Int J Urban Regional Res - 2005 - Tostensen - Reconsidering Informality Perspectives From Urban Africa

Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAIJURInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research0309-13172005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
June 200529245574
Book reviewsBook reviewsBook reviews
Volume 29.2 June 2005 455-74 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
BOOK REVIEWS
2005292Book reviewsBook reviewsBook reviews
Barrie Scardino, William F. Stern and Bruce C. Webb (eds.) 2003: Ephemeral City: Cite Looks
at Houston. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Ephemeral City consists of a collection of articles from the journal Cite: The
Architecture and Design Review of Houston. Cite (pronounced ‘sight’) has been
publishing on architecture, design, and planning issues in Houston since 1982. The
journal is published by the Rice Design Alliance, which is associated with the School
of Architecture at Rice University. In assembling articles for this book, Scardino, Stern
and Webb note that they did not want to put together a ‘best of Cite’, but rather a
collection of articles that would provide readers with a sense of Houston. By and large
they have succeeded. The editors have also invited the authors to provide brief updates,
or a reflection on their originally published articles, which not only ensures that the book
is up to date but also allows for some insightful retrospectives.
There is much that I like about Ephemeral City. The book’s strengths are its
comprehensive overview of architecture and design issues in Houston and the historical
survey of the city and its landmarks. The editors have made a good attempt at compiling
a collection of works that range from regional-scale urban-environment issues (such as
shaping a city around waterways and local and regional transportation) to more micro-
scale built-environment issues (such as Houston’s streetscapes and architecture). The
book also provides an extensive set of high-quality photographs, many by Paul Hester,
a nationally renowned Houston photographer.
The book is well organized, with three parts reflecting three scales in urban planning
and design — the city and its region, the neighborhoods, and buildings in Houston. The
first part of the book explores city and regional issues, such as Houston’s freeways,
public spaces, the influence of water on Houston’s development, managing a city without
formal zoning, Houston’s inner-city and mid-town revitalization, and Houston’s suburbs.
The second thematic section is called Places of the City, which introduces readers to
a number of Houston’s defining neighborhoods and districts. This part of the book is
not only effective in introducing the city’s neighborhoods, but also in revealing some of
the city’s social diversity and local politics. While it explores such places as Indo-
Chinatown, the museum and theatre districts, and Houston’s universities, it also includes
a historical development of Montrose Boulevard, Hermann Park, and the development
and demolition of the Allen Parkway Village (a public housing project in the Fourth
Ward). This section of Ephemeral City offers a rich examination of architects, public
figures, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and civil activists that contributed to shaping
Houston’s neighborhoods, districts and the city itself.
The third part of the book, called Buildings of the City, presents a detailed survey of
Houston’s architectural landmarks, key architectural figures and their clients. It includes
a historical review of Houston’s skyscrapers, an examination into some of Houston’s
architects and their defining works, the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van
der Rohe on Houston, the restoration and renovation of the Rice Hotel, and a design
and development assessment of the Astrodome and Minute Maid Park.
I consider Ephemeral City to be a valuable and comprehensive collection of works
on Houston. The articles and sections, however, are of varying strength. The review of
Houston’s architects, architecture and design — the focus of the work — is the strongest.
Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.
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456 Book reviews
In contrast, the first part of the book, on the city and its region, provides a limited and
selective assessment of planning and design issues in Houston. Many of the pieces in
this section are too descriptive, lacking the detailed social and critical analysis that will
be readily apparent to social scientists who address similar topics. For instance, the
importance of private interests in Houston and the disinterest in the public realm is raised
throughout the book, with little critical feedback of the consequences. As the editors
note, Houston has a ‘reputation as a place where property wheels and deals with fewer
restrictions than anywhere else in the Anglo Saxon world’ (p. x).
In fact, in some papers the emphasis placed on the private, in contrast to the public,
is even celebrated. In the chapter on transportation and the West Loop by Joel Warren
Barna, he argues, ‘[i]n a manner typical throughout modern Texas, private interests
began to develop the comprehensive vision that public entities had failed to achieve’ (p.
47). While this is a common perception in Houston, alternative views might have been
introduced for a greater balance. The absence of wider public interests, as might be
evident with basic regulation, has generated unique social and environmental pressures
in the city that are never introduced in the book.
The Houston region has the highest levels of toxic waste generation in the country.
In 1999, the Houston area also became the first region in the US to exceed Los Angeles’
ozone violations, and since then the two cities have continued to exchange for the title
‘smoggiest US city’. In addition, according to a Houston-funded study, there are 435
premature deaths annually in the city from fine particle emissions alone. The issue of
pollution in the region has emerged as one of the leading local issues. As noted by Jim
Blackburn in a Houston Chronicle article:
A 1999 study by the city of Houston found that more than $3 billion in health benefits would
be realized if Houston would clean up both the ozone and small particle problem. More than
435 premature deaths would be avoided if our air was cleaner. Would you consider these facts
in determining whether to move your company to Houston? (Blackburn, 2001: 1C)
The emphasis on the private and the disinterest in the wider public good has been
important in generating this urban environment. While weak environmental regulations,
an issue that became recognized nationally during the 2000 presidential election, have
encouraged the concentration of pollution-intensive industries in the region, they have
also generated considerable environmental stresses, especially among the city’s
disadvantaged. The ones that can afford to escape the noxious environments do so, which
plays a role in encouraging the existing scale of decentralization and suburbanization,
while the ones that live with the consequences are largely the poor and minorities. This
is a particular concern in a city that functions without formal zoning or a plan.
While the first part of the book on the city and its region examines issues such as
decentralization, the absence of formal zoning and the disinterest in the public realm,
there was little said about racial and social disparities and the environmental stresses
that result from what Barna considers the ‘comprehensive vision of private interests’.
This criticism, however, should not take away from the overall value of the book. While
Ephemeral City introduces readers to some of Houston’s urban and regional planning
issues, these topics are not the focus of this collection. The strength of this work is in
its overview of Houston’s architects, architecture, neighborhoods and districts. This
review is rich and robust. Anyone who has an interest in Houston and in the people that
shaped the city will enjoy this edited collection.
Igor Vojnovic, Michigan State University
Blackburn, J. (2001) Stop whining. Houston

Chronicle 1 April.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005
Book reviews 457
Jane Schneider and Ida Susser (eds.) 2003: Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction
in a Globalized World. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers.
This edited collection of 14 richly textured essays examines cities in nations as diverse
as Mexico, Sicily, Vietnam, Lebanon, Russia, Thailand, Ireland, Colombia and the
United States. The volume emerges from a workshop sponsored by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research held in April 2000.
In the original workshop, debate and discussion focused heavily on the notion of
‘wounding’, which was understood to be an organic metaphor implying ‘a vision of
collective well-being that must be negotiated within an identifiable, bounded place (p.
1)’. But as the editors to the volume note, this concept seemed inadequate to capture
the regional, national and international context in which cities were embedded and
through which they either prospered or declined. Compelled by the power of the image
of cities as organic bodies, but eager to move beyond the assumptions and analytical
constraints that emphasize stabilizing dynamics and functionality over conflict and
power, the editors and contributors to this volume recast the notion of wounding to fit
into a more globally conscious political economy perspective in which power, capital
accumulation and struggle play out on various scales to affect the social, spatial and
economic life of cities and their inhabitants.
The end result might blithely be characterized as the Chicago School meets the Urban
Political Economy perspective; but even this representation is not entirely accurate, as
what is obtained from the former is little more than the anthropological method and an
appreciation for grounded empirical analysis, while it is the insights, debates and
concerns of the latter that establish the volume’s main and most powerful unifying
threads. One senses that the interruption of 9/11 merely reinforced the editors’ resolve
to keep the notion of wounding central to the project. Even so, the recasting of this
metaphor to be much more than social ecology, and to draw instead on the traditions of
history, anthropology and political economy, works well to capture the meaning and
larger aims of the studies presented within. An overview of how and why this metaphor
could be used to rethink cities is masterfully presented in David Harvey’s essay in the
volume entitled ‘The City as Body Politic’, which, along with the introduction, helps
frame the empirical contributions to follow.
One common thread in almost all the contributions is the close attention paid to the
processes of spatial and social segregation. Almost without exception, the cities
showcased in this volume are characterized by social polarization and uneven
development, in which each city’s business or political elite have the will and capacity
to displace poorer citizens from prime lands or locations that serve as sources of
accumulation — whether it comes via land rent, industrial production or agriculture.
As such, while it may not have been each individual contributors’ intent, the collective
picture drawn here is rather depressing. The power of capital, both domestic and foreign,
legal and illegal, seems almost unstoppable in its capacity to destroy and remake the
built environment without regard for local traditions, culture and community — although
some of the most interesting chapters also argue that local culture (as manifest in the
discourses and cultural practices associated with ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ in the
Robotham chapter on Kingston; and the power and place of the mafia in the Schneider
and Schneider chapter on Palermo) can at times be seen as the product of such dynamics.
Still, with the exception of two chapters on Philadelphia and New York by Jeff Masovsky
and Leith Mullings, respectively, in which urban-based activism is the key point of
departure, there is little room for agency in the collective scenario presented here.
If anything, this volume gives life to the time-worn story of urban destruction and
private accumulation that has affected city after city across the globe. The depressing
assessment holds even for the case of Ho Chi Minh City, presented by Suhong Chae, in
which liberal reforms in socialist Vietnam are shown to have produced some of the very
same patterns and practices seen in the capitalist world. Perhaps the only exception to
this rule is the final chapter, by Jane and Peter Schneider, whose account of Palermo
458 Book reviews
shows that sometimes the over-building of downtown areas for speculative purposes can
indeed be challenged. But the massive anti-mafia campaign that was necessary to
accomplish this goal suggests that such outcomes are possible only when broad sections
of urban society join together and when much more is at stake than just urban
development.
As if this were not enough, several of the chapters focus on the near breakdown of
urban society and the networks of community and solidarity so celebrated by the
Chicago School in decades past. These contributions are difficult to read, on a pure
human level, but worthwhile because they give the reader an opportunity to peer even
more deeply below the precarious surface of the buffed built environment, to see the
complex if not contradictory social and cultural dynamics that flower even when the
aesthetic veneer of urbanism might seem appealing.
A fascinating but troubling account of Mexico City by Claudio Lomnitz highlights
the degradation and depreciation of urban life in a city currently run by a leftist
mayor who has been trying to put himself on the global map with downtown
development. Despite the flowering of a new democratic culture and a break from the
authoritarian past, the historical legacies of earlier administrations have persisted.
Lomnitz’s essay exposes the roots of this problem as laying in the post-1982 political
and economic crisis in the city, which contributed to a culture of death, criminality
and violence.
The subtext here is similar to the one implied in an equally compelling study of
Medellin by Mary Roldan, in which the impact of drug traffickers on the city persists,
albeit to different effect, no matter the changes in political parties and national or global
dynamics. Like the Schneiders’ assessment of Palermo, Roldan’s story of urban
development in Medellin rests on two key axes: the political and economic power of
illegal forces (mafia; drug traffickers) and the inexorable forces of accumulation in their
search for new sources of investment in more predictable circuits of capital. One hardly
knows which would be the worst enemy to challenge if improving urban conditions
were the goal; and, in any case, the account of how these two sets of forces so frequently
work together shows that there would be very little room for maneuver even if one were
to undertake the challenge.
To a great extent, the larger story being told in this volume will not surprise most
analysts of cities, especially of the so-called developing world. For decades the bread
and butter of ‘third world urbanism’ revolved around the claim that regional, national
and global forces of capital were largely responsible for polarized and uneven patterns
of growth and development in cities of the global South. One gets the sense that the
editors — and many of the contributors to this volume — may be unaware of this large
body of work, if only because discussion about the impact of globalization is almost
always framed within a discussion of the contemporary advanced capitalist world. This
is a comment as much as a criticism, however, because invoking the ‘third world’
literature of the 1970s and 1980s would merely have compelled the authors to study
how and why globalization works differently now than in the past; and many of the
authors already do this. Indeed, one of the most valuable assets of this edited collection
is the attention paid to urban history in such a large number of the case studies.
While a historical framing is present in most of the pieces, it is particularly
noteworthy in the treatment of Bangkok, Medellin and Kingston. Through the attention
to history, the authors are able to assess the impact of colonial or mercantile forces on
the city, and how each’s fate ebbed and flowed as domestic and global dynamics
changed, both political and economic.
Equally important, a large number of the chapters focus directly on the rural or
agricultural context of urban development, yet another key analytic entry point for much
of the earlier work on third-world urbanism. Combined with the attention to history, this
feature makes Wounded Cities stand out as exemplary among the growing number of
edited volumes on cities and globalization that have proliferated over the last several
years.
Book reviews 459
It is not just that the attention paid to rural-urban dynamics is important and valuable
because it helps explain key aspects of a city’s development that might be missed when
the focus is merely the global or even national context of urban growth. (In this volume,
the importance of situating the study of a city in its immediate agrarian surrounds is
best exemplified in the study of Xalapa by Carol Meyers, in which she directly links
the spatial changes in the city and investments in downtown development to the fate of
the surrounding coffee-producing elite.)
It is also true that a focus on the rural context of urban development may actually
end up providing the entry point for successful social action that seems to remain elusive
when the point of entry is the city in the orbit of global capital. After all, while
globalization almost uniformly brings money and resources to cities, even if unevenly
distributed within and between them, some of the biggest aggregate losers in the
globalization-fueled race to the bottom are domestic rural producers. As a consequence,
the ownership structure and future of agricultural development are up for grabs in many
countries, a state of affairs that merely pushes more residents to the city to fuel the cycle
of competition for land, housing and work, with real estate developers profiting in the
process.
So rather than looking for allies in cities where globalization almost always
culminates in big winners as well as losers, why shouldn’t those who care about the
future of wounded cities not look for alliances outside the city itself, if the region and
the nation also are hard hit by globalization? If we accept that the city is merely an
arbitrarily circumscribed body politic, whose wounding both derives from and extends
beyond the formal political boundaries that make it a city, then neither scholarship nor
action need be confined to that level. This volume may not explicitly have set out for
itself such an agenda, but it lays an essential and important foundation for thinking in
such terms. From my perspective, that is just one more reason to take it seriously, and
to embrace its findings, difficult as they are to face.
Diane E. Davis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Karen Tranberg Hansen and Mariken Vaa (eds.) 2004: Reconsidering Informality:
Perspectives from Urban Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute.
This collection draws attention to the informal city in Africa and its interface with the
formal institutions of urban planning and governance. In an insightful introduction, the
editors argue that there is a need for reconsidering informality in urban development,
because the ‘economic, political and social conditions in African cities at the turn of the
century differ significantly from those of previous eras’ (p. 11). These changes stem
from shifting power relations, demographic dynamics and the intervention of
international aid agencies. This new situation, the editors claim, has important
implications for urban policy at both national and international levels. Indeed, they find
it a strategic moment to reconsider informality.
The contributions address extra-legal housing and an array of unregistered economic
activities and their encounters with formal institutions, be they local authorities, national
governments or transnational corporations. The nature of this interface ranges from
accommodation and condonation to non-recognition and confrontation.
Apart from the editors’ introduction, the anthology contains 11 chapters drawing on
cases in nine different countries. They fall into three distinct thematic sections, each
with a brief informative introduction to the subject under discussion. The first section
deals with locality, place and space. Its contributions recount contestations over urban
space. The second section addresses economy, work and livelihoods, detailing a
multitude of informal economic activities. The third section is devoted to land, housing
and planning, with analyses of struggles for housing in various planning contexts.
460 Book reviews
The first contribution by Gabiel Tati in the first section provides a longitudinal
narrative of contestation over urban space by fishermen in Pointe-Noire, Congo-
Brazzaville, and a multinational oil company. The concession given to the oil company
by the local authorities interferes with the activities of artisanal fisheries. The
authorities wanted to relocate the fishermen but through their struggle for land and
proximity to marketing outlets they succeeded in finding accommodation in the form of
shared use of the area. However, the oil company’s activities have continued to affect
the fisheries adversely because of noise and pollution from oil spills. Knut G. Nustad,
in his account of Cato Crest, Durban, South Africa, analyses the interaction between
community mobilization and formal attempts at regulating the area, which evolved
with a considerable element of violence. A community-based umbrella organization
was set up to inject participation into the process of resettlement in an area from which
120,000 residents had been evicted under apartheid. However, factions emerged in the
leadership and led to fierce struggles of control. Nustad finds that ‘informality is in
the eye of the beholder’ and that ‘the formal and the informal are two perspectives on
the same issue, and both are defined by an attempt at control’ (p. 58). The contribution
by Karen Tranberg Hansen is another case of struggle over control of space. The street
vendors of Lusaka, Zambia have fought — successfully for a long time it would appear
— for space in the central business district against repeated attempts by the city
authorities to relocate them to designated and regulated markets. For a while, however,
they seemed to have succumbed to the hardnosed crackdown by the mayor of Lusaka.
But as Hansen concludes: with a poorly organized local authority lacking the financial
means to construct markets where vendors can operate at affordable fees, it is no
surprise that the vendors keep coming back to the streets out of necessity to eke out a
livelihood.
The second section starts with a contribution by Ilda Lourenço-Lindell, who writes
on processes of informalization of economic activity in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, in the
wake of the liberalization policies that structural adjustment policies professed. She
makes a clear distinction, however, between informalization for accumulation and for
survival. She makes the point that those who straddle the informal and the formal spheres
are able to exploit the informalization process for their own accumulation of wealth.
The contribution by Barbara Mwila Kazimbaya-Senkwe on home-based enterprises in
Kitwe, Zambia is particularly interesting on account of two points being made. First,
that engagement in informal economic activity is not only a residual activity of last
resort, but a conscious choice because it offers better returns than formal wage
employment and a greater degree of freedom. Second, a house is far more than a
dwelling place; it also provides premises for home-based production. Amin Kamete
discusses a different kind of home industries as defined in Harare, Zimbabwe. Rather
than being run from dwellings, home industries in Harare take place in designated
industrial estates. Even so, they operate in between the formal and informal. It is
puzzling to read, though, that in Zimbabwe ‘businesses in home industries — and indeed
the informal sector — are supposed to pay taxes’ (p. 128). Normally, not paying taxes
is a defining characteristic of informal economic activities. Apparently, the tax regime
is not enforced, despite the fact that some home industries are subcontractors for formal
private sector industries and most of them get their raw materials from established
companies. Overall, they are making a substantial contribution to employment and skill
formation for young entrants to the labour market. Besides, home industries have strong
forward and backward linkages that are truly local. For those reasons, they are probably
‘left alone’.
Most contributions in the third section deal with housing and struggles with planning
authorities over land use. The chapter by Marco Burra highlights the emergence of a
community-based organization in Makongo, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and how it
asserted itself vis-à-vis the city planning authorities. In contrast to the top-down posture
of the local authority, the CBO provided a bottom-up approach to planning based on
the needs of the residents of the area in terms of infrastructure and service provision.
Book reviews 461
Towards that end, the existing legal framework was exploited in imaginative ways. Rose
Gatabaki-Kamau and Sarah Karirah-Gitau narrate the emergence of a middle-income
housing area, Zimmerman, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. Again, the formation of
a community-based organization as a vehicle for the interest of the residents is a key
factor in their success. This case is particularly interesting because electoral politics
enters the picture. By supporting the residents in their struggles, a local politician with
national ambitions expects a pay-back in the form of votes. Non-compliance with land
legislation as a ‘weapon of the poor’ is the topic of the chapter by Resetselemang
Clement Leduka on access to land in Maseru, Lesotho. Faced with the enforcement of
formal rules, non-compliance is used as part of a coping strategy by field owners whose
land was appropriated without compensation. John Abbott looks at the upgrading of an
informal settlement in New Rest, Cape Town, South Africa. He points out three lessons
to be learned from that experience. First, it is essential to forge a strategic alliance with
key players in the local community. Second, it is crucial that everyone has an opportunity
to share in the success of the endeavour. Third, dealing with a local authority is an
ongoing process. In other words, building linkages across the informal/formal divide
depends not only on what is being done, but how it is being done. In the last contribution,
Paul Jenkins queries the meaning of formality by pointing to the fact that a battery of
existing laws has been carried over from the colonial era. Hence, the formal legal
framework is often illegitimate in a political sense. Thus, land allocations have generally
not followed formal state rules; access to land has been secured predominantly in an
informal fashion with the tacit approval of local authorities. This conforms to the social
mechanisms whereby most people manage to survive in general, i.e. extended kinship,
ethnic and similar social relationships.
A common thread runs through all the contributions in this collection. The informal
initiatives, whether individual or collective, spring from the inability of the formal
authorities to deliver plans for urban development and service provision. The changing
conception of the state in the wake of structural adjustment policies has widened the
scope for such initiatives. However, the formal authorities often frustrate the grassroots
initiatives by clinging to existing legal frameworks, which are sometimes outdated or at
least inappropriate, to assert their authority over the evolution of the urban landscape.
From this contradiction stems contestation and struggle between the informal and the
formal. In some cases accommodating solutions are found; in others, confrontation
ensues. The contributions are all interesting in themselves by bringing to light such
struggles. Apart from their theoretical and conceptual approaches, their strength lies first
and foremost in meticulous empirical documentation.
They also have important policy implications. Clear signals are sent to planning
authorities at different levels that accommodating approaches are likely to be more
effective than confrontation in satisfying the needs of urban residents, even if that road
might be more untidy and time-consuming. The same message is conveyed to aid
agencies that tend to come in on the side of the formal authorities.
Arne Tostensen, Chr. Michelsen Institute
Talja Blokland 2003: Urban Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press.
This is a ‘back to basics’ book that addresses a very contemporary theme: what is the
tie between people and places? In so doing, it addresses many of the classics of post-
war sociology and gently reminds us that the issues raised by these books have not been
forgotten with the passing of time but have become, if anything, more complex.
There has been a long-standing assumption that ‘community’ (the sociological
‘we’) has been tied ‘like Siamese twins’ (p. 6) with ‘neighbourhood’ (the building
block of much urban theory). Blokland questions whether this was ever the case,
462 Book reviews
although we might have been forgiven for the elision in the past because of the ways
in which working-class communities, at least, were tied spatially to their places of
work. With the decline in the importance of class, religion and mutual dependence on
the one hand and the rise of affluence, welfare and consumerism on the other, she
argues we need to think through what it is that ties people to places — or vice versa.
Very simply, she reminds us, people are now, to a much greater extent than in the past,
able to make choices about where to live and how to relate to where they live. How,
how much, and if, at all, they invest in their ‘neighbourhood’ are increasingly matters
of choice.
The book is a reworked translation of the original community study she undertook
of Hillesluis — a once working-class inner-city district of Rotterdam. The English
version is, we are told, a broadened out discussion of the links between people, work
and place that brings in inter alia Weber, Durkheim, Merton, Lockwood, Gans and
others who have puzzled over why people behave in the way that they do in particular
circumstances. By interweaving her account of Hillesluis in its transition from an inner-
city industrial district to a largely post-industrial multi-ethnic enclave, she constructs,
in a more or less seamless manner, the kind of middle range theory proposed by the late
Robert K. Merton.
The book begins by asking a deceptively simple question — if we can no longer tie
community and neighbourhood together because of the disruptions of place, space and
class by capitalist restructuring, could we ever? In answering this question, Blokland
carefully disentangles the social from the spatial. She begins with the ecological theory
of the Chicago School which was the starting point for urban sociology and questions
whether there was ever anything natural about these areas. Drawing on the work of
contemporary geographers, such as Massey and Harvey, she emphasizes the role of
place but in relation to power and not simply geographical space. She concludes that
‘location does not of itself produce community’ (p. 10). Having rejected the ‘natural
area’ approach, she then appears somewhat sympathetic to Barry Wellman’s view that
communities exist in ‘personal networks’ but then immediately asks ‘how?’. She claims
that what is invisible in Wellman’s approach to networks is any idea of identity (p. 13)
and critiques him for prioritizing social relations to the exclusion of social institutions
(p. 60). In her view, neighbourhood relations (like urban sociology itself) cross many
categories and are distinguished by ‘physical proximity rather than social
characteristics’ (p. 13) and the inability to predict their potential for social
identification.
This, according to Blokland, is precisely why ‘a neighbourhood is not the same as a
community’. At most, ‘communities make use of the location to varying degrees’ (p.
13). In addition, however, to the ‘grid of social relations’ available in the neighbourhood
there are two additional aspects which are the ‘spectrums’ of privacy and of access —
the former ranges from ‘anonymity through familiarity to intimacy’, whilst the access
spectrum runs from ‘public to institutional to private’. It is these spectrums which have
changed over time and over which people now exert far more choice than previously.
They are also the basis out of which, Blokland claims, people construct the ‘we’ and
‘they’ of community — by, for example, constructing ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’.
This argument is further elaborated in respect of Weber’s theory of rational behaviour
(chapter 5) and Durkheim’s notion of mores and the conscience collective (in both its
forms of mechanic and organic solidarity) (chapter 6). The outcome of this excursion
into mainstream theory, somewhat unnervingly for those of us raised on the work of
Talcott Parsons, is four ‘patterns’ of behaviour: interactions, transactions, attachments
and bonds. These are spelled out in two diagrammatic continuums which draw from
both Weberian action sociology in relation to the first two and Durkheimian collectivism
for the second pair. It is this which re-invokes the kind of middle-range theory pioneered
by Robert K. Merton in his 1968 book Social Theory and Social Structure, which was
less concerned with grand theorizing than with adapting theory to understand how
people behave in concrete situations.
Book reviews 463
If this sounds abstracted, it isn’t; the argument proceeds by way of a worked example
from Hillesluis told, for the most part, through the eyes of her respondents. She carried
out extensive ethnography in the mid-1990s amongst different age cohorts. Some had
been born in the 1913–9 era and grew up during the poverty and totalitarianism of the
interwar period, survived the deportations and starvations of Nazi occupation and then
basked in the affluence of the post-war period before retiring into an increasingly anomic
old age. More recently, the area has become home to migrants, particularly from
Morocco and Turkey, as well as to middle-class gentrifiers and post-1969 dropouts
seeking an authentic inner-urban experience and/or cheap rents in a neighbourhood
where people largely leave them alone.
There is also the ‘Common Sense Association’ who write poignant but increasingly
hopeless and helpless letters to the Queen and politicians about how their once posh
area, referred to as the Gold Coast, no longer gives them the kind of social recognition
that it once conferred. The overall theme, through this worked example, is how, out of
force of choice or circumstance, people make sense of themselves and where they live
in a situation of rapid social change. For much of the twentieth century, the institutions
of religion or class provided two trajectories that could be followed through the
neighbourhood which were, to all intent and purposes, irrevocable decisions once they
had been made — or ascribed. Whilst this didn’t actually solve the problem of
understanding the relationship between place and people, it helps explain why it was
largely a non-issue for many sociologists.
In the last 20 years, however, with the large-scale collapse of industrial employment,
about which Blokland actually says very little, the people–place dilemma can no longer
be answered by reference to such simple class or religious divides. She spends much of
the book working out how people come to identify with ‘imagined communities’,
although the work of Ray Pahl seems strangely missing from her extensive list of
references here. Imagined communities emerge through the expression of similarity and
difference (p. 64) and this provides the cue for the introduction of Weber’s notion of
‘meaningful’ action and ways in which notions of ‘friendship’ (again a recent focus
of Pahl’s work) play an increasingly important role in choosing peer groups — in place
of kinship, co-religionists, colleagues or comrades.
All of these relations have become increasingly privatized and commoditized with
the development of technology (individual mobility for example) and affluence.
Communal relations that were once dependent on transactions based around reciprocity
have been replaced by a set of structured choices based around markets and often
actualized through relations of consumption rather than those of belief or production.
In a telling chapter on ethnicity, which draws on Lewis Coser’s conflict theory, she
examines the ways in which ethnic diversity plays out amongst the older residents who
need to create divisions precisely in order to foster cohesion where the previous bonds
of work, religion, etc. have disappeared — ‘us workers’ versus ‘them Christians’ or
‘them rich folk’ or even ‘them capitalists’, as she puts it (pp. 129–30).
‘Once communities are privatized, does neighbourhood cease to matter?’, she asks
(p. 154). The short answer is no, but it does so in very different ways. The old certainties
are replaced by new flexible associations of friendship, lifestyle and new imagined
communities who exist, at least for those displaced by these changes, through their
shared memories of the past which don’t include young people, minorities and everyone
else ‘out there’. For many of these other groups, the neighbourhood is not a physical
location but an ‘emotional involvement’ (p. 157).
The neighbourhood residents, whom they referred to as ‘the people on this street’ or ‘they’
did not pertain to Joop and Jenny’s reference group. Although they enjoyed talking with their
neighbours on occasion, they felt a considerable social distance (pp. 162–3).
This description of gentrification would apply equally well in Hackney or Brixton in

London and Brooklyn in New York or King’s Cross in Sydney and, according to
464 Book reviews
Blokland, is indicative of the way in which many groups now regard the neighbourhood
from which they construct their own imagined communities.
This book invokes an era when sociology, and the other social sciences, used
empirical work to throw a torch beam not only on social groups but also on social
theory. The inspiration for this book clearly lay in the work of sociologists such as
Herbert Gans, Ulf Hannerz and Robert Merton and, more contemporaneously, Charles
Tilly, Mike Savage and Richard Jenkins. At a time when it is becoming increasingly
apparent that place has become more, not less, important as a concomitant of migration
and identity, this book lives up to the claims on the back cover that ‘it is a book of
major intellectual significance’ in the continuing saga about people and their kind of
places.
Tim Butler, King’s College, London
R.K. Merton (1968) Social theory and social

structure. Third edition, Free Press, New
York.
Chris Rhomberg 2004: No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland.
Berkeley, LA: University of California Press.
This excellent book joins a growing scholarship that applies historical institutional theory
from economics and political science to the study of the city. Institutionalism, known as
path dependence theory in economics, rejects the neoclassical assertion that markets clear
at a single equilibrium point and the corollary belief that efficiency typifies organizations.
Instead, a multiplicity of possible outcomes (‘multiple equilibria’) — some efficient
or equitable or both, but most not — characterize the market, government and social
groups. These outcomes are determined early in the history of an institution, often as a
result of small, ‘contingent’ events that fix the character and competence of the
organization. Organizational development, the theory emphasizes, proceeds under heavy
spatial constraint either because it is expensive to move or impossible in the case of
spatially defined governments to do so.
The result is ‘increasing returns to scale’ that almost guarantee entrenched institutions
that are prone to inertia. Recent work that applies this pessimistic outlook to urban
government, with the attendant necessity of studying history, includes Douglas Rae’s
(2003) City: Urbanism and its End and Mega-projects: The Changing Politics of Urban
Public Investment by Altshuler and Luberoff (2003). Both books detail a perceived
decline of US urban institutions since the 1950s, but blend their histories with pluralist
and public choice frameworks.
The Rhomberg book, by contrast, moves the discussion forward by returning
institutional analysis to its roots in critical theory — the urban regime theory of Clarence
Stone and Susan and Norman Fainstein; the early work of Ira Katznelson on class and
urban politics; and, especially, the treatment of social movements by Manuel Castells.
Here, pessimism about urban institutions is tempered by the drive to discover modes of
action for change in the name of equity.
The book takes up the clash between urban regimes and social movements in three
separate periods via a rich case study of Oakland, California. The movements in question
are a rebellion of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) versus the ethnic political machine between
1900 and 1920; working-class militancy in the Depression and second world war
directed at a ‘business managerial’ local regime; and the rise of the Black Panthers in
the 1960s in protest at urban renewal. The core question Rhomberg wants to consider
via these social groups is their discontinuity: how is it that one city could house social
movements as diverse and unrelated as the KKK, the working class militants, and the
Book reviews 465
Black Panthers? The question is a bit loose — as is typical in institutional analysis —

but it serves as a pretext for a fascinating narrative.
The ethnic, predominately Irish, political machine ruled Oakland for a period that
was brief compared to similar regimes in the Northeast and Midwest. Weak local
government in California in the late nineteenth century meant that urban infrastructure
and services (water, power, streetcars, rail) were provided through grants of monopoly
franchises to private corporations, particularly the Southern Pacific Railroad. The urban
machine in Oakland did not determine allocation of most franchises — this was the
bailiwick of the state Republican machine — and was confined to apportioning jobs for
Catholic immigrants and their descendants. Further, the growing Asian presence in the
city remained outside the bounds of machine power.
These factors — together with Progressive reform efforts and an AFL-sponsored
labor movement after the second world war — left the machine vulnerable to challenge.
By the mid-1920s, the KKK provided a conduit of protest, not for the frustrations of a
declining group, Rhomberg emphasizes, but for the new middle class of native
Protestants who were moving to the suburbs of Oakland and eager to contest the urban
Catholic machine that denied services to their neighborhoods. But instead of
overthrowing it, the KKK — as did the labor movement and Black Panthers
subsequently — sought implementation of their demands through the existing urban
government. The immediate results were neither institutional reform nor achievement
of demands. Instead, a rising downtown elite swept the machine and its new allies from
power and installed a regime congenial to the base of the KKK among middle-class
Protestants but with broader appeal. In the long term, however, the KKK challenge
helped cement the alliance between suburbs and downtown and to undergird the
formation of a native Protestant middle class.
A related process of middle-class formation, according to Rhomberg, drove working-
class insurgency in the 1940s and black protest in the 1960s. For the former, the radical
promise embodied in a general strike against downtown Oakland retailers died out when
the labor coalition in government proposed racially integrated public housing for
workers and the coalition broke apart. The resulting decline into ‘machine unionism’
meant that labor came to support not working-class racial harmony in the inner city, but
suburbanization and flight from an increasingly black urban core. Black protest of the
1960s developed under different geographic constraints — particularly lower rates of
suburbanization compared to working-class whites — and achieved real gains against
exclusion of blacks from the public arena. Still, ‘the black urban regime succeeded in
opening up the city’s institutions, creating a space for the flourishing of a black middle
class’ (p. 185) more than it did for poor and working-class blacks. In the fragmented
US context, Rhomberg concludes, working-class movements do not build upon each
other but need to be ‘continually reinvented’ (p. 200).
The book offers a fleeting comparison of Oakland social movements with those in
other US regions that might have been sustained. Social movements in this ‘second
city’ to San Francisco display, according to the author, problems of ‘concentration,
industrialization, and population change typical of American urban centers’ (p. 19).
His accompanying disclaimer that Oakland is not representative of US cities is no
doubt true, and he briefly considers social protest in the Northeast, Midwest and
South. But a focused comparison of Oakland with other ‘second cities’ with similar
demographic trajectories — particularly Newark, NJ — might have uncovered
fruitful continuity and difference by region. If it is true, for example, that strong
urban political machines fragmented black political insurgency in northern and
midwestern cities, to what extent can we attribute the rise of the Black Panthers in
Oakland to the relatively weaker immigrant machines of the West Coast? The social
movements that gathered force in Oakland have a regional particularity that is worthy
of analysis.
Nonetheless, this is a fine book that brings together the disparate fields of urban
sociology, geography, politics and history. Its recovery of the origins of institutionalism
466 Book reviews
in critical theory makes an important contribution to what is hopefully a revival of

historical method in the social science of the city.
Laura Pangallozzi, Rutgers University
Altshuler, A. and D. Luberoff (2003) Mega- Rae, D.W. (2003) City: urbanism and its end.
projects: the changing politics of urban Yale University Press, New Haven.
public investment. Brookings Institution 2005292Book reviewsBook reviewsBook reviews
Press, Washington, DC.
John Meligrana (ed.) 2004: Redrawing Local Government Boundaries: An International Study
of Politics, Procedures, and Decisions. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press.
Researchers have long argued that local government may be the most accessible and
important level of political administration. Yet, processes of social, political and
economic restructuring, together with urbanization, new information technologies
and globalization are changing virtually all aspects of ‘local’ life. So how do local
governments adjust to these challenges? This edited collection examines one element
of that adjustment by focusing on local government boundary reform. The opening
proposition is that ‘local governments around the world must govern territories that are
increasingly out of sync with the economic, social, and regional demands of an ever-
urbanizing world’ (p. 1).
The collection seeks to address the paucity of work on the theoretical and procedural
foundations of boundary reform. It does this through two groups of chapters. The first
three chapters, together with the conclusion, speak of the need for theorizing to better
understand processes of annexation, amalgamation and the creation of new local
government institutions. Particularly important is recognition that local governments are
embedded within state systems and that this complicates comparative research. The
second group involves eight international case studies.
Meligrana opens the collection with an insightful summary of key arguments and a
review of the various chapter contributions. Paddison follows with an analysis aimed at
deriving a set of propositions for local government boundary restructuring. These
propositions focus upon the need to address local preferences, to follow fair and
accessible processes, and to enhance democratic participation. Skaburskis adds to the
book’s foundations by examining some of the arguments grounding municipal boundary
reform, including issues of autonomy, politics, function and structure, choice,
administration and governance, and the relations between local government and the
other economic and political levels in which those governments operate. These chapters
create an analytical foil against which the case studies can be evaluated.
The case study chapters begin with Lindsey’s review of annexation activity and
policies across the United States. He covers the basic types of annexation, notes changes
which have led to the increasing annexation of low-density rural lands, highlights the
role played by a strong sense of local democracy and independence, and concludes with
the case of Fort Wayne, Indiana to show the complex ways strategies and controversies
work themselves out.
Fischler, Meligrana and Wolfe review boundary reform in two Canadian provinces.
While they identify similarities in pressures, including the need to rationalize
metropolitan governance and the large number of very small municipal jurisdictions,
they emphasize differences. Important among these differences is the coordinated policy
approach in Quebec relative to Ontario’s rather simplistic interest in rationalization. In
an interesting word choice, they highlight the lack of coherence in boundary reform by
labelling the various efforts as ‘experiments’.
The development of territorial reform over time is continued in Wollmann’s review
from Germany. Wollmann highlights how local governments have some institutional
Book reviews 467
protection from encroachment by federal or Länder legislation, and how the dramatic
effects of post-war occupation and German reunification underscore the additional
pressures of metropolitan governance and the desire to retain small local government
units as important political and democratic arenas.
Albet i Mas extends the interest in ideological foundations for local governance
through a review of boundary reform in Spain. Again, periods of dramatic change
(including civil war and transition to democracy) combine with urbanization and
globalization to create pressures for adjustments. Albet i Mas follows these threads
through a focus upon Catalonia and its metropolitan centre of Barcelona. The position
of municipalities as part of a grass-roots democratic ideal, linked with citizens’ identity
and voice in society, play important roles in the reforms.
Razin examines the local boundary issue in Israel. Following a review of the types
of local governments and boundary adjustment trends, Razin focuses upon the
transformation of the state and society from a centralist-collectivist foundation to an
increasingly fragmented-individualistic foundation as important in underscoring local
government reform.
Economic growth, urbanization and the resulting spillover effects are themes carried
forward in Shin’s review of local government boundary reform in Korea. Historical
jurisdictions have collided with extensive industrialization and the emergence of
metropolitan regions. In an interesting comparison to many of the previous chapters, the
Korean model was to undertake a democratic, bottom-up process involving public
hearings and referendums. It also involved a fundamental reorientation from ‘urban–
rural separation’ to ‘urban–rural integration’.
Like the Korean case, ‘post-reform’ China has undergone rapid economic
development and urbanization. Shen’s review of the reorganization of urban space
follows this same transition from urban-rural separation to regional integration. As with
the Israeli case, links to the strength of the central government are drawn out, as are
desires to incorporate bottom-up initiatives. This balancing of central and local input to
municipal reorganization is an interesting attempt to overcome the ‘challenges faced by
a developing country in coping with rapid urbanization and urban expansion’ (p. 204).
Rapid response to recent political changes is a theme recurring through Cameron’s
review of local government reform in South Africa. Particularly important here are the
changes resulting from the constitutional debates of the 1990s. Among the identified
problems were large numbers of small municipal units, the effects of gerrymandering,
and various other apartheid fragmentations. A clear set of decision-making criteria have
guided recent change, and the resorting of space has been extensive. A further
contribution has been attempts to deal with communities which straddle provincial
boundary lines and the roles of traditional leaders (chiefs) following constitutional
reform.
Each of the case studies is well written and includes mapping and tables which track
key boundary reform elements. One of the most impressive contributions is that each
case study spends considerable time discussing the historical roots for contemporary
pressures and situates responses within social, cultural, political and historical contexts.
All of the chapters are well laid out and accompanied by a list of references. With a few
exceptions, the book is free of typographical errors. The book ends with contributor
biographies and a brief but efficient index.
While the opening proposition is that the context surrounding local government has
changed dramatically, those interested in boundary reform need to extend the ‘territory
question’ to include the roles and functions of local governance. Several of the case
studies move in this direction and highlight ways in which form and function can be
integrated into studies of the place for local governments in a globalizing economy.
Similarly, there is a need to consider the implications of boundary lines, not just on
those captured within such boundaries, but also on those ‘beyond the fuzzy edges’ (p. 25).
The contributing authors come from planning, geography and public policy fields,
and most have extensive academic and applied experience with local government
468 Book reviews
boundary and boundary reform issues. Their depth of expertise means that this collection
is a wonderful and informative resource. While there may be undergraduate courses
which could use this book as a text, it will surely find wide readership among graduate
students and local governance researchers.
Greg Halseth, University of Northern British Columbia

Barbara Eckstein and James A. Throgmorten (eds.) 2003: Story and Sustainability: Planning,
Practice and Possibility for American Cities. Boston: MIT Press.
In the period 2001–3, I was seconded to produce a State Sustainability Strategy for the
Western Australian government. It was a deep learning experience for me and involved
many public seminars in every part of the state. I found considerable enthusiasm to
address the concept and to struggle with what it could mean for the people in their
community and region. But, without exception, the real interest came whenever we
stumbled together on a story that helped explain our situation, or which showed hope
for the future. These stories we began to collect and eventually published on the web
as part of the Strategy (www.sustainability.dpc.wa.gov.au).
As I reflected on the power of the story I found myself forming a new approach to
sustainability based on the need for each region to tell their ‘place story’, to bring
together their natural history, their indigenous stories (many of which had 40,000 years
of oral history), their recent economic history, and how the integration of this could
form the basis of a community vision. We invented a new process called Regional
Sustainability Strategies.
After completing the State Sustainability Strategy I returned to academia. Reflecting
on my policy experience I found myself discovering a rich source of inspiration in the
new literature on storytelling as a social science methodology. Most importantly, I found
Story and Sustainability by Barbara Eckstein and James Throgmorten. Its insights
reverberated deeply with my recent experience as well as my previous work on cities
and sustainability, when I also discovered I had used stories as a major method of
challenging urban policymakers, though I had just called them ‘case studies’.
Eckstein and Throgmorten have provided a collection of edited papers that seek to
establish the links between story and sustainability. They are a coherent collection as
they arose from a symposium called for that purpose. The papers are rich in theory and
real stories about the way sustainability is being approached in American cities (this is
the focus as suggested by the subtitle). However the conceptual approach is such that it
can be applied to any city or to any region.
The main value in the book is that it offers a way to reinvigorate democracy at the
scale of the community, city and region. The global economy is making nation-state
democracies impotent as it moves more and more to being a series of competing global
cities. But, as the authors say in the introduction, ‘sustainability, story and democracy
mutually construct one another’ (p. 4). The main way this happens is by giving back to
social sciences a sense of values and ethics. The triumph of the descriptive, the
quantitative, has meant that not only are economic capital and natural capital understood
through measurement, social capital has now been added. Thus sustainability could be
seen in such a model as the integration of these three forms of capital. ‘Story’
emphasizes the importance of interpretation, of making sense of these forms of capital
and, most of all, giving them policy direction.
This is not an easy exercise. Bringing together the descriptive and the interpretative
is the most important challenge in the policy arena that has been opened up by the
sustainability agenda. However, the approaches to doing this are rare and the simple
model of ‘storytelling’ rarely appears on the radar. Eckstein and Throgmorten’s book is
Book reviews 469
therefore of great significance as it fills a need that is being felt by academic and
policymaker alike.
The emerging area of sustainability challenges all disciplines and professions to think
more holistically, more globally and more long term. However, this can still be an
expert’s game, one involving the collection of data to describe a problem and the
development of technical options for solution. Important as this is, the issues of
sustainability in cities and regions go broader and deeper than such analysis. Only
through stories can the ‘will to change’ (p. 5) be generated in such matters as racially
segregated cities, car dependence, consumerism, declining community, the loss of
habitat and climate change.
The power of the story is in its empowerment of ordinary people, the setting of
boundaries around ‘place’, and the ability to ‘imagine communities’, thus creating a
‘shared sense of moral purpose at a regional scale’ (p. 5).
It all makes sense and so in my institute researchers are rapidly switching their
methodologies to be more story oriented. But there is also a warning. Eckstein says in
her chapter: ‘I begin with a warning about sentimentalizing storytelling precisely
because understanding its power is so important to public decision making and urban
well-being’ (p. 14). She concludes: ‘A focus on storytelling emphasizes the elusiveness
of truth and the complexity of desire. For those who want to plan for a sustainable urban
future, these qualities must be acknowledged and explored’ (p. 14). Thus, we need to
go beyond Hollywood, whilst acknowledging that it has known about the power of
storytelling for some time.
Leonie Sandercock tells a number of stories in her chapter of this book and expands
on them in later publications. She tells of a social planner going to a new suburb in
Australia where families were struggling. After collecting statistics she felt nothing in
her report truly reflected their situation and instead told the story of a typical family,
their hopes and their pain as the place did not fulfil their dreams. When she took the
story back to them they said finally someone had understood them. But that was the
beginning of a process to try and change their future and redeem some of their lost
dreams. This was the real power of the story.
Peter Newman, Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University
Graeme Hayes 2002: Environmental Protest and the State in France. Basingstoke, UK and
New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
According to most studies in the political opportunity structure (POS) literature, France
is characterized as a strong and closed state. In such a context, environmental protest
has been approached in terms of waves, leading to the institutionalization into a political
party, Les Verts, and a weak movement. However, since the late 1980s, a diversity of
active local campaigns and groups have developed, indicating a revival of environmental
mobilization and showing an influence on specific policies. These developments can
partly be explained by the weakening of the French state through decentralization and
the process of European integration, but also because most classic studies are limited to
a macro level and generalize the political opportunity structure of a nation to all policy
sectors.
On the other hand, public policy research has shown, particularly in the case of
France, how a meso-level approach, focusing on sectors and regions, is much more
accurate and allows for a finer interpretation of the varied structures of political
opportunities. The book thus highlights the difficulties of comparative analysis and the
need to take into account sectorial and territorial differences within a state. Moreover,
the approach through structures tends to emphasize stability and plays down changes
that affect over time both institutions and the strategies of the various actors involved.
470 Book reviews
Graeme Hayes sets out to understand these evolutions and these nuances through the
analysis of mobilizations against policy developments. Chapters 1–3 develop the
theoretical model. First, the narratives of the French environmental movement are
explored. The author shows how the process of institutionalization that is generally
underlined overlooks the increased diversity of actors involved. Moreover, it appears
that the strategies chosen now tend to privilege the judicial process, therefore favouring
the intervention of organizations with resources and technical expertise.
The intersection between political opportunity structure and policy communities is
then scrutinized. Rather than a macro-level analysis of policy-making, Hayes
demonstrates how it is important to develop the analysis at a meso level in order to
understand the complex interactions between actors. A variety of policies and their
related mobilizations are drawn to illustrate how each sector functions along
idiosyncratic lines that cannot be generalized. A recent creation, the ministry of
environment, has carved different roles for itself in distinct cases, from an intellectual
facilitator contributing to the reframing of a debate to a direct player. Thus, movements
appear to be more than simple whistle blowers (what they are to an extent reduced to
if we take too seriously the strong/closed characterization of France in the POS
literature), but are actors whose impact can be read at three levels: sensitizing and
promoting issues on the agenda; procedural input on the decision-making; substantive
impacts at the level of policy implementation.
In some cases, authorities are prepared to accept substantial changes provided the
influence is not too visible in the policy process. The third chapter dwells on the
transformation of the institutions of the Fifth Republic and how these have affected the
opportunities for groups to influence policy-making and policy implementation. New
levels of decision-making have been created thanks to several waves of decentralization,
even if the state has retained in most cases the role of an intermediary in the interactions
between European regions.
The remaining part of the book is devoted to two case studies: projects involving
building dams on the Loire and a tunnel in the Pyrenees. The selected cases are of
particular interest because the environment cuts across territorial, administrative and
ministerial boundaries, here transport, economic development and water management.
The first chapter in each case focuses on the policy networks and the processes leading
up to the decision, the second on the counter-mobilization. It becomes apparent that the
interplay between the actors cannot be understood without looking at the peculiar
organization and interactions in each policy sector, the links between the state, local
notables and interest groups. The strategies and the effort to reframe the debate in terms
of environmental questions rather than ‘NIMBY’ (not in my backyard) are analysed. In
both cases, the mobilization was successful in bringing about radical rethinking or
abandonment of the projected transport and water management developments.
Hayes has written an excellent book that is well researched, well articulated and
very readable. It will be of interest not only to specialists of French institutions and
politics but also to analysts of public policies. The clear constructive critique of POS
and the precisions it brings to the analysis of the French case will also be helpful to
those who are interested in comparative analysis of new social movements. It is a
shame, however, that the two extremely interesting case studies of the movements only
receive a short and rather dry treatment. In that respect, the book is a bit frustrating for
those working on movements as such. As the author points out, the objective of the
book is to underline the importance of meso-level analysis but the lens remains focused
on these two levels without attempting to extend the analysis. It would have been
extremely interesting to have learnt more about the decision-making process of groups
at the micro-level, pointing out the role of individual actors which is all the more
important as the protest relies on the activism of a small number of environmentalists
and campaigners.
Florence Faucher-King, CEVIPOF Sciences Po, Paris
sBook reviewsBook reviews
Book reviews 471
Lily Hoffman, Susan S. Fainstein and Dennis R. Judd (eds.) 2003: Cities and Visitors:
Regulating People, Markets, and City Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell
A welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on urban tourism, this volume uses
regulation theory as its analytic frame. Including scales ranging from the global to the
local, the authors examine the role of the state in creating and marketing tourist products
as well as regulating the consumers of that product. They illustrate how national and
local governments regulate cities for the benefit of the tourism industry while ensuring
that industry and its labor markets benefit capital, cities and labor. In exploring whether
the rules and regulations of a globalized tourist industry reduce variety in urban tourism
or whether urban tourism varies significantly from place to place reflecting local culture
and politics, the authors find evidence of both trends.
This book’s genesis was a Council of European Studies funded tourism research
group of urban scholars. The papers from their third meeting (in Barcelona) form the
basis for the book’s chapters. While the editors are from the USA, contributors include
scholars from Mexico, Spain, France, UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Australia
and Israel, as well as the USA. The introductory and concluding chapters, written by
the editors, set the stage for an examination of urban tourism in the context of
globalization and summarize the advantages of using regulation theory for that analysis.
In between are discussions with rich empirical detail on such topics as security measures
at the World Soccer Cup in Paris in 1998, legalized prostitution and soft drugs in
Amsterdam, gentrification and marketing diversity in Harlem, New York, and the
challenge of changing Berlin’s image in a united Germany. The book has four parts
focusing respectively on the regulation of visitors, city space, labor markets and the
tourist industry as a whole.
This is one of the first full-length books to consider issues of regulation in the new
state of world affairs following the events of September 11th 2001, though there has, of
course, been attention given to this in periodicals. International tourism, in particular,
declined rapidly in the aftermath of that terrorist attack and has yet to fully recover
visitor numbers in many destinations. Harlem, relying particularly on international
tourists, suffered proportionately more than New York as a whole. Barcelona’s market
fluctuates more than previously and tighter security required increased taxes and fares.
Australia’s Gold Coast made up for the decline of international tourists by increased
domestic travel. Subsequent terrorist attacks (e.g. in Bali in 2002, Madrid in 2004) and
the war in Iraq, combined with economic slowdown, indicate the vulnerability of cities’
reliance on tourism and have stimulated considerable governmental intervention in the
provision of security measures.
Even since the book was published, new rules proposed under the ‘U.S.VISIT’
program will require all visitors to the US to have an interview at an overseas embassy
or consulate, pay a $100 fee, submit to photographing and fingerprinting, and carry a
passport with a machine readable barcode if issued after October 2004. Not surprisingly,
these requirements are eliciting a backlash — Brazil retaliated in kind by photographing
and fingerprinting visiting Americans while the British press underlined the economic
contribution made by touring Britons to America’s economy. Eighty-nine percent of
British tourists say their main reason to enter the US is shopping — an activity
encouraged by the currently weak dollar. Whether the new visa regulations and increased
security checks will reduce summer visitor numbers in 2005 remains to be seen, but
fears of losing the $22.2 billion which visitors from Britain, France, Germany and Japan
spent in 2002 encouraged calls to extend the visa deadline. The role of the government
in reducing security risk while attracting tourists is a delicate balancing act, as detailed
in this volume.
In the regulation of tourism’s labor force, Fainstein and Gladstone note that while
local economic and political conditions vary too widely for generalizations to be made,
because tourism is, ipso facto, place dependent (unlike footloose manufacturing firms),
most workers have the advantage that they cannot be threatened with firm relocation in
472 Book reviews
wage negotiations. Nevertheless, wages in the tourism sector in New York and Los
Angeles are relatively low, reflecting both the dominance of small-scale enterprises and
the low level of unionization. However, the authors provide evidence that due to
differences in regulatory regimes, workers in New York have better conditions. New
York’s administrations, currently under Mayor Bloomberg, have consistently supported
tourism developments, most recently by proposing major public investment in the city’s
2012 Olympic bid building projects. In the unlikely event that their bid is ultimately
successful (we won’t know until July 2005), Fainstein and Gladstone’s prescription for
tourism workers to change the rules to their benefit will be even more apt.
In their discussion of the contemporary role of art museums as flagships for urban
development, Hamnet and Shoval indicate the strong support from the local state these
new museums are attracting, despite their dubious benefit to local residents. Although
the authors note that new museums may have a legitimating function, they have to be
successful at drawing visitors for this to happen. While the authors claim to have shown
that not all are successful, in fact little data on visitor numbers or revenue are given. A
table showing the 10 most visited attractions in London, Paris, and New York in 1997
is accompanied by a note in the text about the opening of Tate Modern, with over 5
million visitors in 2001, but there is no mention that New York’s fifth largest attraction
in 1997 — the World Trade Center Observation Deck — was demolished by terrorists
in September 2001, about a month after a New York Times reporter quoted here
proclaimed that ‘Lower Manhattan has become a cultural destination in its own right
capitalizing on the growing popular interest in heritage and history’ (p. 230). Indeed,
Ground Zero has become among the leading tourist destinations in the city.
As the editors note in concluding, using regulation theory to analyze tourism has
numerous advantages. It allows for both structure and agency to be considered and can
explore the relationships between political economy and culture. It enables analysis of
various economic sectors at varying scales. This book is rich both theoretically and in
empirical cases. It will be invaluable to urban and tourism scholars. It is an appropriate
text for advanced courses.
Briavel Holcomb, Rutgers University
André Drainville 2004: Contesting Globalization: Space and Place in the World Economy.
With a foreword by Saskia Sassen. London and New York: Routledge.
Startled by the consequences of Thatcherism and Reaganomics and inspired by a series

of global conferences, large parts of the social scientific community in the 1990s have
focused on concepts like ‘global civil society’, ‘global governance’, ‘network society’
and other cosmopolitan abstractions. The outcome has often been a terminological fog
which has revealed concrete struggles and power relations. It is one of the many merits
of Contesting Globalization that it contributes to clearing the view again.
The book aims at unearthing ‘possible futures that risk becoming buried in
cosmopolitan ideology’ (p. 11). For this purpose, the author distinguishes between two
‘modes of social relations to the world economy’: a ‘unitary’ mode and a ‘civic’ mode.
The civic mode means processes of global governance, organized within the framework
of international conferences or by institutions like the World Bank and with strong
participation of the ‘global civil society’. Its forms are, for example, declarations,
agendas or development programs that aim at enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness
of neoliberal politics. In contrast, the unitary mode consists of campaigns which are at
the same time transnational and rooted in concrete (local) struggles and thereby
contribute to the making of ‘transnational subjects’. Examples are transnational
campaigns to strengthen local strikes or to improve the working conditions in the
Mexican maquiladora industry.
Book reviews 473
Drawing on situationist concepts like dérives, Drainville explores the emancipatory

possibilities with which the contextualized transnational practices of the unitary mode
are ‘pregnant’. Dérives were a form of urban action developed and practiced by the
Internationale Situationniste in the 1950s and 1960s. They aimed at reclaiming urban
space and transforming it into an ‘unalienating “unitary milieu” where the functional
divisions between work and leisure, and between private spaces and public places, would
wither away’ (p. 35). For this purpose, the situationist dériveurs abandoned their usual
reasons for moving about the city and deviated from their normal routes; they followed
scattered hints and were open for chance encounters. In the same sense, transnational
campaigns move around the world economy: ‘Abandoning for a while their usual
trajectories . . . avoiding the grand avenues opened by neoliberal governance’ (p. 147)
and transnationalizing contextualized struggles, thus ‘preparing the ground for a
successful, self-supportive and self-governing global neighbourhood à la Jane Jacobs’
(p. 140).
The two modes of social relations to the world economy are heuristic tools. As such,
they do inform empirical work as well as strategic choices. They direct our view to those
social processes which are veiled by the abstract and decontextualized terminology of
the global governance literature. What they cannot do is be a substitute for empirical
work. This is important to emphasize (and it is indeed emphasized several times in the
book) because otherwise some of the author’s own empirical observations could be
misunderstood. For example, when Drainville in chapter 4 analyses the ‘civic ordering
of global social relations’ or when he talks about a ‘Manichaean struggle’ between
transnational subjects rooted in concrete places and globalizing elites, there seems to be
little room for the contradictions of neoliberal governance or for hybrid (e.g. neither
unitary nor civic) international terrains like the World Social Forum. In fact, however,
this room exists, as becomes clear in chapter 5 and the conclusion (in my view the
strongest and most enriching parts of the book). Here Drainville states that ‘All social
forces present on the terrain of the world economy, whether constituted as NGOs, local
unions or social movements, are necessarily involved in both modes of relation to the
world economy’ (p. 155). Thus, what is a unitary connecting point of situated practices
and what is an anchoring point of hegemonic order is a conjunctural matter, and there
may emerge, of course, limited possibilities for social forces to divert sites of neoliberal
governance into their opposite by resetting them in the ‘continuum of experience’ (p.
155).
One point to which, in my opinion, too little attention is given in the book is the
recent transformations in neoliberal politics. Drainville distinguishes between two
periods in the development of neoliberalism. In the first, following the breakdown of
the Bretton Woods System, core regulatory agencies of the world economy like the IMF
and the World Bank have designed neoliberal concepts of control, while shunning
NGOs. The second period is characterized by a move to governance: the same agencies
now emphasized ‘inclusivity, participation, consensus-building and the weaving of
partnerships with would-be GCS [Global Civil Society] representatives’ (p. 114). The
latter is certainly true for the 1990s. However, how does the ongoing authoritarian
transformation of capitalist states, for which the recent wars and ‘security’ laws are the
most visible expression, fit in this picture? Do we still live in the ‘age of governance’
as Drainville suggests, or has not the very failure of neoliberal governance revealed a
hegemonic vacuum of global capitalism which is now being filled with more and more
violent state politics? And consequently, doesn’t the ‘Manichaean struggle’ take place
to a lesser extent between a civic and a unitary mode of social relations to the world
economy than between the unitary mode and a repressive ‘new constitutionalism’
(Stephen Gill), with both being an expression of the civic mode’s failure?
There will be further research on these issues, and this will advantageously draw
upon Drainville’s ‘experimental work of theory’ (p. 16). In summary, this is a really
inspiring and valuable book that should contribute to the reshaping of the theoretical
frame through which large parts of the social sciences look at the making of
474 Book reviews
‘transnational subjects’. Like Drainville, starting from concrete and diverse social
struggles instead of creating ‘cosmopolitan ghosts’ is a precondition for investigating
more radical possibilities and for the social sciences to become part of a possible
‘hegemonic articulation’ (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) of contextualized
transnational practices.
Markus Wissen, Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning, Erkner

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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAIJURInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research0309-13172005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

2005292Book reviewsBook reviewsBook reviews

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Startled by the consequences of Thatcherism and Reaganomics and inspired by a series

Drawing on situationist concepts like dérives, Drainville explores the emancipatory

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