Chris Pickvance, University of Kent, Canterbury. Janice Perlman 2009: ..... edited by Douglas Massey, is the product of collaborative research aiming to address.
Volume 36.2 March 2012 400–14
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01129.x
BOOK REVIEWS Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera (eds.) 2010: Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival. Cape Town: Southern African Migration Project and Ottawa: IDRC. ijur_1129_1 400..414
Jonathan Crush and Bruce Frayne (eds.) 2010: Surviving on the Move: Migration, Poverty and Development in Southern Africa. Cape Town: Idasa and Midrand: DBSA.
Even the most cursory glance at today’s headlines makes apparent the rapidly growing importance of migration in urban and regional dynamics, both within and across countries, and for a diverse range of societies around the world. European countries like the Netherlands and Denmark — to say nothing of France or Italy — struggle with deepening problems of how to integrate migrants — seeing the impact of these issues on national politics and policymaking. American states like Arizona have recently reinforced what were already uncompromising policing strategies targeted at Latino migrants, as progressive immigration reform in Washington, DC has withered away. Within the vast expanse of China, economic migrants from impoverished rural areas challenge urban policymakers and national politicians seeking to address uneven regional development and enhance social cohesion. (Internal and external) migration of various kinds, then, is an economic, cultural, political, security, geopolitical and ultimately developmental issue with multifaceted consequences. No serious discussion of urban and regional dynamics in any major area of the world can afford to sidestep sustained engagement with these and related issues. In this context, two new edited texts on the variegated impacts of migration within (and necessarily well beyond) Southern Africa provide fine, exceptionally detailed, empirically well-grounded, often insightful and fresh additions to the migration, urban, African, global and development studies literatures. The first book, Zimbabwe’s Exodus, edited by Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera, is usefully engaged, in my view, through the organizing theme of diasporas of survival associated closely with profound state failure and socioeconomic crisis. After a lengthy synoptic chapter by the two editors, the text comprises 16 empirically well-supported studies addressing an impressive range of relevant and timely topics, including inter alia: the history of Zimbabwean migration (both within and beyond the country); the various implications of skilled emigration from Zimbabwe (particularly of health professionals); transnationalism; the influence of Zimbabweans on (and the political responses of) Britain and South Africa; the experiences of Zimbabweans in cities like Johannesburg; gender issues; the highly debatable role of remittances; media portrayals of migrants; smuggling as livelihood; and rural labour, income and agricultural-sector demand. In nearly all the cases included here, readers will encounter an enormous amount of quantitative data, illustrated succinctly and frequently in 125 figures and tables (unfortunately though, there is not a single map). More ethnographic work does often supplement the ‘number-reporting’ approach (e.g. Lefko-Everett’s elegiac study of Zimbabwean women in South Africa). But like many edited texts, this is a substantive resource to use frequently, not necessarily to read from start to finish. Policymakers will find the voluminous, easily accessible, data especially helpful; academics will too — and will also find valuable chapters to supplement extant courses in human geography, urban studies and development studies, to name but three fields. For example, I plan to include Bracking and Sachikonye’s analysis of remittances, informalization and dispossession in (sub)urban Zimbabwe in my urban course on the global South. I admire the fieldwork the authors undertook to get their data — and © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Book reviews
401
furthermore consider their thematic synthesis both compelling and deeply revealing of (sub)urban life in both Zimbabwe and perhaps in Southern Africa more generally. The second (substantially shorter) book Surviving on the Move, edited by Jonathan Crush and Bruce Frayne, widens the analytical lens geographically to include Southern Africa as a whole. While migrant Zimbabweans are in urban and rural South Africa, and indeed many other Southern African nations, the collapse of apartheid has precipitated much greater mobility of Africans across the entire region. This raises innumerable questions for academic researchers and policymakers. As in Zimbabwe’s Exodus, arguably the major contribution of Surviving on the Move is how the authors collectively question common assumptions about migration per se, which are frequently negative, by presenting hard numbers grounded in practical, mostly applied, primary research. Without ever donning rose-tinted glasses, the editors and the contributors repeatedly draw attention to the potentially positive dimensions of migration, particularly as they influence socioeconomic development in both sending and receiving areas. In their view, migration can lead to more than just ‘surviving on the move’; improved national policies might progressively redirect migratory dynamics within the region. Notwithstanding the thematic focus on what might be called the unrealized possibilities of the ‘migration–development’ nexus, many of the themes and conundrums in the book’s 13 chapters are broadly similar to those addressed in Zimbabwe’s Exodus (e.g. remittances, the brain drain, urban–rural linkages, discrimination and vulnerability, gender); but in Surviving on the Move we also learn about migrants from/within Mozambique, Lesotho and Namibia as well as (and especially) South Africa. Samuel Owuor’s clear and concise chapter on rural–urban linkages in Kenya certainly stretches classic definitions of ‘Southern Africa’ but perhaps this is the entire point. Migrants disrupt and complicate taken-for-granted cartographies of development through their own spaces of survival. Migration issues within South Africa in particular are clearly far more complex than xenophobic reactions to poor African migrants, which have plainly intensified in recent years. In a particularly illustrative chapter (as but one example of what readers will encounter), Prerna Banati explores the relationships between HIV and migration in South Africa, drawing attention to geotypes like urban informal settlements, where migrants naturally congregate, as ‘risk magnifiers’ (p. 237). While important in itself, and of particular relevance to those concerned with the social dimensions of urban development, Banati’s study also has a number of urban policy implications. At their best, of course, edited books are able to generate analytical and conceptual synergies, even as the actual topics, theoretical commitments and/or methodological approaches may (and probably should) differ. Surviving on the Move frequently accomplishes these synergies, perhaps slightly better than in Zimbabwe’s Exodus (which in fairness is much longer). Several chapters in Surviving on the Move document patterns of uneven regional development associated with migration. Fion de Vletter, for example, explains how rural southern Mozambique, ‘an area relatively bereft of resources and traditionally less productive agriculture’ (p. 146), is nonetheless now relatively better off than other rural areas in the country as a result of massive migrant remittances. This raises an obvious question: what happens to these sorts of uneven regional patterns as classic ‘pull’ industries in South Africa (especially mining) restructure? Xola Ngonini’s chapter on the decline in mining work answers this general question, documenting the negative effects of the permanent return of migrants on the Eastern Cape (albeit with brief references to Mozambique). These are rather different chapters, then, but for me they work well together in the same text. In sum, I strongly recommend both texts. While they will appeal especially to scholars of urban and regional development within Southern Africa, they will also prove extremely useful for academics teaching courses in both development and urban studies, especially where issues of migration loom large. Moreover, I also believe policymakers and project/program managers working within national ministries and departments, the UN system, the OECD, the World Bank, international NGOs and other developmentsupporting institutions will benefit from the rich trove of empirical work assembled here. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
402
Book reviews
Jonathan Crush and his colleagues have contributed enormously to documenting, developing and challenging what we know (and think we know) about migration in and beyond Southern Africa. Yonn Dierwechter, University of Washington, Tacoma
You-Tien Hsing 2010: The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This book is a study of the politics of land and property development in three types of area (cities, urban fringe and rural areas) spread across six regions comprising Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou plus three inland regions. It is based on interviews conducted between 1996 and 2007. Taking cities first, the author argues that, following the introduction of leasing of urban land-use rights in 1988, the gains from these leases and the ensuing property development became the focus of a struggle between municipal governments who ‘own’ some urban land and theoretically have planning control over all urban land, and ‘socialist land owners’ (large state enterprises, ministries, etc.), which continue to ‘own’ large areas of urban land and have de facto but not de jure planning control over it. Both types of institution form development companies to pursue their goals. For municipal governments, land profits represented major income streams and helped make up for cuts in central grants. Auctions of land were theoretically introduced in 2002 to make land dealing more transparent, but in Beijing and Shanghai most land was exempted. The book examines two types of bottom-up response. A group of some 10,000 Beijing property owners whose houses were expropriated during the Cultural Revolution was successful in obtaining a mixture of restitution, rehousing and compensation, by using petitions and visits to officials. Another group, who had lost property as part of a national policy and had become stigmatized, was unsuccessful. Lastly, the author studies protests against demolition and rehousing in peripheral areas lacking services and access to jobs, where residents insisted (unsuccessfully) that legal procedures should be followed (as in similar struggles in Moscow). The second section of the book turns to the urban fringe, where city governments have expropriated rural land and developed it for industry, shopping centres, housing and ‘university towns’ (which guarantee against the unoccupied building problem, as student housing is always full). Here conflicts are less sharp. One type of competition was with ‘township and village enterprises’ (TVEs), which had undertaken small-scale fringe development (albeit with mixed success). Another was with ‘villages in the city’, which had developed rural land (illegally) for housing (e.g. to accommodate migrant workers) and businesses, and where ownership was in the hands of a ‘shareholding cooperative’ (rather like a holding company). This ‘village corporatism’ varied in success. In such cases, city governments would grab undeveloped land but leave the developed land alone. Finally, in the rural outer reaches of the metropolitan region, TVE development of doubtful legality also occurred to generate revenues, but the need to assemble large sites meant that peasants could lose their land. In these areas the party secretary plays a key role in keeping order. The author describes the ‘nail households’ who stand out against development plans, and shows how families found ways of expanding themselves when entitlement to compensation was based on family size. The main contributions of this book are its identification of distinctive types of land politics in cities, the urban fringe and rural areas, its emphasis on the state and its demonstration of how weakly the law applies to land development in practice. The emphasis on the state is a rebuff to those who argue that China is an example of neoliberalism and who underestimate the continuing dominance of the party-state. The author makes clear that much development is undertaken by development companies which are owned by state territorial institutions and state-owned enterprises. However, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews
403
these may appear in statistics as ‘private’ companies, part of the exaggeration of the scope of market activity. The author has little to say about whether private development companies which are genuinely independent of state institutions exist or not. Some of the most insightful sections are from interview quotations (e.g. interviews with city leaders which address their inability to control socialist land masters). The question of what conditions the relationship between city governments and socialist land masters is left for future study. The book’s emphasis on how major institutions get round the law is very significant, undermining as it does any account which uses laws as a measure of what is happening in practice. The author’s analysis of urban conflicts is rather brief and is based on the residents’ perspective, presumably because information from the authorities was not available. This would have benefited from drawing upon the urban movements literature. For example, were the different types of policy (national versus Beijing) really critical to protest outcomes, or was it more to do with the social characteristics of the groups concerned — who in one case were people well connected to officials (p. 70), and in another stigmatized ‘marginal’people? Were the groups really collective or were they led by a few individuals? How do officials regard demands that are based on legal rights? What role did publicity play in their success? How far can concepts like legitimization threat be applied? The author’s conceptual framework is not really adequate. She describes it using the odd phrase ‘civic territoriality’ (by which she means residents’ struggles) and as ‘bottomup’, and uses the term ‘urbanization of the local state’ to refer to the dominance of land politics. In practice, her approach is both state-centred (and focused on internal state conflicts) and bottom-up, which gives it great potential strength, but she makes little use of previous work on local power relations between state bodies, developers and resident groups (I do not understand how her analysis supports Lefebvre’s idea that ‘space’ is an active force; her examples are all about institutions and groups of varying power). The book’s wide coverage and synthetic ambition is bought at the cost of a variable depth of analysis. The research method is described rapidly and we are not told what categories of actor were interviewed, or how many, so the empirical base for the conclusions is difficult to judge. Also, the dividing line between rural areas and urban fringes is not clear. Overall, this is a well-written and clearly organized book which provides insight into China’s varied land politics and deserves to be a point of reference for future, more detailed, studies of land politics in China. Chris Pickvance, University of Kent, Canterbury
Janice Perlman 2009: Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press.
When floods of rural migrants began reshaping the cities of Latin America and elsewhere some 50 years ago, numerous scholars set about rebutting the fears and myths elicited by the newcomers. Janice Perlman (1976) was among them. Favela endeavors to track the many changes that have occurred subsequently, as the city-born offspring of the original settlers continue to struggle to make headway in Rio de Janeiro. Many works have documented the conditions that, according to Perlman’s account, characterize today’s life for marginalized urbanites: the spread in drug-related violence, the shortfalls of democratic government, the abiding experience of social segregation and so on. The book’s distinctive feature lies in its longitudinal comparisons, based on empirical data collected at two points in time over three decades apart. About 40% of the participants in a questionnaire survey conducted in 1969 were interviewed in 2001, together with their children and grandchildren. As Perlman makes plain from the outset, the puzzle is complex indeed; the factors shaping the lives and trajectories of favela dwellers are probed quite deeply, and not always successfully. One (null) finding, for instance, is that ‘structural’ processes such as International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
404
Book reviews
regime transition, macroeconomic trends and long-term policy orientations have little influence on the evolution of the people’s lives as recounted by them. Social mobility (a central concern for the author) is thus cast as a ‘mystery’, the ingredients of which neither coalesce into a definite model nor nullify the influence of ‘plain luck’. These caveats notwithstanding, a fair effort is made to pin down overarching trends and tease out their ‘micro’ repercussions. The single most massive fact distinguishing life in the present from the early days of urbanization is the pervasive coercion exerted by drug gangs over the daily routines of favela residents, coupled with the feelings of anxiety, loss and distress caused by violence. The author also flushes out the signs of widespread disillusionment with politics under democratic rule, an intergenerational trend. Though people seem more conscious about their rights and still profess a nominal adherence to the ideal of democracy, participation has declined sharply and cynicism about politics runs rampant, particularly among the youth. One of Favela’s most far-reaching theses is summed up and emphasized in the final chapter. It revolves around the ‘rights to personhood’, the recognition of a legitimate other in the person of favelados by the social actors around them — their bosses, the upper-class landlords whose floors they scrub, government authorities, police and even store clerks in upscale neighborhoods. Access to this ‘human’ status, Perlman claims, follows a tortuous route, with a permanent risk of relapse into subhuman otherness. In the present context of soaring unemployment, continuous drug-gang harassment and hardening inequalities, this journey seems longer than ever. This leads Perlman to conclude that marginality, whose reality she had challenged some 40 years ago, might now be coming through. In other words, favela residents, whom she had known to play an active role in the cultural and economic life of the city, increasingly appear as distraught victims or outcasts. The book offers no overarching framework to make sense of these puzzling trends. In fact, its treatment of other theoretical frameworks, like Sen’s capabilities approach or Wacquant’s territories of relegation, is elliptic. Even marginality, the core concept of Perlman’s early work, appears so multidimensional and widespread in its applications that its power wanes as an analytic category. The generality of the policy recommendations spelled out in chapter 11 echoes this theoretical eclecticism. But perhaps, as suggested, no theoretical model fits so rich a reality, and the book does deliver powerful insights into the feelings, drives and prospects of the studied population. The most valuable insights in my judgment flow from the life stories of long-time settlers, some of whom have had a 30-year relationship with the author. Their confidences and testimonies are fleshed out by vivid photographic portraits. Through their narratives, many a prejudice about favelas and their dwellers comes under question. The other major source of evidence, i.e. the multiple surveys, yields some interesting findings as well. It shows that improvements in material wealth are not followed by a higher assessment of personal happiness or success, that infinitely better educated grandchildren are no more optimistic about their future and by no means keener on the virtues of democratic rule, that living in a legal neighborhood and/or close to the city center increases your chances in life, etc. Given the scope of the study (i.e. a 30-year period, half-a-dozen neighborhoods, thousands of individual lives), the complexity of the object and the lack of recent ethnographic fieldwork, many such findings are not fully explained, but informed conjectures are provided. In all, Favela gives a sensitive and well-documented view of the world of twentyfirst-century urban marginality, and calls for more ‘prolonged involvement’ (p. 339), as Perlman puts it, to match the attitudinal trends established in the surveys with the actors’ practices and worldviews. Jacinto Cuvi, University of Texas at Austin
Perlman, J. (1976) The myth of marginality: urban poverty and politics in Rio de International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Janeiro. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Book reviews
405
Didier Lapeyronnie 2008: Ghetto Urbain. Ségrégation, Violence, Pauvreté en France Aujourd’hui. Paris: Laffont.
Lapeyronnie is one of France’s most renowned researchers into issues affecting young people; over the last 20 years he has been studying the youth of the banlieues — more precisely those living in the cités, France’s suburban social housing estates. This book is the result of a complex empirical investigation undertaken in a cité in a mid-sized town that has a very poor image, due to high levels of violence, widespread unemployment and a large proportion of immigrants. The received wisdom is that there are no ghettos in Western Europe, no neighborhoods cut off from mainstream society (as is perceived to be the case in the United States). But Lapeyronnie points to the growing gap between the life chances and ways of life within these cités when compared to mainstream society, despite massive welfare state provision and regulatory intervention. His evidence is primarily qualitative, there are few data given — but his findings have been confirmed, for example by the Observatoire National des Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ONZUS, 2010): in the 1990s there was an increase in disparity between problem neighborhoods and the average, which has not subsequently reduced. This book documents the strength of qualitative methods in giving voice to groups who suffer from difficult life situations. Lapeyronnie got very close to people who are in general difficult to access; he succeeded in discussing difficult and taboo topics, and managed to clarify some of the behavioral complexities of these people. Through structured interviews and group discussions he reveals the difference between individual and group behavior; this is especially important in understanding the dynamics and normative power of youth cliques. He relates this to observations, e.g. at the meeting points of embittered and racist indigenous inhabitants (‘petits blancs’). Life stories contribute to our understanding of the logics of difficult and highly segregated life developments, for example providing empathetic portraits of an older pair of immigrants, a 25-year-old repeat offender and a North African woman who has split from her family. The materials he presents are complex and concise; in this sense the book resembles the great neighborhood studies of the 1940s and 1950s, e.g. The Urban Villagers by Herbert Gans (1962), or Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte (1961). From comparisons with findings in US ghetto research, we see that grave stigma and discrimination, linked with deep cleavages between the neighborhood and mainstream society, produce astonishing similarities between life situations which are otherwise structurally very dissimilar. The author also shows astounding parallels between Western workers’ culture and the culture of immigrant families originating overwhelmingly from the Maghreb (although strangely he does not discuss the influence of Islamic culture). Lapeyronnie keeps to the perspective of the inhabitants and of their life worlds. This is conclusive as long as he explains identities or logics of behavior. But since structural conditions remain out of consideration, the success or failure of people appears to result only from group-specific patterns. In addition, the world of the cités seems more closed than it really is: among the socially upwardly mobile and others who have moved away, only those who subsequently returned to the neighborhood are the subject of enquiry (and these are typically the failures). The sample consists of quite different groups of inhabitants; young people from the Maghreb have been the subject of more intense enquiry (and in higher numbers). The ensuing differentiations among the young (especially interesting with regard to young women) will hopefully undermine the stereotypes of the ‘jeune de banlieue’. Lapeyronnie is prepared to address topics that in current (polically correct) discussions about banlieue–cités are somewhat taboo — e.g. anti-semitism, criminal families, moonlighting and drug dealing, the pauperized ‘social problem cases’. In part I the author undertakes an extensive analysis of poverty as a central element of the French ghettos. Poverty in these neighborhoods has been largely ignored in French politics. Lapeyronnie (who had amazingly good access to the ‘social problem International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
406
Book reviews
cases’) differentiates between those who manage to retain some of their self-esteem by actively negotiating difficult circumstances and the passive socially isolated people resigned to their situation in life, whose poverty consumes all of their energies. In another passage he distinguishes between those overwhelmed by misery (‘accablés’) and the ‘assistés’, whose lives are structured by the welfare state. The ‘social cases’ do value state benefits, because they help them to escape from misery. But these benefits only serve to help them into a ‘non-existence’ — they try to remain invisible in the ghetto because they are the most despised of all inhabitants. There is less information on the many casual workers who usually live in poverty; they make up about half of the working-age population. Lapeyronnie briefly characterizes their lives as a constant struggle for self-esteem, autonomy, reputation and a well-ordered family life. The information on those actively in employment who are not in poverty (making up a quarter of the working-age population) is very scant; there are no details at all on their social networks which, according to Lapeyronnie, bind them to the ghetto. All inhabitants of the ghetto have the same feeling of social relegation, of being cut off from ‘real’ society and of a common stigma. But this does not entail commonalities, quite the contrary: the inhabitants demonstrate a striking ambivalence towards the ghetto. On the one hand, most of them praise the openness and solidarity among its people and families — on the other hand, they express tremendous animosity against their neighbors and whole sections of the community. The ghetto — where nobody wants to live — represents a space of protection for many of the failed and excluded. Part II deals with the fruitless interplay between state institutions and their clients (in particular immigrant families). In this respect, La Misère du Monde (Bourdieu, 1993) is much more comprehensive in showing that ‘misery’ structures not only the lives of the poor and the excluded, but also has great influence on the lives of teachers, social workers, police officers and small businesses. The strong presence of welfare and regulatory institutions is the significant difference when drawing comparisons with US ghettos. On this topic we find little that is new in this book. Social work and community centers are useful in providing help and activities — but they cannot offer a way out of social exclusion. Lapeyronnie’s method helps us to better understand the antagonism of young people towards education. They collectively (e.g. in discussion groups) accuse schools of being useless and of inflicting humiliation upon them; a negative attitude towards school seems to represent the group norm. On the other hand, in personal interviews they express hopes of advancement through education — albeit knowing that in conditions of massive youth unemployment very few can benefit from such chances (and these opportunities are mainly open to women). Lapeyronnie emphasizes the omnipresence of insecurity and loss of control within the ghetto, due to widespread low-level criminality, with incidents including the use of firearms, general aggressiveness and the threat of violence from some criminal families. From the perspective of the inhabitants, the police and justice services appear as ineffective, not least because most inhabitants refrain from any cooperation, and because the police force is widely seen as racist. Besides poverty, Lapeyronnie offers a detailed explanation of racism and the socialization of immigrants as being central existence factors in the ghetto. In a remarkably innovative way he works out how they interact; the six chapters dealing with this (part III) are themselves sufficient reason for every social sciences library to acquire this book. The perspective on racism (that is the equalization of physical appearance and social qualities) is innovative in the context of Western European countries because it is conceptualized from lived experience: being ignored as a person, snide remarks endured ‘in the city’ and discrimination at work. Lapeyronnie also reflects on anti-semitism, which he understands as being nourished by hatred against those who, although outsiders, are able to enforce their claims; their assumed power reminds the immigrants of their own powerlessness. Racism pervades all relations with mainstream society, as well as relations between families and groups within the ghetto. The inhabitants concerned see it as arising from moral deficits of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews
407
‘the French’ in ignoring social backgrounds. Their many humiliations, large and small, confirm their feelings of powerlessness and result in them retreating into their own space — into resignation or revolt, into their own families or onto the streets, in any case into the ghetto, the place for people who have failed. As 50–80% of the inhabitants are immigrants (first to fourth generation, two thirds of North African background), this kind of failure initiates a return to the origins which form the basis for reconstructing their own identity. Thus, many families return to patriarchal traditions. The severe fathers, acting with unquestioned authority, as well as the often resigned and ‘protective’ mothers, usually succeed in committing their daughters to the family role. The sons, educated into the role model of masculinity, are less compliant, escaping to congregate with their peers on the streets. Ghetto relations persist in this ‘polarity between family and street’, in morals of strong personal bonds, in distrust of ‘the others’, in demonstrations of force — this means familism instead of civility. The failure of integration into a modern society burdened with the legacy of racism, and determined by social inequality and an impersonal morality, should be no surprise. In three equally innovative chapters (part IV), Lapeyronnie explains how gender order and body come together in polarizing the identities and the modes of expression of young men and women in the cités. He succeeds in explaining the most unpleasant aspect of the French cités, namely the offensive conduct of young men towards young women. Paternalistic cultures see women as being libidinal; in North African society, family reputation largely depends on the chastity of daughters. In the ghetto, which is the place of the socially unsuccessful, the reputation of people depends largely on a presentable façade of sound family morals. Due to the male dominance in the lives of families and associations, due to the superincumbent force of young men in outdoor spaces, they feel best suited to control the young women — and the latter try to remain invisible wherever possible. Racism tends to exacerbate the gender polarization. Indigenous ‘white’ society accepts immigrant women much more easily then immigrant men, both as co-workers and as relationship partners. In this regard, young immigrant women have more freedom of action in the labor market as well as in gender relations — freedom that the ghetto tends to annihilate. The women have been socialized into a broken identity and their relationship to their own bodies is difficult; they are more successful in education, they have better social opportunities, they speak and act in a more thoughtful way than the immigrant men — but they don’t have the courage to benefit from these advantages because of family considerations. The young immigrant men play out their power, their identity appears unbroken within the ghetto, they can benefit from hypocritical morals — but these potencies do not count in mainstream society where they experience failure and repudiation. There are very few books I know of which succeed in bringing together life conditions and identities of people in such a differentiated, vivid and reflective way. This book provides good explanations for phenomena that have until now been difficult to understand — e.g. the unacceptable behavior of young men, the timidity of women preventing exploitation of good social opportunities, the general tendencies of selfinclusion into a ghetto, the effects of everyday racism. This is thanks to Lapeyronnie’s radically subject-bound and multi-perspective approach. The analysis of structural conditions falls short in this book — but there is already a great deal of literature tackling the structural conditions of French banlieue–cités in depth. Rainer Neef, University of Goettingen
Bourdieu, P. (ed.) (1993) La misère du monde. Seuil, Paris. Ganz, H.J. (1962) The urban villagers. Group and class in the life of Italian-Americans. Free Press, New York. ONZUS (Observatoire National des Zones Urbaines Sensibles) (2010) Rapport 2010. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Comité Interministériel des Villes (CIV), Paris. Whyte, W.F. (1961) Street corner society. The social structure of an Italian slum. Second edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
408
Book reviews
Douglas S. Massey (ed.) 2008: New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Economic forces and social networks have historically been determining factors in the initial settlement patterns of international migrants. In the United States, immigrants usually arrived in traditional gateway cities, such as New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. While some then undertook secondary migration to other industrial cities, most did not because of work and familial or ethnic ties. In the 1970s and 1980s, new immigrant gateway cities, such as Los Angeles, Miami and Houston, began to attract international migrants on a larger scale. In these migrant-receiving urban centers, both old and new, immigrants of diverse origins have consolidated existing ethnic communities or established new ones, playing a crucial role in continued ethnic clustering; the local economy and migrant labor have formed interdependent relationships; the state has developed institutions and mechanisms to accommodate newcomers’ needs; and natives have learned to live alongside strangers from different shores, despite intense cultural conflicts and economic competition at times. As international migration has accelerated, new patterns of settlement have also emerged. One such pattern is geographic dispersal into suburban communities, often surrounding or adjacent to gateway cities. The rise of ‘ethnoburbs’ is a case in point, where upwardly mobile non-white immigrants bypass urban ethnic enclaves to become residentially assimilated into white middle-class suburbs upon arrival. In these gateway cities, multiculturalism and assimilationism are topical issues of concern, but often the former trumps the latter in public discourse. Over the past two decades, however, an emerging trend has become increasingly apparent. Since the 1990s, new arrivals (overwhelmingly low-skilled Latino immigrants) have begun to settle in smaller cities and towns that had historically received few foreigners. This geographic shift is relatively sudden and voluminous. What has perpetuated the shift? Why have newcomers moved to these uncharted places? How do locals receive and deal with their new neighbors who look so unlike themselves? How well are immigrants incorporated into these new destinations? New Faces in New Places, edited by Douglas Massey, is the product of collaborative research aiming to address these important questions. The edited volume employs a variety of data sources and methodologies to examine the causes and consequences of the new settlement patterns from different disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, anthropology, geography and policy. It contains an introduction by Massey and Hirschman, 10 quantitative or qualitative studies by co-authors or solo authors, and a concluding chapter by Massey. Part I presents three quantitative analyses of the general trends of new settlement patterns based on US census data (Massey and Capoferro; Leach and Bean; Donado et al.) and two studies examining the impacts of broad changes in the American economy on local labor markets using census and survey data (Parrado and Kandel; Donado and Bankston). Part II contains six case studies focusing on local reaction and reception, including an investigation of prejudice against Latinos in a Midwestern town (Fennelly); a study looking at how the process of immigrant incorporation is conditioned by the local economy and institutions (such as churches, schools and the health care system) in four rural communities in the Midwest and the South (Griffith); an examination of black–Hispanic relations in two small communities in North Carolina (Marrow); a study of the effect of Latino influx on interracial dynamics (especially black–Latino relations) in Nashville (Winders); an ethnography of a Mexican festival — the Cinco de Mayo celebration — in a rural community near Philadephia (Shutika); and an analysis of how white-middle-classdominated suburban schools react to the rapid growth of immigrants in the DC metropolitan region (Jones-Correa). Together, these studies offer glimpses of new patterns of immigrant settlement and native–immigrant encountering, demonstrating the specific ways in which new immigrants (overwhelmingly low-skilled Mexicans and other Latinos) affect new places and are themselves affected by changes. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews
409
There are several significant lessons to be learned. First, immigration policy has both direct and indirect effects on the geographic dispersal of new immigrants away from traditional gateway centers. For example, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) legalized more than 3 million undocumented immigrants (75% were Mexicans and more than half were concentrated in Los Angeles). As Massey and Capoferro point out, direct policy impacts are felt in the sudden saturation of local labor markets, as well as in the behavior of newly legalized immigrants who are emboldened to stand up for their rights and become strongly incentivized to look elsewhere for better opportunities. Moreover, the passage of California Proposition 187 (which prohibits undocumented immigrants from access to education, health care and other public services) sends an explicit and chilling message to potential immigrants that they are no longer welcome in California. Furthermore, the selective reinforcing of the border does not stop undocumented immigration, but functions to channel undocumented immigrants away from California and Texas (pp. 30–32). Second, immigration is intertwined with a reciprocal dynamic of globalization and industrial restructuring. New patterns of immigrant settlement reflect the growing dependence of the American economy on immigrant labor (see chapters 2–6). Most of the new places to which immigrants move have well-developed, low-skill, low-wage industries or service sectors and are experiencing significant population decline, especially in the native white population. Many jobs would have moved overseas or disappeared altogether, had it not been for immigrants filling them. However, the demand for immigrant labor is only part of the story. The availability of affordable and flexible immigrant labor stimulates new demands, not only from the manufacturing, food processing and service sectors, but also from middle-class families (families that can afford to delegate household responsibilities — housework, childcare and gardening — to immigrant labor). Third, policy interacts with economic forces to set in motion the initial movement of new immigrants to new places. Social networks and ethnic support institutions are constructed in the process, leading to subsequent inflows. Such ongoing trends raise the likelihood of permanent settlement and eventual incorporation. In sum, New Faces in New Places illustrates not only what’s new on the part of immigrants, but also what’s new on the part of natives and host communities. It is both informative and intellectually stimulating, compelling readers to think about further questions for future study. Are these trends sustainable? Is the current demographic shift a temporary or permanent shift, associated with the characteristics of the movers on the one hand and unique patterns of global restructuring on the other? What would happen to these new places and new settlers if local economies were to take another sudden turn because of possible adverse effects caused by the global economy? Min Zhou, University of California, Los Angeles
Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron 2008: City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
If you believe that local government can be a major contributor to a city’s quality of life, regardless of the economic forces impinging on it, then you must read this book. Deeply embedded in this thoughtful exploration of the powers and liabilities of city governments is the belief that they are obliged to assure that their constituents live well and prosper. They can only do so, though, if the legal structures under which they operate enable a wide array of policy options to be considered. In the United States, state law ‘frustrates cities’ effort to exercise control over their future development’ (p. 9). The story begins with a basic idea: institutions matter. State governments are the source of city governments’ ability to act, and while the federal government (particularly the Supreme Court) is also influential, its impact is overwhelmed by decisions made by International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
410
Book reviews
state legislators. To this extent, the powers and liabilities of city governments vary from one state to the next. Frug and Barron make an additional argument. Numerous city governments around the country are well positioned to address their future, yet the law has created ‘the bureaucratic structures, dysfunctional agencies, regional fragmentation, and democratic deficits that make governance’ extremely difficult (p. 231). For legal scholars, the question is: what powers do city governments need? The answer is that these governments will do best when powers and liabilities are balanced across federal, state and local governments, and when the legal structures under which they function enable them to cooperate with surrounding municipalities. In the first half of the book, the authors establish the conceptual framework for their analysis: first by searching for the law in urban theory — an outstanding literature review, by the way — and second by exploring the meaning and practicalities of local autonomy. At the core of urban theory is the relationship between city government agency and external economic structure (for example, globalization). Frug and Barron reject this dichotomy, as well as the distinction between developmental and redistributional policies that is so embedded in regime theory. By isolating agency from structure, they claim, we miss how legal structures influence local action, whereas the latter distinction falsely assumes that different policy choices are mutually exclusive. Local government flexibility, though, will not be found in local autonomy. Local autonomy precludes recognition of the interdependency of central cities and suburbs, and of the various levels of government. Despite the granting of home rule that allows cities to act without having to seek state permission, decentralization of authority always involves limits on local discretion. For these reasons, two-tier solutions (in which certain functions and powers are allocated to regional governments and others to city governments) are difficult to manage — mass transit is both a regional concern and a local concern — while also elevating efficiency over equity considerations. Power and authority should be decentralized, but not in this way. Having established the basic argument, Frug and Barron address four key issues affecting cities: home rule, revenues and expenditures, land use and development, and education. Drawing from laws and policies in seven cities — New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Atlanta, but taking Boston as the prime example — they delve into the myriad ways that state legislation empowers and disempowers city governments. For example, consider the various toll roads, bridges and tunnels in Boston. They are all owned by public authorities and beyond the control of the city government. The city neither shares in the revenues they generate nor has to maintain these facilities. Moreover, the land is unavailable to the city government to use in planning its future. Such arrangements stem directly from decisions by state legislators to allocate these facilities to public authorities and minimize the city government’s involvement. This situation might not occur in a city in another state. To give an example, Boston does not own the land on which its airport is built (thereby limiting planning for and revenue from this facility), however New York City does. Just past the midpoint of the book, the authors shift from a detailed and careful analysis of the intricacies of legal structures to speculation about the ability of city governments to pursue various urban futures. That these futures — global, tourist, middle class and regional — are severely simplified; that becoming ‘global’ and attracting tourists, for example, are often compatible goals (tourism is part of a global image); and that any single governmental program (for example, affordable housing) can serve multiple futures (a middle-class city and a regional city in this instance) gives the discussion an ad hoc quality (one too indeterminate for my tastes). What is of more concern is the focus on prosperous cities. None of the cities considered are even close to being shrinking cities. Yet, the city governments in Buffalo, Detroit and Baltimore also need to think about the future and take urgent action. While shrinking cities are not as numerous as the growing and prosperous cities of the United States, they are home to a significant portion of the country’s population and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews
411
infrastructure, not to mention being the site of major institutional assets such as hospitals and universities. Their powers and liabilities are just as important as those of Boston and Seattle. Or does this distinction not matter? Despite my misgivings, no urban scholar should ignore this book. And, if you have not already done so, you also need to read Frug’s earlier (1999) City: Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls. Both books powerfully convey the role of legal structures in setting the fate of cities. Robert Beauregard, Columbia University
Frug, G.E. (1999) City: making: building communities without building walls.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens (eds.) 2007: Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life. New York: Routledge.
After so many books published in the past two decades that have gradually proclaimed the death of public space, this one not only reinforces the concept, but adds new ‘liveliness’ to it. Franck and Steven’s volume is devoted to a very obvious phenomenon: that in cities around the world, city-dwellers appropriate spaces to meet their own needs and desires and do various things that, as the editors argue in the introductory chapter, are not originally intended for those spaces. The book focuses on this looseness of space that ‘arises from the unfolding of the social encounters in public, whether they are forms of commerce, expression, adventure, escape or innovation’ (p. 30). The 13 case studies in this book are divided into four sections defined in relation to the context of the act of looseness. Their unification in one volume is certainly a successful endeavour: it lucratively escapes the danger of edited books to lack continuity of their focal thought in the various case studies. The four sections — ‘Appropriation’, ‘Tension’, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Discovery’ — gradually introduce the phenomenon of considering and performing the ‘optional’ urban activities in public space pursued by city-dwellers. Written by contributors from the fields of architecture, geography and environmental psychology from various parts of the world, the chapters in the book follow a storytelling style beginning with case studies, arranged in the book under the subtitle ‘Appropriation’, which illustrate the phenomenon in its simplest, most-straightforward form and which offer more description, rather than argumentation or discussion, of the human adaptability to ‘loosen’ spaces. The second part, ‘Tension’, focuses on the ways and the extent to which public spaces in Guadalajara, New York and Bangkok accommodate change and thus, as the editors say, public space is seen here as a mediator between the city-dwellers as users of these spaces and different notions of public interest. The third section, ‘Resistance’, reaches the state level, discussing city authorities as agents of ‘tightening’ and revealing conscious and explicit acts of resistance. Unlike the rest, the fourth section, ‘Discovery’, doesn’t follow the level of gradual tension and unveiling of the acts of loosening space, but moves on to spaces with no primary use — like industrial ruins in the Edensor’s text and Schneekloth’s abandoned industrial river — bringing into focus the very basic prerequisite for space to become loose: it has to be discovered first. Given the recent array of texts on the subject of public space and urban life, the question must be asked: what is the contribution of this book? The range of case studies and their richness of data is remarkable — the book takes a broad international and multidisciplinary approach, and as such is accessible to a wide audience. Yet, its theoretical contribution is rather limited and the primary criticism arises from the key concept itself. Throughout the book, the concept of loose space never finds solid ground on which to build its relevance in urban studies. It thus remains ‘not fixed’ itself. The volume fundamentally fails to recognize an essential characteristic of loose International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
412
Book reviews
space — that such looseness is inherent in those spaces and is by no means, as the book suggests, ‘added later’. What is more, the binary oppositions that are part of the vocabulary of the book imply that spaces are either completely structured or can be without structure, and thus become loose: the editors themselves define loose space in relation to the ‘tight spaces’ of Robert Sommer (1974) and ‘in direct opposition to qualities of public space that many people value: certainty, homogeneity and order’ (p. 17). It is questionable whether such binary oppositions are appropriate tools for studying cities. Even though some sections of the book acknowledge that spaces are neither without structure nor completely structured, the way that many contributors and the editors themselves use the concept of ‘loose’ in contrast to ‘tight’ space necessitates such criticism. Finally, the book might have offered a broader theoretical challenge to a wider variety of readers if it had been able to adequately conceptualize loose space in relation to the other debates and problems in urban studies that have found their place in these case studies. This book does indulge us with much enjoyable material, taking us from New York to Bangkok and telling us stories about a wide variety of city-dwellers. Sociologists and social theorists of space will probably not greatly appreciate Loose Space, but urban planners, policymakers and architects will certainly find examples here that will influence their practical decisions related to space and the environment. Ana Aceska, Humboldt University Berlin
Sommer, R. (1974) Tight spaces: hard architecture and how to humanize
it. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (eds.) 2009: Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
The bad news first: it is unlikely that we will see in the foreseeable future an English translation of Henri Lefebvre’s monumental four-volume study of the state published in the mid-1970s. Personal, political and proprietary sentiments — backed up by copyright laws — are standing in the way of making De l’État available to a worldwide audience in the global lingua franca, which (for better or worse) is not French. This is a pity, for any reading of Lefebvre not including his writings on the state will remain incomplete. Missing out on De l’État also means missing out on a spirited attempt to rethink the means and ends of Marxism and communism from the heyday of structuralism and post-structuralism. But what kind of Marxism? What kind of communism? These are precisely the questions that occupied Lefebvre throughout his anti-capitalist and anti-statist oeuvre. Yet its style and scale, including some 70-odd books spanning more than six decades, have obscured the wood for the trees, especially in the spatial disciplines of the AngloAmerican academy, where partial (mis)readings of Lefebvre generally unconcerned with his critiques of everyday life and state (among other things) have dominated politicaleconomic as much as post-modern debates even into the twenty-first century. In these literatures, the most consistent blind spot is the state. To be sure, Lefebvre is most conspicuous by his absence in Marxist writings on the state. Bob Jessop’s State Theory (1990), for example, refers to many French authors including Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Nicos Poulantzas, but not once to Lefebvre. Did Lefebvre not have anything useful to say on the state? And if he did, why has it been so ignored until the appearance of State, Space, World, a collection of 15 essays penned between 1964 and 1986? If we ask why Lefebvre wrote what he did on the state at the time he did, this much should become clear. He studied the state for much the same reason that he studied everyday life and urbanization: to critique a few key things responsible for the ‘survival of capitalism’ in the postwar era (production of space, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
Book reviews
413
colonization of everyday life, new state form), some of which he also deemed to be culpable for sending ‘actually existing’ socialism down the wrong track. Concerning the state, Lefebvre (1971: 86–109) offered a two-pronged critique: of ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ in the West; and of Stalinism in the East. In so doing, he argued vigorously that a lot of ‘actually existing’ socialism perverted the idea of communism found not only in Marx, but also in Lenin’s (1918) The State and Revolution. The end of socialism was not dictated by the state, whose productivist ideology in the Soviet Union was for Lefebvre no better than that of the advanced capitalist world, but by the withering away of the state. Lefebvre traces this fetishism of the state in the socialist tradition not to Marx, but to Ferdinand Lassalle, a ‘Hegelian who thought he was a Marxist’ (p. 18). But for him the trouble now lies mostly in the role assumed by the state in the reproduction of ‘actually existing’ capitalism and indeed socialism. What becomes of both state and society on account of this selfvalorizing role includes, crucially for Lefebvre, not merely the social reproduction of late-capitalist relations, but also their territorial organization — new forms of colonization based on centre–periphery relations. In a strikingly original move here, Lefebvre proposed the concept of mondialisation to explicate the making and remaking of such uneven and unequal relations at various spatial scales ranging from the local to the planetary. What the state had to do with mondialisation, he clearly did not like: ‘today there is no State that can avoid moving toward’ what he called the ‘state mode of production’ (le Mode de production Étatique). This is a key term of De l’État that underlines how the state now ‘reproduced itself in the reproduction of relations of domination’. For Lefebvre this means that ‘there is no “good State” ’. So ‘the only criterion of democracy’ for him emerges from a re-vindication of the repressed Marxist and Leninist concept of withering away of the state (p. 130). What is to be done, then? In a word, autogestion (self-management): the ‘one path and one practice that may be opposed to the omnipotence of the State’, and, we may add, the political strategy that unites, in the making of communism, (some) Marxists with (some) anarchists (p. 134). This is the central political thought that animates State, Space, World, and it captures in essence Lefebvre’s attempt to reinvigorate an anti-statist conception of radical-socialist democracy at the height of the Cold War. He did not invent this word and was well aware of its uses and abuses in the real world of socialism — not least by states that spoke of autogestion as a mission accomplished, rather than as a praxis that ‘revives all the contradictions at the heart of the State, and notably the supreme contradiction . . . between the reason of the State and human reason’ (p. 147). Yet he kept alive the promise of autogestion, by radicalizing its meaning. ‘Each time a social group . . . refuses to accept passively its conditions of existence . . . each time such a group forces itself not only to understand but to master its own conditions of existence’, Lefebvre wrote, ‘autogestion is occurring’. As such, it is a ‘highly diversified practice that concerns businesses as well as territorial units, cities, and regions’ and includes ‘all aspects of social life’. Like democracy, therefore, autogestion ‘is never a “condition” but a struggle’ (p. 135). But autogestion for Lefebvre is also more than political democracy, in the same way that for Marx (1844) in his On the Jewish Question, human emancipation exceeds political emancipation: The State of autogestion, which is to say the State at whose core autogestion is raised to power, can only be a State that is withering away. Consequently, the party of autogestion can only be the party that leads politics toward its termination and the end of politics, beyond political democracy . . . Only through autogestion can the members of a free association take control of their own life, in such a way that it becomes their work [oeuvre]. This is also called appropriation, de-alienation (p. 150).
In its pioneering commitment to autogestion, State, Space, World challenges us to re-imagine radical politics. Lefebvre enthusiasts will also find here a rich introduction to his wide-ranging thinking, especially the distinction he made between levels (everyday, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
414
Book reviews
urban, global: capital and state) and scales (local, urban, national, regional, worldwide) of social totality. It is a remarkably user-friendly volume too, thanks to the insightful editorial introductions by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden marked by an exemplary mix of readability and rigor. English readers will not derive from this collection the full benefit of studying Lefebvre’s De l’État; but they now have the best substitute to it anyone could have imagined. Kanishka Goonewardena, University of Toronto
Jessop, B. (1990) State theory: putting the capitalist state in its place. Polity Press, Cambridge. Lefebvre, H. (1971) Everyday life in the modern world. Allen Lane, Harmondsworth. Lenin, V.I. (1918) The state and revolution [WWW document]. URL http://www.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36.2 © 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ staterev (accessed 31 January 2012). Marx, K. (1844) On the Jewish question [WWW document]. URL http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/ jewish-question (accessed 31 January 2012).
