since the days of Joseph Chamberlain in the. 1870s. During his years in the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of. Birmingham, he had ...
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Book reviews
topic, though again he misrepresents the position of many environmentalists. Few take sustainable development to mean the preservation of all ®nite resources, for example, or the sacri®ce of `all other components of welfare . . . in the interests of preserving the environment exactly in the form it happens to be in today' (p. 2). More importantly, in rightly exposing the contradictions of sustainable development, Beckerman fails to acknowledge its power as a policy discourse: whatever its inconsistencies, sustainable development can be seen as both responsive to and constitutive of changing social and political relations with the environment (Owens, 1994). Its growth to prominence, post-Brundtland, is part of the same political process as that which gained momentum in the early 1970s, when Beckerman (1974) launched his ®rst robust attack on the anti-growth school. Whatever its inconsistencies, the new discourse of sustainable development has enhanced recognition of the environmental components of welfare and, because it was hastily embraced by unsuspecting politicians, provided powerful new levers in environmental policy. Consistency, after all, was never a prerequisite for political action. Beckerman's framework is essentially utilitarian; `needs' should by and large be determined by individual preferences (rival views on this subject `lie outside the ®eld of scienti®c discourse' p. 118); and preferences, in aggregate, should be a guide to political action. When not expressed in markets, they should be revealed through such techniques as contingent valuation, the only alternative, apparently, being a `mystical' approach (p. 123). This much is predictable, and is not so much blowing a whistle as playing a familiar tune. Yet Beckerman introduces dierent and sometimes challenging perspectives: he acknowledges problems with de®ning welfare and accepts that maximizing utility may not be our only goal; he admits of judgements based on moral intuition, of the kind that `decent human beings ought to respect nature' (p. 144, emphasis added); and he concedes that nonutilitarian approaches may oer important insights in the analysis of environmental issues. This is refreshing, but also frustrating, for we are left with competing moral doctrines without a full exploration of their implications for the case expounded in the book. Beckerman is perceptive, provocative, sometimes infuriating and always impatient of weak arguments. But his own do not always stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps his biggest failing, like that
of others in the increasingly fashionable contrarian literature, is his representation of the environmental movement as static and dogmatic, arrested in a time warp of the 1960s and 1970s, their old preoccupations scarcely disguised in the new rhetoric of sustainability. He fails to locate the environmental debate within a wider framework of social and political change. One can take issue with particulars, but it seems churlish not to give environmentalists some credit for a transformation of political ecology in the past quarter of a century. As Weale (1992: 211) has observed, what was established in the early 1970s `was not simply a con®guration of policy institutions, but also a process of policy exploration and development'. Environmentalism itself has both in¯uenced and been moulded by this process. Susan Owens University of Cambridge Conservation Foundation 1987: State of the environment: a view toward the nineties. Washington, DC: Conservation Foundation. Beck, U. 1992: Risk society. London: Sage. Beckerman, W. 1974: In defence of economic growth. London: Jonathan Cape. Owens, S. 1994: Land, limits and sustainability: a conceptual framework and some dilemmas for the planning system. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 19, 439±56. Weale, A. 1992: The new politics of pollution. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Chant, S. and McIlwaine, C. 1995: Women of a lesser cost. Female labour, foreign exchange and Philippine development. London: Pluto Press. xii + 372 pp. £45.00 cloth, £15.95 paper. ISBN: 0 7453 0946 1 cloth, 0 7453 0945 3 paper. Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine have made a considerable contribution to the literature on women and development with this book (although they have taken poetic licence with the title; the book is only indirectly concerned with foreign exchange). Their focus is to explore the nature of the links between the form and behaviour of households and women's increasing levels of both employment and migration and to seek a conceptual framework for their holistic study. Their aim is to ascertain whether development strategies focusing on export-led development exacerbate or ameliorate the subordinate situation of women. Their ®ndings lead them to
Book reviews 121 argue for theoretical frameworks open to notions of multicausality and for empirical analyses which take into account the interplay between the economic, social and demographic aspects of women's employment. In keeping with a major trend in current research on gender and development they focus on women employed in industries engaged in export-orientated development, namely, export manufacturing, international tourism and sex work. They look at women's participation in these industries in three dierent places ± Boracay, Lapu-Lapu City and Cebu City ± all located in the central and western Visayas. Surveys were conducted with 240 low-income households as well as with 77 workers in the three occupational sectors. As we have come to expect with Sylvia Chant's work it is authoritatively referenced and jampacked with information. But it is not so much what we are told that interests me as what has been left out. In what way are we introduced to the women in the study? We know that they are from lowincome households and that they are Christians, but the (three) references on ethnicity are opaque at the very least. We are not introduced to their words ± not one single quote ± or even to images of them. Neither do the authors appear to consider it a problem that some of the data on women in the household surveys come from women who were interviewed and some is provided by the men who were interviewed. Furthermore, in parts of the text it is unclear whether the ®gures for women relate only to the women who were interviewed or also the wives of the men who were interviewed. We are told that the authors conducted the interviews. But this must have been done with translators. Why were their local counterparts not given overt recognition? How did this method aect the data collected? Were the data translated? There has been too much said and written about notions of dierence and representation for the authors to have treated this aspect of their research design as unproblematic. Such an approach smacks of the kind associated with the outside `expert', as does their de®nition of household. With a nod to the literature on `co-operative con¯icts' they claim `. . . it is generally agreed that a household is a group of people who share the same residence and participate collectively, if not always cooperatively, in the basic tasks of reproduction and consumption' (p. 4). It is a de®nition that sounds as if it has come out of the 1960s not the 1990s
where it has been subject to much contestation, emphases now lying on notions of ¯ows rather than Eurocentric notions of sharing the same residence. Furthermore, it is extremely odd that in a study on women we are not told precisely how many were interviewed. We are told that a total of 317 survey interviews was conducted but we are not told how many of the household survey interviewees were women or whether the household surveys were based on interviews with a household head (or how they de®ned the head of the household or how they de®ned low income). If the interviewees were household heads, then approximately only 30 women ± a number derived from pie diagrams ± may have been interviewed out of a total of 240 interviewees. Neither are we told whether the surveys were random or nonrandom yet this is crucial in terms of whether the data can be used to extrapolate to the broader population or to compare settlements, both of which the authors do. In relation to the occupational surveys we are, once again, not told how the samples were chosen but we are told that 59 women and 18 men were interviewed. This gave three occupational subsamples of 24, 37 and 16, i.e., too small for any meaningful comparison. Yet the authors proceed to make comparisons not only between but also within these groups, for example, `Summing up the major dierences between the two localities, workers in [manufacturing employment] in Lapu-Lapu are more likely to be young and single, with migrants residing either in boarding houses or with other relatives in the city' (p. 163). But this authoritative-sounding statement is based on a (nonrandom?) sample of only 12 workers in each locality. Moreover, this sloppy style (substitute samples for localities) creates confusion in places where it is dicult to tell whether the authors are describing features of the settlement population as a whole or of the sample. Finally, despite their claim that the household interviews will act as a point of comparison with the occupational surveys the bulk of the analysis is based on interviews with the 59 women in the three target employment sectors and links between the two surveys are extremely sporadic and weak with one chapter devoted to a discussion of both surveys. As the authors say the book is based on `speculative comparison' (p. 257); they claim that future research needs to be based upon larger samples, arguing that this would require more
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Book reviews
time and money. I argue it needs a more ecacious survey design and one that would take into account the positioning of the researcher in relation to the researched. Linda Peake York University, Toronto
Cherry, G.E. 1994: Birmingham: a study in geography, history and planning. Chichester: Wiley. xiv + 258 pp. £37.50 cloth. ISBN: 0 471 94900 0. This review was due for delivery on 19 September 1995. A few days earlier, Gordon Cherry was paralysed by the eects of an unsuspected brain tumour. After a brief remission towards the end of the year, he died on 11 January 1996. This review has been written in the shadow of these tragic events. Early retirement from the University of Birmingham in 1991 allowed Gordon Cherry to plan a number of books. All of them were based on the combination of history/geography/ planning which had fascinated him since the late 1960s. Having lived and worked in the Birmingham area since 1967, he had long wanted to write about the history of planning in the `Midland metropolis', which he saw as a great exemplar since the days of Joseph Chamberlain in the 1870s. During his years in the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham, he had formed close links with Birmingham planners and politicians, and this experience had much to oer him as an author. Cherry's Birmingham is a comprehensive economic and social history of the city since the Middle Ages, with an early emphasis on geography giving way increasingly to urban and regional planning. This structure allows the author to make full use of the rich corpus of secondary literature which Birmingham has stimulated over many years, while drawing on his personal understanding of the city's planning since the turn of the century. As an early title in the Belhaven World Cities Series, edited by R.J. Johnston and P.L. Knox, it achieves the series' aim of giving a `sense of place' distinguishing Birmingham from the other cities while conveying the shared experience of the `world city'. The result, as the author emphasizes, is a `planning history' of Birmingham, a rounded example of what the Planning History Group/International Planning History Society has been developing since the 1970s.
Cherry's account of the early development of Birmingham stresses the site and the regional setting of the growing market town. The rise of metalworking creates an industrial base which allows Birmingham to become a centre of industrialization from the eighteenth century. Eective government now comes to the fore, with Birmingham ready to assume municipal status in 1838. Like other historians before him, Cherry stresses the importance of nonconformity in the growth of town government, culminating in the mayoralty of Joseph Chamberlain from 1873 to 1876. The spread of municipalization, the pursuit of public health and the launch of the Corporation Street improvement scheme in 1876 helped make Birmingham a national leader of urban government. By 1905, the city was ready to take the lead in the new science and practice of town planning. Up to this point, Cherry's account is a clear and convincing reworking of existing orthodoxy rather than a source of new interpretations. However, no other result could be expected, given the aims of the series and the dense character of the existing literature. The twentieth century is fresher ground, however. Cherry begins by describing the main housing zones, on lines similar to those pioneered by the Bournville Village Trust during the war. The growth of the suburbs creates new perceptions of the potential of town planning, and of Birmingham's right to incorporate its surroundings in the interests of municipal eciency and a ®rm tax base. Councillor John Sutton Nettlefold, one of Britain's leading pioneers of town planning at local level, secures considerable attention on the lines indicated in Cherry's earlier work. From here onwards, a series of outstanding archive photographs of local housing complement the text. Birmingham's planning reputation allowed it to shine in more dicult circumstances between the wars. Municipal housing was its most prominent achievement but roads, parks and civic buildings gradually modernized the city. A young city engineer, Herbert Manzoni, adopted a new, city-wide approach in the later 1930s and, like Nettlefold before him, built up a national reputation. His systems of ring and radial roads, and slum redevelopment areas, had already been approved by the time wartime damage and deterioration helped create the conditions in which they could be carried out. Manzoni in¯uenced much of the building of Birmingham after 1945, but it was perhaps the shortage of
