmly in control of
Shanghai’s economic revival.

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The book under review is divided into two parts. Part I, Global Cities and the West,
brings together five essays by distinguished foreign scholars (including two from Hong
Kong!). Most of them address partial issues that will need to be addressed by
policymakers in the future, such as Ann Markusen on high-tech activity, John Kasarda on
aviation infrastructure, and K.C. Ho on competitive urban economic policies, while
Tai-lok Lui and Stephen W.K. Chiu compare Hong Kong and Shanghai’s single-minded
pursuit of the global jackpot. Saskia Sassen introduces these contributions to Part I with
an essay on ‘The Global Cities Perspective’.
I found Part II more interesting, because it focuses more centrally on Shanghai than
on potentially useful experiences in ‘the West’. Led off by Fulong Wu’s exemplary essay
on the state and local governance, virtually all of the authors are of Chinese ancestry,
though many of them hold senior academic positions in the United States and the United
Kingdom. As a joint author, the senior editor of this volume has contributed three of the
five chapters in Part II. There are chapters devoted to telecommunications, the
restructuring of urban districts, the potential role of neighborhood-based residents’
committees in community development, and global consumption by the emerging
middle classes and elites. A concluding chapter written by Xiangming Chen and Anthony
M. Orum attempts to draw ‘lessons’ for and from Shanghai.
In a sense, this volume covers a period when China’s policies were driven primarily
by the theory of export-led growth. This period came to a close, however, with the 2008
global economic crisis, when the central government decided on a major push to open up
domestic markets in the interior regions of the country via a stimulus package of nearly
800 billion dollars in infrastructure investments. At present, China’s economic growth is
down by a few percentage points but is still quite healthy. Unemployment, too, has been
at least partially absorbed by these new initiatives. In Shanghai’s case, the new policy
encourages regional collaboration, with efforts currently underway to strengthen
linkages to other major centers in the lower Yangtse delta, such as the new six-lane
highway to Ningbo bridging Hangzhou Bay. Ningbo is a major manufacturing center of
about nine million people that is destined to become Shanghai’s twin, with an emphasis
on manufacturing, while the metropole resumes its goal of expanding business services,
R & D, and tourism. The most recent accomplishment in this direction is the recently
signed agreement with the Walt Disney people to construct the world’s largest
Disneyland in East Shanghai (Pudong) to the tune of $3.5 billion. Meanwhile, Shanghai
is also shifting some of its industrial investments to nearby Suzhou in Jiangsu Province
(p. 144).
What is missing from this volume? The regional dimension of Shanghai’s economy
could have been better developed. Certain topics such as poverty and inequality are
barely broached, nor are the environmental and social costs of break-neck economic
growth. Despite these shortcomings, this is an excellent collection of essays that I would
be happy to recommend for graduate courses on China’s urbanization.

John Friedmann, University of British Columbia/Vancouver

Rhoda H. Halperin 2006: Whose School Is It? Women, Children, Memory and Practice in the
City. Austin: University of Texas Press.

In Whose School Is It? Women, Children, Memory, and Practice in the City, urban
anthropologist Rhoda Halperin writes about the founding of a charter school in the East
End, a working-class neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. As a scholar, advisor, activist,
and onlooker in the process of the creation and ongoing struggles of the charter school,
Halperin describes the challenges faced by a group of neighborhood residents who feel
abandoned by the city school system and open their own school in a historic building.
Halperin’s conceptual framework explicitly draws on Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of the

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global borderland, which she defines as a ‘place where many cultures, world and worldy,
come together, and, often, clash’ (p. xvii). Halperin argues that the social and political
relationships that shape the charter school reveal the degree to which such an institution
is a borderland. Struggles over the proposed school facility, the curriculum, and the
appropriate roles of personnel all reveal to her a contested terrain of difference.
Furthermore, she argues that the school itself is a microcosm through which the broader
urban experience can be understood.
Halperin’s story is rich with details about the personalities of the founders and the
students of the school, as she paints a stirring picture of children and families who have
been marginalized by race, class and traditional public schooling. Indeed, some of the
struggles she describes resonated with the challenges faced by residents in an in-town
neighborhood of Atlanta who started a community charter school, which is the basis of
some of my own research.
Halperin organizes Whose School? in a rather unconventional manner, using
‘narratives, stories, poetry, short essays, critical writing’ (p. xxi) in three main parts. In
the first part of the book, Halperin describes the neighborhood’s need for and struggles
over creating the charter school. Her chapters address different moments in the process,
from a detailed description of the founders to conflicts over securing a physical location
for the school. In the second part of her book, titled ‘Deterritorialization’, Halperin
chronicles conflicts over various aspects of the school: its leaders, its curriculum and the
appropriate role of community members in the school. In her last section, titled
‘Reterritorialization’, the author traces the steps that were taken among the school
founders to reclaim the community-based nature of the school, creating new structures to
better integrate local and ‘credentialed’ knowledge to serve East End children. Her book
is not a chronological account of the community efforts; rather, Halperin organizes her
chapters thematically, highlighting ‘favored key issues and moments’ in the school’s
opening and first years (p. 13).
With her insight into the social relationships that cross race and class to form the
neighborhood school, Halperin’s work has the potential to contribute to literature on
social difference, the challenges faced by charter-school and other community activists,
the role of gender in the volunteer sector, and changing political and economic
frameworks that make charter schools desirable institutions in the United States.
Although she doesn’t draw specifically from geographers, much of Halperin’s book
centers on the importance of place-identity, including the struggles over defining (and
respecting) the neighborhood.
In her intriguing story of neighborhood struggle, Halperin vacillates between
researcher and activist. While combining research and activism is a laudable goal and
a move that is increasing among academics, the implications for representing research
(as such) in a book like Whose City? become ever more complex. Indeed, Halperin
describes herself as a ‘founding mother’ of the school (an entirely gendered term she
never problematizes) while at the same time she is one of the few ‘credentialed’
participants in the charter-school process (referred to as ‘Dr. H’ by a community
activist). In her role as ‘founding mother’, she spent considerable time — many hours,
long meetings, middle-of-the-night phone calls — working to develop and maintain
the school, and indeed sections of her narrative turn into detailed descriptions of ‘he
said, she said’ accusations of power-grabbing rather than careful illustrations of
considered ideas. Indeed, she makes much of the fact that East Enders are wary of ‘the
power structure’ — however, she never explicitly describes who or what that might be.
Although she addresses her positionality in the book, the way her descriptions and
analysis unfolds reveals a troubling omniscient voice. For example, she frequently
describes not just the actions but the motivations of charter-school teachers and
administrators with little suggestion of how she formulated such judgments. Much of
her analysis feels like an afterthought with analytical words added (e.g. ‘borderland,’
‘organic intellectuals,’ ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’) rather than a thoughtful argument
that drives the direction of the text.

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The description of the struggles of the school is not strongly embedded in history or
geography. That is, she does not put her case study within a broader framework of
economic, political or demographic events — either within Cincinnati, Ohio, or the
broader US landscape of economic restructuring, education and neighborhood activism.
For example, beyond a brief description, we are not given data about the socio-economic
and demographic characteristics of the East End neighborhood and to what degree
the group of activists she describes is typical of ‘East Enders’. Nor does Halperin
suggest how common the story of the East End Community Charter School might be
in other neighborhoods or cities. Finally, she tries to develop the struggles over the
charter-school as ‘trouble in the borderland’ through processes of ‘deterritorialization’
and ‘reterritorialization’ Such spatial metaphors would have benefited from careful
explanations.
The collage of fieldnotes and descriptions then is rich in personal detail, but uneven
with respect to defining the context of various events, and problematic in its claims about
the social lives and political motivations of characters in the story. Although her goal in
writing a ‘fragmented work’ is to capture the ‘character of the [charter school] project
and the contradictions inherent in city life’ (pp. xxi–xxii), Halperin’s story would have
benefited a lot from deeper analysis and more careful conceptualizations.

Katherine Hankins, Georgia State University

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