Volume 33.

4 December 2009 107993

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00934.x

BOOK REVIEWS

Review Essay Ulrich Beck and Cosmopolitanism

ijur_934 1079..1093

Ulrich Beck 2005: Power in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ulrich Beck 2006: Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sociological theory has many faces. The overview of current books which are classied as theoretical allows us to distinguish two major types of theorizing. Some authors treat theory as the explanation of observed events and phenomena, attained by discovering general and universal mechanisms of social life represented by social laws. They answer why questions. This is a rigid idea of a theory, patterned on the practice of some of the hard natural sciences. But it is not the dominant approach. Today most famous and widely read theoretical contributions are of a different order. They aim at providing orientation in the chaos of social events and phenomena which surround us, by means of generalized diagnoses of social condition. These are not just concrete descriptions in common-sense terms, but generalized descriptions using special, more sophisticated and precise vocabulary,And they do not avoid value judgements, depicting visions of the good society, that sometimes border on new utopias. This brand of theorizing becomes particularly relevant in a time of rapid and fundamental social change, when not only ordinary people but sociologists stand bafed in view of the emerging new social world surrounding them and ask: where we are, where have we come from, and where we are going. We undoubtedly live in such a period. The awareness of the novelty and uniqueness of our epoch is rendered by the multiple terms now widely used in sociological discourse: postmodernity, late modernity, high modernity, second modernity, reexive modernity, risk society, network society, information society, globalized society, and the most recent in this list Ulrich Becks cosmopolitan society. For the common people and sociologists alike the question What is going on? becomes more pressing than the question Why do these events happen?. Hence the proliferation of diagnostic rather than explanatory theories, attempting to squeeze reality into some orderly conceptual framework, some manageable model that would give dened meaning to the perceived transformations and also promise a future, better world. The famous social theorists of our time Jurgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Manuel Castells, Jean Baudrillard and others have provided various generalized and axiologically tainted diagnoses of this sort (sometimes as a second track to their universal, explanatory models, e.g. Habermass communication theory, Giddenss structuration theory etc.). Ulrich Beck joins their ranks with the two volumes under review, originally published in Germany and now available in English. I would suggest that they should be read in the reverse order of publication: Cosmopolitan Vision rst, because it explicates the foundations of Becks theory (generalized diagnosis), and Power in the Global Age after, because it provides more concrete applications of the theory, particularly to the domain of politics, both internal and international. In both books he extends and elaborates some ideas already hinted at in the earlier, well-known works on the risk society and second modernity. The reader who is acquainted with those will have a much easier task understanding the recent volumes. But the scope and ambition of the present project (with the third volume on Cosmopolitan Europe already announced) is incomparably larger. Becks theoretical program is getting persistently enriched.
2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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The leading concepts in the trilogy are cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization, the particular condition of a society, and the dynamic process leading to that. There are innumerable perhaps even too many permutations of these concepts: cosmopolitan reality, cosmopolitan realism, cosmopolitan outlook, cosmopolitan empathy, cosmopolitan pity, cosmopolitan regime, cosmopolitan state, cosmopolitan common sense and others. There are also multiple typologies: banal cosmopolitanism, existential cosmopolitanism, institutionalized cosmopolitanism, etc. The core meaning of cosmopolitanism is the acknowledgment of otherness as at the same time different and equal. And the main line of argumentation may be summarized as follows: 1 Contemporary society has evolved beyond the phase of modernity and already acquired a new shape which may be labelled second modernity. Its dominant new features include: the interrelatedness and interdependence of people across the globe, growing inequalities in a global space, the emergence of new supranational organizations in the areas of economics (multinational corporations), politics (non-state actors like IMF, World Bank, WTO, International Court of Justice), civil society (advocacy social movements of global scope like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, feminist organizations), new normative precepts like human rights, new types and proles of global risks, new forms of warfare, global organized crime and terrorism. Their common denominator is cosmopolitanization, i.e. the erosion of clear borders separating markets, states, civilizations, cultures and the life-worlds of common people. The world is more and more boundaryless. This inuences human identity construction which need no longer be shaped by the opposition to others, in the negative, confrontational dichotomy of we and them. What I nd particularly insightful is Becks emphasis that cosmopolitization does not operate somewhere in the abstract, in the external macro-sphere, somewhere above human heads, but is internal to the everyday life of the people (banal cosmopolitanism), and to the internal operation of politics, which at all levels, even the domestic, has to become global, taking into account the global scale of dependencies, ows, links, threats, etc. (global domestic politics). 2 The awareness of these changes lags behind objective reality, because people are still thinking in terms of the national outlook, which suggests nation-states as the universal and most important containers within which human life is spent. And personal dominant identity is still dened by belonging to a certain nation-state, as opposed to other nation-states. This is already obsolete. As Beck provocatively puts it with a dose of persuasive exaggeration: Today, we Europeans act as if Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and so forth, still existed. Yet they have long since ceased to exist (2005: xi). I would rather put it in the continuous tense: they are ceasing to exist, and certainly are losing their preeminent importance, so characteristic of the epoch of rst modernity. 3 Similarly, most of sociology is still applying the rules of methodological nationalism treating societies conned within the borders of nation-states as natural units of data collection and analysis. This is also a blind avenue: Just as nation-based economics has come to a dead end, so too has nation-based sociology (2005: 23). 4 Thus the real, objective transformation of human society at the beginning of the twenty-rst century is inadequately reected both at the level of social consciousness and sociological methodology. National outlook must be replaced by cosmopolitan outlook, and methodological nationalism by methodological cosmopolitanism. And in the more concrete domain of politics: national politics with its obsession on sovereignty and autonomy must turn into politics of politics, which on the meta-level commits itself deeply to solving the issues of global, and not narrow national scope.
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The sceptic may point to the fact that sociology has been operating for a long time with ideas like cultural relativism, multiculturalism, tolerance and internationalism, and perhaps cosmopolitanism may be just a new term for quite old stuff (and not even a new term, as Beck acknowledges by referring to its use by the ancient Stoics, Kant, Arendt and Jaspers). But the prophet of a cosmopolitan vision would respond that all these ideas have been insufcient because they were built on the premise of difference, alienness, foreignness of others. Multiculturalism has meant living side by side with different people within one state, peaceful coexistence and non-interference in internal affairs as principles of international law have implied separate, autonomous, sovereign states, tolerance has meant grudging acceptance, allowance for difference as unavoidable burden. Cosmopolitan tolerance is more than that: it is not defensive, passive but active, opening toward the others, embracing them, enjoying the difference as enriching and seeing others as fundamentally the same as ourselves. As Beck likes to put it: either/or logic is replaced by both/and logic. Cosmopolitanization does not mean uniformization and homogenization. People, their groups, communities, political organizations, cultures, civilizations will (and should) remain different, sometimes even unique. But, to put it metaphorically, the walls between them must be replaced by bridges. Those bridges must be primarily erected in human heads, mentalities, imagination (cosmopolitan vision), but also in normative systems (human rights), institutions (e.g. the European Union), and domestic global politics informed by transnational concerns (e.g. energy policy, sustainable development, ghting global warming, war on terrorism). Both volumes are extremely dense, rich in factual material, but even more so in insights, intuitions, original observations and hypotheses. They give a vast panorama of social changes engulng contemporary societies at all levels, in all dimensions. They full the authors promise of providing an analysis of the social, economic and political transformations of the modern age (2005: xi). They are not an easy read, but certainly worthwhile and ultimately very rewarding. Assuming the correctness of the diagnosis of evolving cosmopolitanization presented by the author the most challenging question remains: What drives these fundamental changes? The answer we nd in both books is not direct but implicit: time and again Beck invokes his earlier idea of a risk society. He seems to suggest that the real, objective force pushing toward cosmopolitan awareness, cosmopolitan axiology of global solidarity and human rights, and institutionalized cosmopolitanism of transnational regulative agencies is the objective expansion and qualitative novelty of risks humanly produced threats (side effects of the advance of civilization) which do not know state borders, class divisions, gender differences etc., and are touching everybody equally with no privileged escape route. Examples are pollution, global warming, nuclear and chemical catastrophes, the diseases of civilized living, etc. But what is behind the emergence of these risks, and their new scale? Clearly, the causes are technological, civilizational innovations. But, of course, it is not only technologically implied risks that push toward cosmopolitanization. Not only the side effects of technology, but technological developments proper exert the same inuence: developments in transportation extend the scope of interpersonal contacts across the world; communications, telecommunications, computerization, the internet, cellular phones extend the scope of mediated contacts, not knowing any borders. Other crucial innovations include technologies of mass production of standardized goods and services (McDonaldization), creating a global market, but also mass production and easy proliferation of weapons, facilitating global terrorism and new global wars. Huge challenges are ahead for sociological theorists who would not rest content with even the most insightful generalized diagnosis of our society (like Becks), but strive for a true sociological explanation. Let us note that those classical masters of sociology who tried to come to terms with social change and the absolute, qualitative novelty of the rst modernity contrasted with traditional, agricultural society, always combined diagnoses with explanations: Comte joined his picture of a positive societypermeated with science,
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with the law of three stages; Spencer supplemented his vision of industrial society with the theory of social evolution; Marx linked his image of capitalism unmasked with the universal dynamics of class struggle and revolutions, Weber coupled his description of the capitalist market and the spirit of capitalism with the idea of progressive rationalization, Durkheim saw the origins of modern organic solidarity in the universal mechanisms of structural and functional differentiation, and particularly the division of labor. Theorists of the second modernity, confronting it with the rst modernity, should draw a lesson: to nd oneself in the annals of sociological tradition one has to go beyond descriptions and diagnoses toward understanding how the eternally changing social world is becoming and how it operates. And what eventually drives this incessant dynamics. One can certainly expect such a next step from Ulrich Beck, and his readers will eagerly await his future books on cosmopolitan theory, written not only as he puts it now with critical intent (2005: 2434), but with explanatory, fully theoretical intent.
Piotr Sztompka, Jagiellonian University at Krakow

Mustafa Dike 2007: Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

In the fall of 2005, many people around the world watched in astonishment as France was convulsed by violent, countrywide, urban unrest, pitting immigrant youth from the ghettos or banlieues (suburbs) on the one hand against large contingents of police on the other. The police were backed up with verve by the then Interior Minister and now President Sarkozy, who accused the rioters of being scum; the unrest was predominantly a law and order problem, created by a drug-gang youth subculture of criminality from poor neighborhoods that had fallen through the cracks. Although unprecedented in scale and intensity, the 2005 riots had been preceded by two other periods of urban riots, in the early 1980s and 1990s with many of the same neighborhoods involved in the unrest. But in striking contrast to 2005, Mitterrands Socialist government responded to the riots of the summer of 1981 (following on the heels of Londons Brixton riots) by fashioning an urban development agenda based on ideas of democratic local self-government (autogestion), by deepening participation in local management, even alluding to the lofty goal of the right to the city made famous by Henri Lefebvre. The policies sought to integrate neighborhoods with high concentrations of social housing and poverty into the broader urban fabric and to combat racist stereotyping and vilication. The government appointed an elected Mayor, not a central government appointee, to head a national commission to address neighborhood development and problems, thereby expressing its commitment to the new initiatives for democratic decentralization. So how was it that social democratic discourse of the social justice of the city of the early period gave way two and a half decades later to an overriding stress on public order, in which spatial inequality and deprived neighborhoods suffering from de-industrialization and high unemployment were no longer spaces where one could identify the signs or symptoms of larger problems (p. 94)? Answering these questions is the task Dike has set himself in this well-researched and provocative book, in which he draws predominantly on the texts of government laws and programs since the early 1980s. Dike should be congratulated on providing perhaps the most comprehensive account in English of the evolution of French urban policy with respect to neighborhoods where the bulk of the social housing (HLMs) are located and which have been targeted as priority planning zones. Dikes answers point to three factors that shaped the way socio-economic factors in the context of ethnic and religious diversity nd spatial expression in the residential patterns of urban areas, and he presents some subtle arguments about the unintended
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consequences of well-intentioned social policy objectives. First, the roots of the difculty of addressing and solving spatial segregation are in the republican myth of the French nation (p. 10) which emphasizes a common culture and identity and [where] any reference to communities is deliberately avoided because they imply separatism, which is unacceptable under the principle of the one and indivisible republic (p. 4). The French regime has built-in obstacles to dealing with multiculturalism, which it views as a threat to the social, political and even physical integrity of France. This political tradition views urban or other local subcultures as communitarian threats, and the fact that they are spatially delimited makes it virtually inevitable that populations living in social housing will be stigmatized on the basis of ethnic or religious criteria. Second, the launching of a progressive urban policy in the early 1980s set in motion a governmental and bureaucratic logic of intervention, including the isolation of problem areas as distinct from the broader processes of urbanization, the collection of statistics on them and the establishment of new security institutions dedicated to monitoring these specic areas. This process soon began to constitute rather than merely respond to these areas. Over time, the urban policy target neighborhoods became permanent, thus creating a vicious cycle of a pathological stateneighborhood symbiosis, where the states tunnel vision blocked out other possible discourses such as those proposed by the residents themselves who articulated democratic demands. Third, the unprecedented gains by Le Pens antiimmigrant National Front party in the 1983 municipal elections changed the political context to such an extent that the ideals of the earlier progressive urban policy simply could not be pursued with the same vigor. These three factors combined to transform state urban policy over time away from the social democratic decentralized initiatives of the early 1980s towards what Dike ominously calls the coming of the penal, police state of today. The response to the 1991 riots displayed a mix of these two polar orientations, but the trend was unmistakably towards the hollowing out of the social and political dimensions of urban inequality. I would point to four areas for comment. First, throughout the book, an almost anarchist tone describes France as a penal, repressive, police, almost totalitarian, state in the making. But what distinguishes France from Turkmenistan or Syria? Well, it is the fact that for all of Sarkozys rhetoric about security and law and order, the French republican tradition still has to balance these concerns against those of civil and human rights to which it is also committed. Yet this tension in absent from the book and makes the books broader theoretical generalizations based on the Foucauldian ideas of Ranciere less persuasive. Second, and related to the rst, the book takes the implicit position that representative democratic institutions are less effective or legitimate than participatory ones. The author describes a neighborhood association as excluded because the elected mayor does not consult them formally. But surely there are limits to how small-scale jurisdictions of governance can be, for both theoretical as well as practical reasons. It should also be noted that other analysts (such as Le Gals) have detected the opposite trend of a shift from a representative to a more participatory type of democracy in France. This problem is reected in the inadequate attention given to how elected local governance institutions actually function. Third, it is not clear to what extent a preoccupation with social cohesion and protecting an indivisible nation are specic concerns of Frances republican model. The social capital debate, in particular in relation to community development in the Anglo-Saxon countries, is just as much about preventing social fracture at the urban level as in France. This leads to the nal point that although the book does a very good job of showing the spatial manifestation of socioeconomic problems, its evidence leaves the reader unclear to what extent the problems of the banlieues are a problem primarily not of urban policy but of multiculturalism and its dilemmas.
Kian Tajbakhsh, Cultural Research Bureau, Tehran

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Janet M. Conway 2004: Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social Movements Contesting Globalization, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fenwood Publishing.

Janet Conway offers in this book an innovative analysis of the transformation of new social movements in the 1990s through the emergence of anti-globalization themes. Her study follows the Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) in Toronto during the period 19927 and thus documents the mobilizations that bubbled up between the fall of the Soviet Union and the well-known events in Seattle. She provides a convincing demonstration that the ethnography of a local coalition of movements can help us understand the global context of the evolution of movements as well as their forms. She combines a grounded and detailed study of the movement with reections on the theory of social movements and highlights the importance of the production of new forms of knowledge as a critical outcome of mobilization. The book offers a rare account from an engaged academic and owes much of its rich details and close understanding of the organizational development to her role as an insider. What could be seen as a limitation of her study an insider account of a coalition based in the mid-1990s is one of its most striking qualities. To an extent, this account is not only an analysis of some of the successes of the movement and of its difculties but also a self-reexive exploration of her experiences and a recognition of the transformative impact of knowledge production within the movement. As a coalition of movements active over several years, the MNSJ engaged in a diversity of projects ranging from metro-based campaigns to more ambitious projects connecting with the national and international agenda (in particular NAFTA). The MNSJ also developed a series of seminars on economical and political literacy that concentrated on building and sharing knowledge. This challenged the suspicion many activists feel towards experts and primarily intellectual pursuits that seem to counter their desire for action. The initiative contributed to bringing to the fore tensions about organization, vision, practices. Conway shows how the interconnections between place and identity provide the context and resource for forms of resistance to globalization. She also articulates the thesis that the production of new knowledge is one of the most innovative and challenging dimensions of new social movements. She offers the reader three points of entry, or three parts that could almost stand separately. The rst part is a reection on theories of change and new social movements. The second is based on her ethnography though it is by no means a descriptive account. Conway uses this methodology to guide us through the thematic history and development of the movement. The latter part places the MNSJ in the context of anti-globalization movements and anti-neoliberalism mobilizations. Chapter 8 stands out in particular in this section: it concentrates on the uses of and attitudes towards knowledge in movements. It shows how a particular practice of knowledge building contributes to feed new expectations and aspirations for reections and vision. Conway does not explain whether this development relates to the predisposition of workshop participants or is something that emerges from the practice but underlines how it played a part in the transformation of a culture of interaction leading to an organizational crisis. Disputes between factions were ultimately resolved through the breakdown of this education project. The book is well written and accessible to a variety of audiences, even in its more theoretical beginning section. It demonstrates how ethnographic work is not only a method for the collection of data that is particularly appropriate and useful in the study of movements over a long period of time, but is also an important step in a theoretical endeavor. However, the focus on knowledge is paradoxically not combined with a reection on culture and styles. Whilst ethnographic accounts are sometimes criticized for being overly descriptive, this is by no means an issue in this book. In fact, vignettes or closer accounts of events, meetings or interviews would have helped the reader to understand the actors, their motives and modes of interaction. The author has very deliberately decided to avoid the narrative and descriptive phase. Her voice as an actor
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within MNSJ is missing save for the fact that the book is an explicit effort to use hindsight to understand how and why the movement wilted. It would have been interesting to know more about the actors involved, how they changed through the process, how they felt they had learnt and changed through the seminars and engagement with visionary work, what the praxis of knowledge production entailed. In some sense the book is almost impersonal and detached and effectively lters what we can learn about the movement.
Florence Faucher-King, Vanderbilt University

Olga Shevchenko 2009: Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

The 1990s will remain in the memory of the Russian people as a time of the shattering of dreams and collapse of life courses. Reform, modernization, transformation all these labels will retain their negative connotations of hardship and tragedy for a long time. As the long decade starts to gradually oat away into the domain of history, the space emerges for studying the events and processes that shaped postsocialist Russia critically. While studies abound that evaluate the decade in terms of economic transformations and political transition, surprisingly little attention is given to everyday life and the ways in which ordinary people worked their way through the rst transitional years. Olga Shevchenko makes an impressive contribution to the scarce (in Russian as well as in English) literature on the subject. Her book focuses on the way ordinary inhabitants of Moscow lived within a broad interpretive framework of a total crisis and put that framework into the quotidian practice of maintaining their households and ensuring their autonomy. Shevchenko starts off exploring the notion of crisis by contrasting sudden disruptions of normal life and chronic crisis situations whereby a chronic crisis may become the very essence of a communitys identity, a mode of living and a way of self-imagining without which the community is inconceivable (p. 3). In discussing what she calls total crises Shevchenko relies on Kai Eriksons work on chronic disasters, but argues that total crisis has a wholly different dynamic and therefore wholly different effects from sudden crises. She adopts a culturalized denition of everyday life as all activity based on everyday knowledge, on notions widely shared and largely accepted without question in the contemporary Russian setting (p. 5) and sets her focus on exploring the interpretive framework through which Muscovites make sense of the everyday. In eight chapters of the book Shevchenko proceeds from deriving the changing rhetoric of crisis in Russian mass media and intellectual settings to the reception of this rhetoric by ordinary people. Thus, Chapter 2 traces the notion of crisis from the Soviet-time perception of the crisis of Western capitalism to the idea that late socialism is itself in crisis, and nally to the crisis of postsocialist transition and reforms. The ordinary Muscovite experience of this rhetoric is studied in Chapter 3. Ordinary residents develop an interpretive framework, a particular kind of habitus, and put it into practice by establishing the household as a social unit parallel to society at large and the state. Shevchenko indicates the systemic character of this framework: the crisis resided in the web of connections that individuals saw between all the isolated instances of postsocialist decline (p. 43). Chapter 4 is devoted to exploring the emergence of the crisis habitus and its relation to solidarity and social interactions. Shevchenko discusses the notion of autonomy (often employed to describe the postsocialist sociality) and principally asserts that its unit is not an individual, but a household (p. 82). This observation is further grounded in Chapter 5, which documents earning and consumption practices. The focus here is on the importance of the family cauldron whereby individual labor, employment and spending strategies are geared
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toward the overall welfare of the (extended) household. Everyday autonomy as the process in which [i]nsofar as people could achieve it . . . they withdrew from the public infrastructure in search of a parallel system of institutions (p. 127) is discussed in Chapter 6. Here we nd illuminating examples such as household property fortication (e.g. by means of strengthened steel doors). In Chapter 7 the author discusses the political meaning and outcomes of crisis as an interpretive framework that produced what she calls reverse political socialization: all politics and all media discourses came to be perceived as fundamentally false and corrupt. [E]xpressions of distrust developed a value of their own as they informed identities and solidarities (p. 165), but the creation of collective political subjectivity was greatly inhibited. In the conclusion Shevchenko suggests that the adaptive effect and normalization function of the interpretive framework of crisis has essentially contributed to prolonging and even perpetuating the crisis itself, inhibiting collective action and collective subjectivity. One of the merits of the book is that Shevchenko, writing in the 2000s, builds upon her eldwork conducted in 19982000, thus catching the workings of crisis framework in situ during and after the crisis of 1998 (when the Russian government defaulted). Her data, obtained through ethnographic observation and in-depth panel interviews, and supplemented with expert interviews and media analysis, reveal the urban culture of late 1990s Moscow in rich and vivid detail, while all the time maintaining a well-structured theoretical basis and methodological rigor. In my opinion, the chief achievement of this book, in addition to conceptualizing and documenting the emergence of a crisis interpretive framework, is the deep insight that it offers into the true meaning of the autonomy of postsocialist subjects. The decline of collectivity and the dissolution of sociality stand prominently in lamentations of many commentators, who criticize the articially installed Western individualism in contemporary Russia. What these criticisms apparently miss is the actual rootedness of the autonomous subject in family, household, kin and close friendship networks that are parallel to and independent from both the state and the society. Shevchenko subtly shows that the sense of well-being was based on ensuring a possibly broad and allencompassing separation from the system (p. 128). Understanding the nature of this autonomy and the achievement of (and striving for) a sense of well-being is crucial for grasping how Muscovites actually lived their everyday lives in the tumults of the rst post-Soviet decade. On a critical note, I would like to point out that while Shevchenko clearly understands the specicity and uniqueness of Moscow as a social environment within Russia, and indeed ethnography is not about sweeping generalizations, she nevertheless does, perhaps, too little to frame Moscows special status in the Russian social world. The fact that Moscow is often radically opposed to the rest of Russia and that this relation is often very tense is well known and discussed in Russia, but may not be that evident to an English-speaking audience. Another important issue is the nature of autonomy. While Shevchenko describes it as primarily autonomy against the state, and the infrastructure and service provision that were the responsibility of the state in Soviet times, the relation of individuals and households to society at large also requires consideration in the same context. Shevchenkos arguments make it clear that the traditionally drawn associations between social networks and political action, and Habermas notion of the public sphere are grossly inadequate for describing Russian (in this case Moscow) social life. She indicates that Muscovites attained a certain skeptical postsocialist sensibility (p. 168) and a certain collective identity as parts of narod (the people) (p. 166) that was contingent upon the absence of collective action in its traditional understanding of political contention (p. 168). Yet I think we should distinguish the shared identity from the actual collectivity formed on the basis of collective identity. Perhaps this is where the applicability of traditional notions of community, and particularly local community, for describing contemporary Russian urban settings could also be evaluated.
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This being said, I think that the book is a very well-written and careful work that has neither the grand generalizing rhetoric of societal transformation, nor the irony and moralizing that, alas, so often plague studies of contemporary Russia.
Nikita A. Kharlamov, Clark University

Yasser Elsheshtawy (ed.) 2008: The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and Urban Development. London: Routledge.

The last few years have witnessed a resurgence of research on cities across the Middle East and North Africa, and this latest collection of articles by a range of urban scholars from elds such as architecture, archaeology and anthropology is a notable addition. Following on the heels of a number of edited volumes on specic cities in the region such as Cairo (Singerman and Amar, 2006) and Dubai (Kanna, 2008), the chapters in this book offer a range of perspectives on contemporary processes of globalization and urban development from across the Arab world. The collection builds on Yasser Elsheshtawys earlier (2004) edited text, Planning Middle Eastern Cities, and while it revolves around similar conceptual themes, the focus here is on a new set of cities, including Amman, Beirut, Rabat, Riyadh, Kuwait, Manama, Doha and Abu Dhabi. With works divided into two sections on emerging and struggling cities, the introductory chapters by Elsheshtawy and Fuad Malkawi conextualize this volume as one which sheds light on both the growing differences and interconnections of a group of cities currently undergoing rapid and acute change. The case studies themselves are extremely ambitious; structured as periodized accounts of urban development since the nineteenth century, each city is the focus of an empirically packed examination of architectural and urban change. These chronologies are the stuff of municipal reports, master plans, and the local urban logics of a group of cities that have to date received scant attention in English-language urban scholarship. Soa Shraywris chapter on Beirut traces various periods in the destruction and redevelopment of the citys central business district, including the vertical civil warfare that took place atop high-rise construction sites in the 1970s and 1980s and the exclusionary, corporatized shareholder planning practices presently underway. Jamila Bargach moves between contradictory moments of rupture and continuity in her chapter on the evolution of Rabat, in which she juxtaposes the acute urban change wrought by French colonial planning against the articulations of social exclusion and fragmentation of contemporary mega-projects. These concerns with the rise of neoliberal and neocolonial urban planning practices are reective of the books broader critical framework. In the words of Janet Abu-Lughod on the back cover, this book also seeks to confront the legacy of Orientalist knowledge claims about Arab cities. Indeed, one of the great virtues of this volume is that the authors have personal connections to the places about which they write. The result is a set of works that in many cases are nely attuned to the everyday realities and historical trajectories of urbanization and change, and in which the frequent attention to themes of cultural identity, hybridity and globalization is at times enriched by an autobiographical lens. Such grounded perspectives by a group of Arab scholars are particularly timely given the recent focus in Anglo-American scholarship on cities and urbanization in the Middle East and North Africa. Asecond task taken up in this collection is to connect these perspectives to critical urban theory, and in particular to global city debates. There are some insightful engagements with the work of a number of predominantly Western urban thinkers; Rami Daher, for example, explores the theories of scholars such as Susan Fainstein and Pierre Bourdieu in examining the intersections between cultural identity and neoliberal urbanization in Amman. Khaled Adhams chapter on the development of Doha connects the work of
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Zygmunt Bauman with that of Jenny Robinson in exploring the material and symbolic construction of fantasy consumptive landscapes in the quest for global city status. Elsheshtawys own chapter on Abu Dhabi inquires into the neo-colonialism of global city aspirations and recent depictions of Gulf urbanization by scholars such as Mike Davis. This critical engagement runs unevenly through the chapters, however, with some contributions favouring descriptive rather than analytical accounts of urban development. Moreover, the theoretical forays of some of the chapters are somewhat tentative, and the unproblematized deployment of terms such as modernity and neoliberalism occasionally seems at odds with the books critical and anti-colonial mandates. This is an opportunity missed, since the tremendous empirical insights in these chapters provide such fruitful ground upon which Western bias in critical urban theory might be productively confronted and recast, yet, whether in regard to constructions of global city-ness, the relations of urban neoliberalism or theories of urban social exclusion, the contributions of this volume as a critical project are at times left to the reader to infer. These concerns aside, the objective of connecting such a range of embedded and conceptual perspectives is an important one, and will hopefully catalyze similar efforts in what is emerging as a deeply trans-disciplinary body of research on cities and contemporary urban change in the region. Urban scholars across the social sciences would do well to take notice of both the spirit and insights in this collection.
Michelle Buckley, University of Oxford

Elsheshtawy, Y. (ed.) (2004) Planning Middle Eastern cities: an urban kaleidoscope in a globalizing world. Routledge, London. Kanna, A. (2008) The superlative city: Dubai and the urban condition in the early

twenty-rst century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Singerman, D. and P. Amar (2006) Cairo cosmopolitan: politics, culture, and urban space in the new Middle East. American University in Cairo Press, Cairo.

Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom and Christian Schmid (eds.) 2008: Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. London: Routledge.

Henri Lefebvre wrote or edited 71 books in his long life (19011991) (Elden, 2004). The surge in interest in his work among English-speaking scholars during the past two decades has been based on just a handful of these works, however. As eclectic as he was prolic, Lefebvre poses a daunting challenge to anyone who would attempt to synthesize or even summarize his ideas, a challenge made still greater by his writing style (which can be opaque and digressive) and by copyright restrictions exercised by his survivors (which have delayed or prevented translation of much of his corpus). Space, Difference, Everyday Life reects these circumstances, for better and for worse. On the one hand, it greatly expands the scope of Anglophone scholarship on Lefebvres wide-ranging philosophical and political enquiries, with admirable attention to biographical and historical context as well as intellectual exegesis. On the other hand, it raises as many questions as it resolves, leaving numerous loose ends (some new, others already familiar) for further research and debate. In their introduction, the editors note that previous appropriations of Lefebvre have fallen into two dominant schools or camps (they call them waves): one urban politicaleconomic, initiated by and associated with David Harvey, the other postmodern and headed up by Edward Soja. The editors reject both, as well as the debilitating dualism between political economy and cultural studies that they imply, within and beyond studies of Lefebvre. We contend that Lefebvres own view of the terms space, difference, and everyday life was signicantly different from, if not altogether incompatible with, the particular uses of these terms in those two readings. Instead they
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propose a third wave reading, which they describe as a heterodox and open-ended historical materialism that is committed to an embodied, passionately engaged, and politically charged form of critical knowledge (p. 3). On this reading, the third term of the volumes title bears a particularly heavy load: Nothing less than the benchmark of success for Marxist theory, everyday life captures the contradictions of reality and possibility within the very interstices of advanced capitalism (p. 14). The editors embrace the political economists insight that space is not an ontological category but produced by processes that are dominated, especially at large scales, by the exigencies of capital. At the same time, they recognize that smaller-scale processes express contingent factors that must also be accounted for: matters of difference rooted in identity, subjectivity, the body, meaning, affect, locality, etc. These come together, for at least half of humanity, in the urban as the principal interface between lived experience and global capitalism. Lefebvres particular virtue was to apprehend local and global, contingency and determination, in his interpretations of urban forms and everyday practices, revealing both their revolutionary potential and their banal, inertial contributions to reproducing a hegemonic capitalism. As Schmid succinctly puts it, Lefebvres aim is, so to speak, a materialist version of phenomenology (p. 39). In their conclusion, the editors endeavor to situate the books fteen chapters in this framework, linking Lefebvres urban-spatial contributions to the most promising, dialectical aspects of his broader theoretical projects and political commitments (p. 285). This is no small task, as the chapters range widely across matters of history, philosophy, politics and personalities. Many focus on Lefebvres work in relation to major gures in philosophy and Marxism (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kostas Axelos, Gramsci and Raymond Williams). Others consider his personal and political relationships to artists and critics (especially Guy Debord and the Surrealists), activists and political parties (the French Communist Party and, later, the insurgents of May 1968), and to architects and planners such as Lucien Kroll. There are also chapters devoted to specic works of Lefebvres, including The Urban Revolution, Right to the City, and the (still mostly untranslated) four-volume De lEtat (cf. Lefebvre, 2009). The overall picture that one gets from the book is rich in its details, illuminating connections Lefebvre made (and sometimes later severed) through his long life, not only to people and ideas but also to cities and towns where he worked and lived. As a complement to other recent monographs and translations (Lefebvre, 2003; 2009; Elden, 2004; Merrield, 2006), Space, Difference, Everyday Life gives Englishspeaking students and scholars a vastly improved sense of Lefebvres expansive thinking and extraordinary life. That said, it is not always clear that the collection adds up to an identiable reading of Lefebvre. The editors themselves demur on this point, declining to open up a new Lefebvre School, nor to develop a unifying perspective (p. 285). Even if one recognizes and admires the open-endedness of Lefebvres philosophy, however, one might still reasonably expect the contributors not to disagree radically on major points. Whereas several authors emphasize and praise Lefebvres uses of Heidegger, for example, Geoffrey Waite declares unequivocally that Lefebvre was a sometimes avid and always mediocre and careless reader of Heidegger (p. 95), and that LeftHeideggerianism is philosophically incoherent and politically bankrupt. If this is as important an issue as the authors suggest, then some greater sense of resolution or clarication of the core of the dispute would have strengthened the collection. More generally, one can also question whether Lefebvre simply wasnt as systematic a thinker, or as consistent, as readers and scholars might like. The editors remark in passing on his occasional intellectual imprecision and political opportunism (p.11), and Schmid correctly notes that fruitful applications of Lefebvres theory have [yet?] to be found. Manifold possibilities have arisen for this purpose, which remain to be fully explored (p. 43). Even for someone who lived as long as Lefebvre did, the range and magnitude of his output is prodigious; it is not surprising, perhaps, that the quality
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of his work appears to have varied greatly. This book takes important and necessary steps toward identifying the gaps, contradictions, and problems, as well as the strengths, of Lefebvres corpus.
Nathan Sayre, University of California, Berkeley

Elden, S. (2004) Understanding Henri Lefebvre: theory and the possible. Continuum, London and New York. Lefebvre, H. (2003) Henri Lefebvre: key writings. S. Elden, E. Lebas and E. Kofman (eds.), Continuum, London and New York.

Lefebvre, H. (2009) State, space, world: selected essays. N. Brenner and S. Elden (eds.). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London. Merrield, A. (2006) Henri Lefebvre: a critical introduction. Routledge, New York.

Kingsley Dennis and John Urry 2009: After the Car. Cambridge: Polity.

After one or two decades of neglect, low-carbon mobility futures have gained increasing public attention in the industrialized world very recently, as a consequence of the coming exhaustion of oil resources, rising concerns about climate change and the potential impacts this may have on the motor car. Transport in its motorized form is being held responsible for contributing to about a fth of global carbon-dioxide emissions, and, unlike other sectors, its share tends to increase further, particularly in quickly developing economies such as China or India. Even in industrialized countries the challenges of the future are severe, the traditional means of xing the issue seem to be extremely limited. In this context, the volume by Dennis and Urry not only presents serious thought on a possible future after the dominance of the (private) car and on related recipes how to get there, but also applies a specic framework of analysis and strategy building that relates to the new mobilities paradigm particularly developed by John Urry over the last decade (Urry, 2007). Whereas much of the earlier work on new mobilities was seeking to examine and explain the fundamental role of mobility in modern societies, this volume now deals with the limits and constraints of car-based mobility. It was denitely time to do this. The book is divided into seven chapters. The rst one roughly sketches the rationale for rethinking the car. According to the authors, this particularly relates to four major developments: climate change, peak oil, digital technologies and demographic changes combined with urbanization. The main premise of the book is that these changing circumstances are radically altering the conditions of the current mobility system and practices. The second chapter reiterates the notion of the twentieth century as the century of the motor car, which is considered emblematic because of its formation of a specic type of industry, its role as a means of socialization, and its being the centre of a possible global plague. The third chapter is of special interest, since it adopts the inspiring approach of looking at the motor car as a system, mainly following the arguments of the new mobilities paradigm. It thus frames (auto)mobility in the context of complexity, time, path dependency and the likelihood and risks of change. Against this background, the possible and probably necessary transformation of the system towards sustainability is described, with relation to technologies (Chapter 4) and organization (Chapter 5). Smart vehicles and the de-privatization of the car are core components within this line of thinking. Chapter 6 is titled models and aims at demonstrating existing cases of innovation in transport, public transit or town planning all over the world. Chapter 7 concludes the book by providing an outlook on possible futures that are distilled into three different scenarios: local sustainability, regional warlordism and digital networks of control. In its rst 100 pages, the book makes an important contribution to placing new mobilities in the context of climate change, peak oil, etc. and vice versa. It benets from the societal pervasion of mobility issues that could be achieved through this
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approach. Compared to earlier readings of this paradigm which suggest a somehow intrinsic growth of mobility as a consequence of processes of modernization the systematic approach of the book to recognizing the pandemic nature of motorized mobility and to exploring its serious constraints is very welcome. Following on from these analytical strengths, the second part of the book is slightly disappointing. What is subsumed under models comes as a random selection of cases, with no good reasons given why these are more promising than others might be, and how they would really work effectively. Treating situations as different as those evolving in China, Germany or the UK in more or less the same way raises more questions than it is able to answer. Also, some of the conceptual distinctions made are too easy, for instance, the distinctions between sprawl and compact cities. Regarding the specic societal background of the new mobilities paradigm, in a section entitled Life after the car one would have expected an outline of how daily life, ordinary things and even the extraordinary would work out then not some remarks on virtual life as promoted by platforms such as Second Life. The different scenarios for the future presented in chapter 7 cannot conceal their somehow selective, even though apparently radical, nature. Reecting on local sustainability v. virtual and real (controlled) mobility, I wondered whether one possibly powerful scenario had not been left out by the authors: the gradual but nally signicant transition of the existing system of (auto)mobility, by developing and quickly introducing new combustion technologies that make the car more compatible with peak oil and climate change, yet leave the rest of the system (e.g. ownership, oversized vehicles, car culture) more or less unchanged. The hasty attempt by the hegemonic industries to keep up with the demand for change that they neglected for so long is certainly indicative of a critical lock-in. However, it can be argued that they may learn from this innovation disaster soon and make a strong ght in defence of their market shares. Given the undoubted proliferation of the new mobilities discourse and theories promoting a better understanding of the role of movement and mobility in late-modern societies, this book reects the analytical achievements of the paradigm. However, it also reveals the difculties in indicating how this somewhat abstract future might become reality. The gap between critical analyses on the one hand and case study evidence on the other calls for more systematic exploration of the possible ways towards implementation at a larger scale. Nevertheless, despite this criticism, the book offers an inspiring alternative read that challenges conventional thinking in the transport industries, since many of them still suggest that the current crisis is one of market conditions or purchasing power, not of the system as a whole.
Markus Hesse, University of Luxembourg

Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Dorothy Holland, Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen and Enrique G. Murillo Jr 2007: Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interest, and Private Politics. New York: New York University Press.

Local Democracy under Siege deals with important issues that are at the center of inquiry in contemporary urban studies: What are the effects of globalization and the post-Fordian economy on local economic development? How does neoliberalism transform the governance of local communities? Is the rise of market rule in public institutions and policies a threat to local democracy? This kind of inquiry usually favors the study of global cities, but the book proves that such questions are also
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relevant for mid-size cities and rural areas. The authors answer these questions by studying ve communities in North Carolina (two urban, three rural) using ethnographic tools including participating in public meetings (city councils, school boards, etc), following local radio and newspapers, visiting local churches and conducting interviews among 93 local actors and ordinary citizens. The authors favor a study of venues in which what they call dramas of contention are expressed, that is, they establish links between multiple spaces in which controversial issues are discussed publicly. The aim is to see if local democracy was in fact in trouble and if so why (p. xi). Throughout the book, two arguments, which can be seen as paradoxical, are formulated: (1) American democracy is in peril because market rule and neoliberal doctrine create inequality and exacerbate the plutocratic tendencies of the political system; (2) the introduction of market rules into the policymaking process can also create new democratic possibilities and certain countervails. On the one hand, one of the dominant new tools of neoliberal governance, the private-public partnership (PPP1), has the effect of privatizing certain public services through the creation of quangos. On the other hand, the philanthropic public partnership (PPP2) represents a devolution allowing associations to have more resources to defend their points of view and circulate their non-prot visions of the public good. Local Democracy under Siege is quite convincing in regards to the rst argument but is unconvincing in regards to the second. The empirical material for the latter is sparse in comparison with that for PPP1s, and one wonders if it serves any other purpose than not to present a completely negative view of local democracy in the context of neoliberalism. The rst part of the book shows how personal political attitudes, the racialization of community affairs, and the economic colonization of public affairs such as school management have the effect of politically marginalizing people and communities, who feel disappointed, ignorant and angry about politics. Chapter 3 provides political autobiographies of ordinary citizens. The interviews reveal the difculty these people have in making links between their personal situations (jobs, degree of wealth, housing conditions, etc.) and public life in North Carolina. According to the authors, this absence of sociological imagination (p. 52) is partly due to the American tradition of individualism and the propensity to see personal problems, above all, as a result of moral failings. Chapter 4 points to racism and the difcult housing, economic, employment and environmental situations of Black Americans, Latino immigrant workers and poor whites in the ve communities studied. The lack of recognition among local leaders of these inequities reinforces political marginalization. Chapter 5 is particularly interesting in its demonstration of how the private agendas of local elites govern the management of local schools. In favoring a marketization of schools that promulgates competition between public and private schools, standardized measures for evaluating school performance and schoolbusiness partnerships, neoliberal educational reforms privilege liberty to the detriment of equality(p. 85). Cases are cited in which good schools are seen as tools for attracting business, and segregation is encouraged to maintain low taxes, high educational standards and a sense of community. Such cases are possible because marketization favors the appointment of prominent members of the business community onto school boards or other special task forces. The second part of the book is the strongest, with its detailed analysis of neoliberal governance. Chapter 6 describes the transformation of local politics due to political devolution and economic restructuring, while Chapters 7 and 8 show how outsourcing, PPP1s and PPP2s reduce public accountability and favor entrepreneurs as supercitizens. The authors provide examples showing how the denition and implementation of ofcial planning by quangos is guided by private interests. The authors ask: If the PPP in each of our research sites were authorized to act on behalf of the public good, but not entirely accountable to all residents of the sites, to whom are they accountable? (p. 143). Chapter 8 complements this interesting demonstration by studying new tools of public participation in which business interests are favored to the detriment of citizens and civil society. Quangos and special task forces increasingly replace citizen boards. In the end,
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the elite vision dominates because residents of North Carolina are discouraged from participating in local institutions. The third and nal part of the book is less convincing in its attempt to show that, though market rule leads to plutocracy, the new tools of neoliberal governance can also offer positive opportunities for civil society. While participatory democracy theory occupies a good part of the text, the empirical facts remain thin. There are still some community initiatives in neoliberal areas, but how are they different from such initiatives 40 years ago? If there is some change, is it the result of market rule and the introduction of PPP2s into the policymaking process? The extensive use of Archon Fungs concept of empowered participatory governance in these chapters and in the appendix cannot hide the fact that neoliberal governance is above all a marketization and not a democratization of community, as the second part of the book so aptly demonstrates.
Laurence Bherer, University of Montreal

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33.4 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.