bs_bs_banner

Volume 38.2 March 2014 716–30 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12150

BOOK REVIEWS

John Flint and Mike Raco (eds.) 2012: The Future of Sustainable Cities: Critical Reflections.
Bristol: Policy Press.

The political climate for urban policy and planning ideas in the UK took a double hit at
the end of the 2000s. First, the financial crisis stalled public expenditure programmes and
development activity in the private sector. Then a new coalition government was elected
in 2010, pulling the rug from under many of the ideas which had been promoted during
the previous 13 years of Labour dominance. Not surprisingly, this has led to considerable
reflection and reassessment among the academic commentariat who had been
researching and sometimes promoting these various political ideas and policy initiatives.
This book is a contribution to such reflection.
Overarching some of these policy ideas was the concept of ‘sustainable development’
or, as the authors of this book sometimes label it, sustainable planning or sustainable
urbanism. This elastic idea has been lodged in several UK national and local policy
documents, but has always had a wide interpretive potential. During the 2000s, in urban
policy and spatial planning policy it was partly used to promote more environmentally
sustainable practices in the design and location of development, the use of building
materials and attempts to link together areas of public policy to promote less
environmentally damaging habits. The climate change agenda mushroomed over the
decade, adding urgency to this direction. The sustainability idea was also enlarged in an
attempt to create a more integrated approach to shaping urban futures, promoting the
hope that somehow attention to greater environmental care could be combined with the
promotion of economic growth and improved social justice. In both meanings,
redirecting public policy along sustainability lines meant, and means, challenging all
kinds of alternative agendas and entrenched modes of thought and practice. Then and
now, the economic dimension has tended to win out in struggles for priority. And
although ‘sustainable development’ remains a formal objective of the English planning
system, it is promotion of the development side that is currently being prioritized.
Reading this collection of reflective essays, a key theme which emerges is that the notion
of what some authors refer to as ‘sustainability planning’was an intrinsically incoherent and
flawed project, especially as developed in England. For some authors it became merely a
mask, behind which a ‘neoliberal’ agenda of capitalist development facilitated by weak
regulation could proceed. Whitehead argues that ‘sustainable urbanism’ in particular was a
powerful ideology which operated in this way. The editors make use of the idea that a
sustainability ideology acted to dampen down the clash of political argument, encouraging
a ‘post-political’ age. Cochrane shows, however, that under the rhetoric of ‘sustainable
communities’, the English national government pursued a vigorous strategy of challenging
anti-development feeling in southeast England in order to promote housing growth for an
expanding population. The resultant struggle fed the Conservative manifesto for abolishing
regional strategies and encouraging more local policy agendas which was adopted by the
coalition government in the years after 2010 — hardly ‘post-political’!
Yet at the same time, pushed forward by both a policy rhetoric and by regulatory changes,
there have been significant shifts in development practice and in local policy. Dixon shows
that the property development and investment industry has taken on board some of the design
and building implications of carbon reduction and climate change challenges. Pickvance
argues that the construction and energy industries have themselves pushed for more attention

Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Book reviews 717

to changing practices, encouraging national government to put pressure on the

housebuilding industry to respond more actively. Bulkeley and colleagues show how
discourses about urban sustainability have morphed into concepts of low carbon transitions
and promoted innovations in several urban areas. Docherty and Shaw suggest that the
promotion of quality urban public transport has managed to achieve a combination of
environmental gains along with economic benefits, and sometimes social ones too.
However, in a study of how the National Indicator 186 (a measure of local authority
carbon emissions) was negotiated with local authorities, Eadson questions whether it is
sufficient to focus on initiatives in a single local authority area, pursued through one
indicator. Carbon reduction initiatives, he suggests, need to be addressed through
multiple systems as they affect an area. Flint explores the tensions in government policy
and practice between encouraging neighbourhood cohesion to build ‘sustainable
neighbourhoods’ and promoting labour market mobility and gentrification in such
neighbourhoods, which implies considerable out-migration and displacement. And,
bringing experience from another world into play, Dooling provides a rich account of the
tensions that can build up between social justice and environmental objectives in a study
of how homeless people in Austin, Texas were displaced by environmentally justified
park clean-up interventions.
So there is useful review material in this book, but overall the impression is of a diffuse
collection, only loosely held together around a critical review of the promotion of
‘sustainable cities’ in the 2000s and how these ideas may fare into the future. Some chapters
barely touch on the agenda set, the most notable example being Newman’s account of the
promotion of London as a global city. It seems that several narratives evolve through the
book. Newman’s makes an implicit contribution to the discussion of how neoliberal global
capitalist hegemony clashes with the ideology and practice of sustainable urbanism, broadly
understood. Other chapters focus on the evolution of sustainability ideas as expressed in
policy discourses. There is another narrative about the struggles in England between national
policy and local state initiative and experimentation, and also hints that new ways of doing
things are driven by more than just the state. Public opinion and private sector initiative also
makes a difference (somehow, civil society initiative is rarely mentioned in these
reflections). However, as a piece of critical policy analysis, this book lacks its own
coherence. Terms and ‘isms’ fly about, lacking definition. The discussion of how far policy
ideas and ideologies have made a difference to practices lacks analytical edge in several
chapters. And in a book about ‘sustainability planning’, it is odd that so little attention is
given to the planning literature on such issues, in the UK and elsewhere.
Perhaps this book should be read just as a reflection among a group of urban
researchers asked to think generally about what went on in the 2000s, and what might
happen next. Several authors, including the editors, try to look forward with hope — that
the conditions of economic ‘austerity’ and political confusion so evident across the UK
these days may also generate opportunities for new progressive experiments and ideas to
emerge, challenging some of the social injustices, environmental neglects and economic
difficulties that are unfolding before us. Hopefully, the academic community interested
in urban policy and planning ideas will contribute with well-crafted research studies of
this evolving reality.

Patsy Healey, Newcastle University

Colin McFarlane and Michael Waibel (eds.) 2012: Urban Informalities: Reflections on the
Formal and Informal. London: Ashgate.

Providing vivid and colourful insight, this volume of interdisciplinary research on the
ambiguous realities of urban informality discusses and questions the very notion of the
formal–informal divide. Empirical research on everyday urban realities, from selling

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
718 Book reviews

food, renting shops and land subdivision to housing, reveals diverse forms of social
organization and interaction with deeply entangled arrangements of formality and
informality in contemporary cities across the global South.
In the introductory chapter, Colin McFarlane and Michael Waibel take Ananya Roy’s
and Nezar AlSayyad’s understanding of ‘urban informality as a mode of urbanization
and a set of negotiable practices’ (p. 9) as a conceptual frame for the volume that the
subsequent nine essays depart from and critically reflect upon. The editors identify four
main perspectives on the formal–informal discussed in the empirical case studies:
(in-)formality as spatial categorization, organizational form, governmental tool and
negotiable value. This implies a diverse and profound analysis of urban informality as an
undeniable reality of the city as an entity. Rather than locating informality at the
geographical and socioeconomic margins of the city and treating it as deviation from the
norm, the power relations and inequalities inherent in the legal and social categorization
and labelling of the formal–informal in the city must be explored. The case studies fulfil
the ‘task . . . to track the different ways in which informality and formality are put to
work as resource, disposition, practice, or classification in the production of urban
inequalities, and in processes that contest and exceed these forms of production’ (p. 7) to
different degrees. The analyses are the richest when combining ethnographic material
with detailed insights into the historical and cultural backgrounds of urban informality in
their particular settings.
Exploring the housing sector in the new South Africa, Astrid Ley finds that
‘governance spaces can be created by bureaucratic state institutions as much as by
organized urban poor groups’ (p. 23). She sees an increasing relevance of informal
mechanisms founded in the dysfunctionality of the state’s steering capacity. Not only
does the housing sector become informal, but so do its steering logics. As self-created
organizations and institutions like the Federation of the Urban Poor seek to gain strategic
influence outside the formal–dysfunctional routes by establishing personal social ties
with various levels of government, one might see a ‘convergence towards the informal’,
(p. 17) in informal–formal arrangements rather than their formalization, but it does not
become clear how such ‘clientilism from below’ would lead to more transparency and
why formal institutions would collaborate without following their own monetary and
political interests.
Neslihan Demirtas-Milz shows how governmental cooperation with the informal
social organization of an Ankara gecekondu turns informal community structures into an
instrument of exclusion and deprivation. Identity-based clientilism of the Turkish state,
building upon sect and origin, constructed and reified differences between neighbours,
founding inequalities and conflict between rightist/Islamic Sunni and leftist/Kurdish
Alevi settlers. The latter find themselves placed outside the informal networks of social
trust, mutual support and solidarity of the gecekondu. Where access to resources is
controlled by informal leaders who distribute them according to sect and origin,
informality no longer provides a ‘survival package’ or ‘resistance capacity’ for the urban
poor.
To understand the ‘informal moral economies’ detected by Ajay Gandhi in Old
Delhi’s Meena Bazaar, one first has to understand how pre-colonial authorities were
integrated in the political order of colonial power and persist in ‘modern’ nation states.
As with the sectarian leaders in Ankara, ‘big men’ of economic, political or religious
importance have now become ‘informal brokers of recourses within neighbourhoods’
(p. 58). According to Gandhi the (illegal) use of place by squatters and hawkers is
negotiated by these informal brokers with formal authorities in exchange for votes,
revealing the ‘negotiability of state disciplinary techniques . . . and the patchwork of
urban governance in contemporary India’ (p. 52). This enables urbanites living on the
wrong side of the law to ‘negotiate “paralegal” processes that bend formal bureaucratic
doctrine’ (p. 61). The ‘informal moral economies’ are then only based on the general
agreement of a smooth and constant circulation of money and goods, independent of the
categories of formality–informality.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews 719

Pushpa Arabindoo examines the hygiene and health discourse among restaurant
owners of India’s new middle class, who seek to expel informal food sellers from
Chennai’s New Beach to protect their own businesses. Although their food is no more
hygienic, nor do they produce less rubbish or interact on a more formal level,
middle-class entrepreneurs employ ‘an aesthetics discourse emphasizing the visual to
create a new urban imaginary that condemns the informality of the poor’ (p. 74). The
‘elite environmentalism’ and ‘agenda of beautification’ against the ‘dirt and disorder’ of
informal street vendors is supported by the media and political campaigns (p. 73). At the
heart of the conflict lies a different notion of public space as common space open for
‘bazaar-like’ practices of pre-colonial times, which has actually never changed. Thus the
middle class now reclaims a ‘bourgeois city from the informal sector’ (p. 85), drawing
upon the illegitimacy of informal practices.
The notion of public space and arbitrary legal interventions to ban the disordered
‘pavement economies’ from Hanoi’s streets are discussed by Sandra Kurfürst. She sees
the ‘informalization of certain economic activities’ as ‘a policy applied by the party-state
to impose its vision of modernity’ (p. 89). In her analysis she shows how ‘the label of
informality is made use of by the political élite in order to abandon societal groups that
do not withstand the élite’s idea of modernity, and their practices, from the urban
landscape’ (p. 90). Despite being a historical constant of Hanoi’s streets, street peddling
was declared illegal in some districts and on some streets at certain times, and street
vendors face unclear and shifting legal realities. In the ‘legislative jungle, citizens need
to make use of social capital to receive informal usage permissions from local
authorities’ (p. 98). Here, Kurfürst shows how rural migrants are additionally
disadvantaged by an informal system relying on social and spatial proximity which they
fall short of.
Markus Keck takes on the task of studying informality as an issue for wealthy food
wholesalers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Though holding a legal status, a close look at their
business practices makes it nearly impossible to categorize the entire sector as formal or
informal. Moreover, political elites use ‘public space as one of the most important means
to buy votes’ while ‘Dhaka’s public markets are widely controlled by “back stage” actors
who use their broker position in between the state and the wholesalers to skim off space
rents’ (p. 125f). Facing the danger of eviction of markets from public land, executed
under the excuse of fighting illegal expansion and corruption, food wholesalers rely on
informal arrangements with brokers that offer a temporal ‘borrowed’ security. Here,
‘informal politics and the formal state are . . . two sides of the same coin’ (p. 126).
In their ethnographic work in the favelas of Recife where gangs have established
violence as a form of social organization, Rita de Cácia Oenning da Silva and Kurt Shaw
explore the power of hip-hop as another aesthetic form of sociality. Both gang violence
and hip-hop follow highly formalized rules, though being informal forms of sociality
‘the rules that regulate the way that people and groups relate to each other’ (p. 136) are
difficult or even impossible to break. For da Silva and Shaw, informality becomes ‘the
right to suspend rules — to declare a state of exception to the accepted forms of power’
(p. 144). According to them, the aesthetic sociality of hip-hop provides an empowering
bottom-up way for artists to escape gang violence and state clientelism that traditionally
structure power relations in the favela.
The volume closes with two more conceptualizing chapters. Volker Kreibich analyses
urban land management in various settings and discusses the production of informality
by legal deregulation, political exclusion, state fragility and anarchy. Whereas
deregulation and exclusion are exercised by powerful states, fragility and anarchy
become producers of informality in the weak states of the least developed countries,
facing uncontrolled rapid urban growth while lacking statutory institutions. Kreibich
sees ‘intricate relationships between deregulation, social regulation and private control of
the dynamics of urban growth in poverty [that] seem to blur the boundary lines between
the formal and informal’ (p. 162). Besides showing the power of social regulation and
regularization in informal settlements which are intertwined with formal regulations, he

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
720 Book reviews

surprisingly calls for state intervention, when densification becomes excessive and
informal settlements become slums. Here the reader wonders how a fragile or absent
state might suddenly interfere in an informally grown entity.
The closing chapter by Uwe Altrock provides a conceptualization of ‘hybrid
formal–informal arrangements’ (p. 171) based on institution theory which is somehow
disconnected from the empirical work presented in this volume. He distinguishes
between complementary informality (organizing social interaction within formal
institutions where regulation is missing) and supplementary informality (as informal
institutions where formal ones are either inexistent or not effective). His thoughts on
‘informality as a mode of urban life that is selectively made use of by an urban
population in certain situations where formal institutions are weak and where informal
arrangements allow coming to terms more easily’ (p. 180) seem to cut out the notion of
informality as an intended consequence of state policy.
A careful conceptualization of (state) power and interests in respect of
(in-)formalization processes and referring to the empirical research would have
completed this volume. The contributions show that it is questionable whether any state
anywhere in the world has the power and will to fully implement its formal policies.
Furthermore, the absence of formal state power might just have similar effects as the
intended deregulation and exclusion exercised by ‘powerful’ states, ranging from
political exclusion of particular groups to the production of a cheap reserve army.
Another topic that emerges from the empirical research without being further
conceptualized or discussed comprehensively is the notion and negotiation of public
space. Here European ideologies of cleanliness and order clash with the realities of
historically evolved common spaces negotiated between (in-)formal business, informal
brokers and political interests from modernization to vote buying. However, the richness
of this book lies in its drawing together of an international group of researchers from a
variety of disciplines working on quite distinct notions of urban (in-)formalities in
Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. Their work shows that an overly general
conceptualization of the formal–informal would obscure the specific realities deriving
from informality as a ‘mode of urbanization’ and ‘set of negotiable practices’. Instead,
this volume inspires us to further research urban informality in relation to the specific
geographical, political, historical and social realities of the city, emphasizing questions
of power and inequality.

Mirjam Lewek, Humboldt-University Berlin

George Galster 2012: Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Before Detroit developed a reputation for dereliction, it was known for its ‘Motown’
sound and such rhythm-and-blues performers as Aretha Franklin. One of Aretha’s
biggest hits was ‘Respect’, a song in which she told her man that unless she received it,
‘you might walk in and find out I’m gone’. George Galster, Clarence Hilberry professor
of urban studies at Wayne State University, argues that lack of respect is what brought
this city to its present state of abandonment, racial isolation, fiscal bankruptcy,
widespread poverty and high levels of unemployment. Detroit, he claims, ‘is a place that
fundamentally and perpetually disrespects its citizens’ (p. 267, original emphasis).
His argument rests on an expansive definition of respect: people are respected when
they receive sufficient amounts of physical, social and psychological resources. Absent
food and shelter, love and status, and identity and esteem, they exist in a condition of
disrespect. Consequently, what is most important for the city’s fate is how these
resources have been distributed. Competition between capital and labor and between
blacks and whites, however, has prevented Detroiters from receiving equitable shares.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews 721

Conflict in the factories around wages, working conditions, unionization and race, and in
housing markets around racial mixing and property values created a polarized and highly
segregated metropolis. A few families — the owners and managers of automotive giants
like Ford and General Motors — became rich. Unionized labor did well for a time, but
blacks, particularly those who could not secure unionized jobs with the automotive
companies or their suppliers, fared poorly. As for residence, low-income black
households have been concentrated in the city proper while white and more affluent
households live in the suburbs. These conflicts also extended into local politics and by the
time that blacks gained control of the government, the city’s economic base was
shrinking rather than expanding.
Lacking respect, Detroiters developed coping mechanisms that further hampered their
ability to compete. They embraced a fealty to hierarchy, adopted an oppositional identity
that resisted attempts by whites or suburbanites to provide assistance, became intolerant
of people unlike themselves and engaged in racial scapegoating. Collectively, they
adapted by denying the depths of their problems and, myopically, by sacrificing future
benefits for control over diminishing resources. Galster writes that ‘Greater Detroit is a
blinding example of collective irrationality at a metropolitan scale’ (p. 275).
Driving Detroit documents the competitive struggles that produced this irrationality
with a capsule history of the rise and fall of this once-great industrial powerhouse.
Drawing on secondary sources, Galster introduces us to the physical form of
metropolitan Detroit, reviews its fraught labor history and the dynamics of racial
residential segregation, and describes its current state of abandonment, neglect and fiscal
collapse. Disinclined to write another standard urban studies’ history of a city, Galster
frequently interrupts the descriptive material with poetry, music lyrics and family stories.
He also personalizes the text with wry and often irreverent comments. And because the
editor of the series in which this book appears wanted to reach a general audience, there
are no textual citations and only a ‘selected’ rather than robust list of references. I found
the authorial asides and poetry often distracting, while the inability to trace many factual
assertions to their sources was disconcerting.
Overall, the book is a substantive introduction to the political-economy history of
Detroit. That said, I was less attracted to the psychological reductionism which
characterizes Galster’s argument. In fact, his definition of respect runs counter to that of
most scholars who focus on recognition by others rather than resource distributions.
Injustice, or better, inequality, seems more appropriate for the latter. And while Galster
believes that Detroit is ‘the cutting edge of what will happen across America’ (p. 6), its
conflicts and conditions are no different from those in many older industrial cities in the
United States and many newer service-based cities as well (this is where comparative
analysis is helpful). As to whether Detroit’s fate will be that of the country’s other cities,
I am skeptical. Lastly, Galster rightly points out that one cannot understand the city of
Detroit absent an understanding of its relations with its surrounding suburbs. However,
striking a balance in the text is a task which has defeated most who have tried, although
American Babylon, Robert Self’s (2003) study of racial conflict and inequality in
postwar Oakland, California, is an exception.
By inserting cultural commentary, Galster conveys a sense of how Detroit is
experienced by its residents. This, and the political-economic history, are the book’s
strengths and are not to be lightly dismissed. He deserves further praise for putting forth
a bold argument. The current fascination with Detroit is haunted by the need to know
what actually happened. George Galster has proposed one possible explanation. More
importantly, he has attempted to give a sense of what it is like to live with the
consequences of disrespect.

Robert Beauregard, Columbia University

Self, R. (2003) American Babylon. Princeton

University Press, Princeton, NJ.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
722 Book reviews

Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon 2011: Florida’s Snowbirds: Spectacle, Mobility, and Community

since 1945. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Florida’s Snowbirds, written by Canadian historian Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon, offers

a rich account of tourism in twentieth-century Florida with a particular focus on
‘snowbirds’— seasonal migrants predominantly comprising seniors from the northern
US and Canada who spend all or part of their winters in the warm Sunbelt states,
especially in Florida. In ten chapters, the book first reconstructs how Florida was
established as a tourist and retirement destination in the early and mid-1900s. Next, it
describes Florida’s virtually uncurbed growth and resulting adverse effects on its natural
beauty, as well as more recent efforts aimed at environmental preservation. Most
prominently, the book provides a window into the peculiar history, demographics and
culture of snowbird communities in Florida, including a case study of French Canadian
migrants (‘Floribec’).
Florida’s Snowbirds is based entirely on secondary research, drawing on archival
documents, some US census data and studies conducted by social scientists. This
is relatively unproblematic for the early chapters dealing with the rise of tourism
and snowbird culture in Florida, yet the sketchy record in recent years calls for more
original research of all kinds on the topic, a gap highlighted (but not closed) by
Desrosiers-Lauzon’s book. This lack of new data, combined with almost no information
beyond the year 2000, is likely to leave sociological readers somewhat disappointed. For
instance, we do not learn how the Florida home insurance crisis of 2004, or the US
foreclosure and economic crises of 2008, have affected snowbirding, tourism and
migration more recently, even though the subtitle promises coverage ‘since 1945’.
Desrosiers-Lauzon managed to get few live glimpses into the world of snowbirds, and
members of this community are thus rarely seen up close or heard from in person in the
book, aside from a few anecdotes gleaned from news articles. Broad statements
dominate, for example: ‘[T]he snowbird lifestyle has fostered a keen awareness of
environmental issues, as snowbirds and retirement migrants, having chosen Florida for
its natural assets, have mobilized against those assets’ subsequent degradation. They
have, as a result, become integrated into the larger community of environmentalists’
(p. 243). While this sounds surprising yet certainly not impossible, I wondered how the
author arrived at these and other conclusions about the thoughts and feelings of
snowbirds without actually having gotten close to them. There is virtually no information
on research methods or data analysis, and the fact that references are hidden in the
endnotes (making up a quarter of the book) makes it tedious for readers to find or verify
source information. Further, while historians may be comfortable asserting how things
really ‘were’ or ‘are’, such accounts do not sit so well with sociologists who typically
prefer more contextualized statements, emphasizing the processes through which reality
is constructed and represented by people living under specific social and political
conditions.
The most rewarding sections of the book (chapters 2 to 4) retell the outrageous history
of Florida’s development and its struggle over environmental protection. These chapters
are captivating and developed from a rich factual base — this is history at its best. The
book also does a fine job of communicating the immense size of the snowbird economy
and its cultural impact on Florida locales, as well as on ‘sending’ communities up north,
something Desrosiers-Lauzon investigates in a well-conceived final chapter. Illustrating
the conflict potential that snowbirds bring to Florida, the analysis of popular bumper
stickers from the 1980s (e.g. ‘If everything was better up north, why don’t you go back?’)
is one of the book’s highlights.
I agree with the author that Canadians make for an interesting case study because they
work hard at retaining their national, cold-resistant, identity while embracing southern
comforts, resulting in dual expressions of both difference and belonging. It is also
interesting to learn about the identity and community work of French Canadian
snowbirds who seek to further distinguish themselves in a sea of Anglo culture.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews 723

Desrosiers-Lauzon shows that, in these respects, Canadians differ from US citizens who
more easily reconcile northern regional pride with being and buying ‘American’
elsewhere in their country. Despite these differences, the overall homogeneity of
snowbirds regarding race and family structures, and their largely conservative values,
even across various income groups, might have deserved a bit more attention. Florida is
home to various population flows, linking white working- and middle-class tourists with
(largely) poor ethnic migrants in interesting ways — as the former increase demand for
domestic and other service work provided by the latter. Including a discussion of those
‘other’ seasonal migrations might have provided an even more complete picture of the
snowbird phenomenon.
One of the book’s weaknesses for readers of this particular journal is its somewhat
pedestrian theoretical framing, based on readings of the community literature that have
largely been overcome. We hear about Putman’s lost community, Oldenburg’s third
places, even Weber and Durkheim, yet these conceptual tools are removed from
contemporary, and often critical, discourse regarding communities in postmodern and
global societies within urban sociology. Again, Desrosiers-Lauzon draws on existing
ideas and materials yet does offer new impulses that will help advance community
scholarship in general.
In conclusion, while the book offers plenty of insights to scholars interested in
tourism, seasonal migration, urban development and housing, it falls short in areas that
typically matter to urban and community sociologists, such as original data analysis,
conceptual development and examining contemporary social life. Nonetheless, there is
little doubt that Florida’s Snowbirds is cutting-edge history and I strongly believe that
sociologists have much to learn from historians, given the generally rather scant
historical depth of community research. My comments make me wonder how sociology
books are reviewed in history journals. It seems that a combined sociological and
historical approach would be the ideal for any community study, yet there are
disciplinary conventions and preferences, both in research and writing, that will not be
easily reconciled in the future.

Margarethe Kusenbach, University of South Florida

Javier Auyero 2012: Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press.

I am sure you will have had at least one frustrating experience waiting in line at a
government office. We all have. This intriguing book by Javier Auyero is fascinating
because it explores such seemingly banal yet frustrating experiences. It does so, however,
with people who do not have the level of resources (financial or professional) that most
readers of this book review enjoy. Auyero and his team spent hours waiting in the
immigration and welfare offices of Buenos Aires with immigrants and the poor. To
investigate waiting is something he had not planned. It came out of his previous empirical
work on political domination. In the last chapter of the book, he revisits a community
where he had previously conducted fieldwork with the explicit aim of better
understanding the politics of waiting.
Waiting, Auyero argues very convincingly, is a temporal process through which
political subordination in reproduced. Rich with ethnographic material, the book
sketches a ‘tempography of domination’, i.e. ‘a thick description of how the dominated
perceive temporality and waiting, how they act or fail to act on these perceptions, and
how these perceptions and these (in)actions serve to challenge or perpetuate their
domination’ (p. 4). This tempography of the poor’s encounters with agents of the state
(street-level bureaucrats) illustrates how concrete state practices serve to transform the
poor into passive ‘patients of the state’. Much influenced by the work of Bourdieu and

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
724 Book reviews

Wacquant, Auyero argues that in their frustrating encounters with the state, the poor learn
to become submissive through mechanisms such as veiling (hiding the real causes of
delays), confusion (deliberately creating confusion about documents needed, office
hours, etc.) and alternate delaying and rushing (enhancing unpredictability and
uncertainty). The ethnographic work presented in the book convincingly highlights the
‘daily labor of normalizing waiting’ (p. 19).
In chapter 1, Auyero offers a literature review on political subordination and time,
beginning with Bourdieu’s research on gift exchanges. But he quickly moves to the very
few studies specifically dedicated to waiting. Given the paucity of social-scientific
examination of waiting, Auyero explores the fictional work of Samuel Beckett and Franz
Kafka, where the practice of waiting is carefully examined. He returns to these examples
in his analysis of subsequent ethnographic work.
Chapter 2 depicts a portrait of poverty and violence under neoliberalism in Argentina,
the backdrop for the ethnographic vignettes that follow. One of Auyero’s strengths is to
be able to speak of such macro processes using the voice of the people interviewed. I
particularly appreciated the vignettes, sometimes telling the story of one particular
individual, sometimes a composite example created from various stories heard in the
field. The chapter ends with a very useful categorization of state violence through visible
fists, clandestine kicks and invisible tentacles. Dominating the poor by imposing
uncertainty and arbitrariness in waiting is part of what he calls the ‘invisible tentacles of
the State’.
Chapter 3 brings us to the waiting lines of RENAPER (the immigration office), while
chapter 4 is devoted to the welfare office. The vignettes about specific individuals,
interview and fieldnote excerpts make the chapters a captivating read. The reader can feel
the frustration and desperation. Chapter 5 revisits Flammable, a highly polluted
shantytown. Here, we leave the line and waiting room to enter another temporal scale,
that of decades. Residents await court judgements on relocation and health complaints
related to polluting firms.
In a short conclusion, the book ends by synthesizing the argument and discussing the
practices of subordination and waiting in light of a recent revival of the idea of a ‘culture
of poverty’. Temporal experience, Auyero argues, is clearly part of poor people’s
‘culture’. Yet, it is important not to essentialize this ‘culture’ of subordination and to
highlight how it is a political construct: an ‘artifact of both state manipulation and
neoliberal policy’ (p. 155, original emphasis). In line with Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s
structuralist analysis, Auyero attempts to highlight the workings of domination whereby
manipulating poor people’s time is seen as a governing technique.
Auyero specifies that such domination ‘is not the result of a master plan, nor can it be
attributed to actors behaving in a more or less efficient manner or in typical terms of a
means to an end’ (p. 61). However, I would have liked to know a little more about the
street-level bureaucrats he observed in the field. How do they perceive themselves? Do
they see themselves as agents of the state, as some sort of gatekeepers preserving state
power (defending the state against welfare ‘frauds’ or too many immigrants)? They may
not deliberately orchestrate such manipulation, but they do exercise arbitrary power.
Given that these are supposed to be socially benevolent arms of the state, what is the role
of empathy and social vocation in their daily interactions with the poor? While the
ethnographic material presenting the experience of the poor is extremely rich, it was a
little disappointing to have nothing about the experience of state agents in these
interactions. Why did these employees end up on the frontline? It is often the case that
being there is a form of ‘disqualification’ (for employees not performing well or for
employees with few qualifications). Is this the case in Argentina? Did these employees
feel frustration as well? The gendered aspect of these interactions is briefly discussed, but
it would have been interesting to develop it a little, not only with regard to the waiting
population but also in terms of the employees.
Similarly, a more complete picture could have been provided with a little more
information on important mediating agents in these street-level bureaucrat/poor people

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews 725

interactions. In chapter 4, Auyero explains how local leaders control welfare registries.
Who are these leaders? How did they become leaders? Do they act as buffers against
waiting and frustration?
Of course, not everything can be included in any book, particularly one with so many
rich ethnographic excerpts. But in order to give more strength to the structuralist
argument developed, a little more from other types of actors entangled in this system of
domination would have made the book more complete. That being said, it is an excellent
book, not only for shedding light on a topic too often ignored, but also because it is
grounded in rigorous fieldwork. Auyero is a careful ethnographer and this book is
essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the workings of domination and
poor people’s experience. The next time you hear the words ‘sit down and wait’, think of
Milagros, Serena or Monica who waited countless hours before receiving their benefits
or national ID card . . .

Julie-Anne Boudreau, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montreal

Earthea Nance 2012: Engineers and Communities: Transforming Sanitation in Contemporary

Brazil. Lanham: Lexington Books.

This book describes the creation of an alternative technology for sewage collection, first
developed in Brazil in the early 1980s. Its main contribution is to present this experience
to a foreign readership, not only because of the specific qualities of the technology
concerned, but also because the World Bank has been intensively advertising and
promoting this technique over the last few decades.
The technology in question, called esgoto condominial or ‘condominial sewage’
locally and ‘participatory sanitation’ by the author, was developed in the 1980s by a
group of reformist engineers as a solution to the provision of sewage services in two
favelas — Rocas and Santos Reis — in Natal, capital of the northeastern Brazilian state
of Rio Grande do Norte. Some of the engineers who worked as entrepreneurs on these
projects later introduced the technique in the neighboring state of Pernambuco (chiefly in
its capital, Recife). This technical solution was disseminated within the national
technical community by its proponents, and later internationally, mainly by the World
Bank. Its promotion by the latter led to pilot projects in other Brazilian cities, and in
urban areas of other countries, like El Alto in Bolivia. It would be interesting to learn
more about the political associations between the local entrepreneurs and these
international institutions, which explains its adoption as a model, something not explored
by the author.
In technical terms, the esgoto condominial solution treats each block similarly to
buildings or horizontal condominiums, where the connection of the houses or apartments
to the public network is preceded by a local (and private) network. In the condominial
system, secondary networks also exist inside the blocks, collecting sewage from the
houses. These sewers are then connected to the public system at the lowest point of the
block. In conventional sewers, the pipes are located in the middle of the street and each
house discharges waste directly into these pipes. But the lowest level of each block may
be inside the individual plots, which makes conventional techniques expensive due to the
depth that has to be reached to connect all the plots. The condominial network, by
contrast, can connect the backyards of each of the houses, reducing the size of the system
required and making the overall network shallower, also lowering costs. Depending on
the physical situation, sewers may also be constructed under the sidewalks. The main
community resistance to this technological solution (or its disadvantage, according to
some) is that maintenance of the condominial sections is left to the inhabitants.
Depending on the agreement reached between the community and service provider, the
costs of the condominial sewer are also paid for by the inhabitants, although usually

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
726 Book reviews

those opting for the condominial system pay a lower tariff. The process therefore
involves intense discussions between provider and community, and depends on some
kind of participatory strategy and community organization.
Another factor associated with implementation of this technology is that in the poor
urban areas of northeastern Brazil, where the technique was originally developed, houses
are typically built at the front of the plot, while the kitchens and especially bathrooms are
usually built in the backyard, sometimes quite far from the main house. Hence the
construction of the sewer connecting the backyards was an excellent technical solution in
its original context, allowing the pipes to follow the line of minimum distance between
the bathrooms. A conventional solution, moreover, would have ruined the pavements of
almost all the houses.
This technique therefore had a positive impact on the communities where it was first
introduced, and it still influences how sewage services are implemented in poor areas of
northeastern Brazil. Earthea Nance’s book reports the experience carefully, especially in
relation to the actors involved. The detailed account of how the initial experiences were
disseminated and their comparison are interesting, and will serve as references for the
international public. This is certainly the most important contribution of Nance’s work.
Indeed the book is at its best in chapters 3 to 5, devoted to a description of these cases.
Conversely, the book’s main problem is its overestimation of the importance and
dissemination of this new technical solution. This probably stems from an uncritical
acceptance of the discourses of the actors involved in the project, notwithstanding the
author’s discussion of ‘participatory myths’ in the final chapter. In fact, after finishing the
book, the reader is left with an ambiguous impression. While the opening chapters
present the technique as the solution that enabled an improvement in the living
conditions of Brazil’s urban poor (as suggested in the optimistic title), the tone of the
final chapters is more nuanced or critical. The book asserts several times that the esgoto
condominial system turned into a hegemonic model, dispersed across the entire country
through a pervasive network of reformist engineers. This is simply not true. The studied
cases of Natal and Recife are precisely those that were discussed intensively at local level
and where the experience flourished, advanced by a relatively small group of reformist
engineers. In other regions, though, it has simply added to a range of non-conventional
techniques used in accordance with local conditions. The author agrees with the need for
deeper technical evaluations of the existing systems — all the available evaluation
reports came from the World Bank, one of the main disseminators of the idea. But Nance
makes no mention of the several failed attempts to implement this technique, already
discussed in local debates, such as the attempted implementation in Baixada Fluminense,
Rio de Janeiro, at the end of the 1980s. In fact, the existing local studies suggest that the
technology’s success depends largely on specific physical and organizational conditions.
Nowadays the solution is combined with several other techniques within the broader and
more important field of slum upgrading policies.
It must be emphasized that various policies implemented over the last 20 years, not
just esgoto condominial, have been responsible for substantially altering the delivery of
services to Brazil’s poor urban areas. A deeper reading of the Brazilian literature on
public policies would have demonstrated this eloquently. Indeed, the same problem
appears in relation to several other themes discussed in the book: participation (a major
theme), policy reform (another major issue), clientelism and party politics. The local
literature has developed rich debates around each of these issues, all completely
disregarded in the review of the Brazilian situation in the first chapter. Consequently the
book makes several equivocations, such as confusing the sanitary movement linked to
health reform in Brazil with the movement for sanitation reform, which focused on
implementing water, drainage, sewerage and garbage collection services with other
actors, institutions and strategies. Another important example is the role of municipalities
following the decline of the federal policies introduced by the military dictatorship: this
is treated by the book as a trend towards decentralization, when in fact what happened
was a reconstruction of federalism with concomitant tendencies towards centralization

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews 727

and decentralization, depending on policy design and cycle. Finally, it is also worth
remarking that the book says nothing about the last decade, a period marked by intense
changes in public policies and social and urban situations, especially after the creation of
a dedicated Ministry of Cities in 2003. As a result, the book provides a rather superficial
view of the more general processes that have framed and included the supposed
dissemination of esgoto condominial since the country’s return to democracy.

Eduardo Marques, University of São Paulo

Jane Zavisca 2012: Housing the New Russia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Jane Zavisca’s Housing the New Russia contributes to the growing literature on the
transformation of post-Soviet urban areas since the demise of state socialism by
providing an up-to-date, detailed and methodologically robust account of the
development of the housing sector in Russia since the mass privatizations of the early
1990s. Zavisca’s work is based on detailed ethnographic fieldwork in the mid-sized city
of Kaluga, informed by bivariate and multivariate analyses of survey material.
Broadly speaking, the book covers three interrelated central themes: (1) the
experience of transplanting the mortgage-based American housing model into Russia;
(2) the nexus between Russia’s ongoing fertility crisis and its population’s housing
conditions; and (3) the meaning of housing and homeownership. In addition, the book
provides a detailed introduction to the housing situation at the end of the Soviet period
which is of considerable value in its own right. Zavisca argues that the Russian case helps
us gain a deeper understanding of issues that are frequently taken for granted in the West,
and particularly in the United States. Importantly, it allows us to critically re-evaluate the
meaning of ownership under mortgage, which has long been a cornerstone of housing
policy in Western Europe and North America.
Zavisca argues that the introduction of the American housing model in Russia has
been a failure as a result of a series of misjudgments embedded in the Washington
consensus. These misjudgments surfaced both in relation to the supply side and — as this
book innovatively shows — on the demand side. In short, few were able to afford taking
out a mortgage and few were interested. Moreover, the mortgage market would also seem
to have little prospect of succeeding in the future, despite the Putin administration’s
attempts at marrying demographic policy to housing policy by introducing the so-called
‘maternity capital’, a one-off US $10,000-equivalent bonus awarded to all second-time
mothers (under certain conditions, e.g. that the money goes towards a mortgage). The
reason for the mortgage market’s failure to take off lies in the specifics of the Russian
context, where the population has a deeply rooted perception that housing should be
allocated for free, as was the case during the Soviet years. One of the author’s main
arguments is that the Soviet Union succeeded in creating a credible promise, according
to which a few years of good work would ultimately be rewarded with a privately
occupied apartment, and that this promise constituted the benchmark of ‘normalcy’
against which today’s precarious housing situation is measured. With the fall of Soviet
power, low real incomes meant that good work was (and remains) an insufficient
condition to achieve success in the nascent housing market. In fact, as Zavisca
convincingly suggests, while being a nation of homeowners because of the 1990s’
giveaway privatization, Russia does not really have a housing market in the Western
sense because of the lack of liquidity in the system. In particular, the younger generations
who are not old enough to have received a (subsequently privatized) apartment during the
Soviet years are largely excluded from the market. Because of this, they are highly
dependent on the goodwill (or death) of their parents and relatives. Alternatively, they
may look for possibilities in the private rental sector or perhaps in the mortgage market.
Neither of these options is particularly cherished by typical Russian home-seekers:

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
728 Book reviews

renting leaves you in the hands of erratic landlords, while mortgage-taking is perceived
as little short of entering into a master–slave relationship.
What I found particularly interesting in this book is the revealed connection between
today’s housing expectations and the Soviet promise of normalcy in the form of a private
apartment for each nuclear family. The young adult generation (which is the book’s
target segment) sees that the current neoliberal housing model in Russia is unable to cater
to its needs, while their parents were given individual apartments at no cost. Because of
this, the majority are of the opinion that the government should at least do more to
regulate the housing market, and many believe that housing should be given for free by
the state. However, as the first chapter in this book shows, Soviet ‘normalcy’ was tucked
into an unfulfilled promise: by the end of the Soviet period, there were still many who
lived in communal apartments and other substandard housing arrangements. After almost
20 years of post-Soviet transition, the housing situation in Russia had neither changed for
the better nor for the worse (chapter 4). Also, 20 years of neoliberal housing policy did
not significantly influence the public understanding of homeownership, not least because
the distinction between non-privatized dwellings (which may be privatized at any time
anyway) and privatized dwellings remains blurred.
Does this book succeed in theorizing beyond the boundaries of Putin’s empire? Both
yes and no. While Zavisca does show that the meaning of homeownership in the United
States is obfuscated by an entrenched discourse of mortgage market normality, I am not
persuaded that the Russian experience specifically helps us learn more about the United
States. The Russian mortgage market’s failure to take off, Zavisca notes, is at least in part
a result of low demand, which in turn stems from the negative connotations (and to some
extent misunderstandings) associated with it, as well as with the view that mortgages are
long-term commitments that have to be made within a chronically unstable context. The
United States context is completely different and would be more suitably compared to
the situation in other (e.g. Western European) countries, where mortgage markets have
been able to ripen for a longer period. A more fruitful comparison would have been with
the Baltic states, where the mortgage market appeared to have made a stable entry by the
mid-2000s, and where the consumers did not seem to share the same doubts (until the
2008 real estate crisis) as their Russian counterparts, despite their shared experience of
‘free’ Soviet apartment distribution. Having said that, the author’s desire to hook together
the American and Russian experiences is admirable, albeit unnecessary. For my part, I
see this book as a milestone in the state of the art on housing inequalities, housing policy
and housing theory in and about the post-Soviet realm. As such, it is highly
recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the geography and sociology of
urban change in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Michael Gentile, University of Helsinki

Stephen J. Collier 2011: Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stephen Collier poses a timely and sophisticated intervention into urban studies and the
burgeoning literature on neoliberalism, empirically, analytically and methodologically.
Empirically, those concerned with Russia’s economic transitions will benefit from
Collier’s book, particularly his historical updating of the orthodox narrative that
accentuates the much maligned rounds of neoliberal ‘shock therapy’. This was ‘both
contingent and temporally circumscribed’ (p. 2), and certainly does not constitute the
entire horizon of post-Soviet political economy. The book develops an ANT-inspired
analytical approach that delineates the socio-technical assemblages constituting cities
and their urban subjects. Collier has been a strong advocate of this form of analysis, and
here the author applies this approach with remarkable results. Borrowing from Karl

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews 729

Polanyi, the author focuses on the substantive economy of Russia, the institutionalized
materially constituted components of socioeconomic life that provision the population
— pipes, appliances and houses, resource flows, budgetary mechanisms, bureaucratic
routines, etc. — and how they normalize everyday behaviour. The book also contributes
considerably to ongoing debates within Foucauldian studies, refining analytically and
fleshing out empirically the nebulous concept of biopolitics, as ‘the attempt to govern a
population’s health, welfare, and conditions of existence in the framework of political
sovereignty’ (p. 3).
In this regard the book is also heretical, and refreshingly so, in calling for the
‘reconstruction’ (p. 12) of neoliberalism as a field of study, whilst demonstrating the
methodological efficacy of Foucault’s genealogical toolbox for achieving this.
According to what Collier refers to as the ‘critical conventional wisdom’ (p. 9), the
rolling back of state regulation and the subsequent introduction of unfettered market
forces is a prerequisite of neoliberalism. However, drawing on Foucault’s late-1970s
lecture series, Collier stresses that neoliberalism is in fact internal not external to
statecraft; it is a reflexive variegated style of governmental reasoning as opposed to being
a coordinated class project orchestrated from outside. The author accuses critics such as
David Harvey and Naomi Klein of failing to trace the concrete connections between
neoliberal doctrine and its application in local settings. Consequently, he argues,
neoliberalism can appear to be everywhere and anywhere, a pernicious and pervasive
presence behind every crack in the empirical curtain and creak on the floorboards of
fieldwork. In contrast, Collier trains his anthropological eye for the elemental on its local
capillary manifestations.
In chapters 1 and 2, Collier argues that the biopolitical incentive of the Soviet regime
was to rapidly industrialize, as the tsar had effectively blocked capitalist urbanization in
order to maintain aristocratic power blocks. The ‘Soviet social’ therefore consists mainly
of small industrial cities constructed more or less ex nihilo to facilitate modernization. In
chapter 3, Collier extends his argument of how Soviet socialism spatially and
normatively linked population and production by focusing on the physical construction
of cities, examining how architecture, infrastructure and urban planning attempted to
nurture a population that was conducive to the Marxist programme of collectivized
production. The socialist city would be a machine for the comprehensive need-fulfilment
of the workforce that in turn served almost exclusively as a productive input into the
national industrial endeavour.
In the following chapter, which takes Belaya Kalitva as a case study, Collier
demonstrates how localized dispersed means of utility provision supplying small clusters
of homes with heat and water were replaced by a single urban network connected to an
industrial centre, which was itself inserted into a national regime of resource distribution.
This created a unique networked urbanism, a ‘socioindustrial complex’ (p. 104) that was
consolidated at the turn of the 1980s. Nevertheless, as Marx himself remarked, people do
not make history as they please — including Soviet planners. Chapter 5 tells the story of
the eventual disintegration of the Soviet regime, beginning with the imbalances that
occurred in city-building. Capitalist countries were also restructuring in light of
technological advances whereas Russia’s cities had become dinosaurs of industrialism,
conceptually and infrastructurally locked in. The subsequent programme of structural
adjustment, chapter 6 reveals, was far from successful in securing Russia’s future, but
critically Collier argues that this was not a pure or even faithful expression of neoliberal
doctrine.
Going beyond the ‘high politics and high economics’ (p. 161) of the Washington
consensus, the following two chapters focus on what occurred in Russia subsequent to
the mid-1990s. Collier provides a genealogy of the ‘substantive’ shift in development
policy that recognized the need for intricate reconfiguration of the infrastructural,
institutional, spatial, essentially biopolitical characteristics of the Soviet social, in
addition to macroeconomic change. In chapters 7 and 8, the neoliberal thought of James
Buchanan and George Stigler, and how this translated into governmental practice, is

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
730 Book reviews

explicated. This involved refining regulation rather than outright marketization,

introducing calculative choice, fiscal discipline and competition into Russia’s budgetary
processes and national heating network. However, the intransigence of infrastructure
meant that neoliberal programmes, proposing household meters, control valves and
decentralized pipe systems, were difficult to implement, therefore Soviet norms
tenaciously endure.
Whilst Collier does provide a disclaimer that the ethnographic method is not
employed in its most traditional sense, I would still have liked more detail on his personal
encounters with economic reformers based in Russia to better appreciate the ‘human
face’ of neoliberal transition. The little narrative that is provided of conversations with
budget officers is illuminating and memorable, and perhaps this is an opportunity missed.
Similarly, there is little in the way of imagery that could have graphically illustrated the
‘sticky nexus’ (p. 215) of infrastructure, institutions and the urban form, a tantalizing
photographic project. This is not to say the book lacks tables and illustrations, which are
indeed plentiful and clear, and aid the reader’s understanding of complex economic
theory. Overall, Collier’s book is a convincing corrective to current scholarship on
neoliberalism, which takes the material configurations of the city and their political
implications seriously. It advocates a nominalist approach to neoliberalism as ‘a topic
and problem of inquiry rather than its premise’ (p. 12, original emphasis) which, if
heeded, can go some way to grounding neoliberalism as the inexorable abstract
omnipresence it has arguably become.

Mark Usher, University of Manchester

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.2

© 2014 Urban Research Publications Limited
Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-
Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv
without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.