Gender, Race and National Identity: Nations of Flesh and Blood – By Jackie Hogan

BOOK REVIEWS

Review Essay — Gated Communities:Perspectives on Privatized Spaces

Georg Glasze, Chris Webster and Klaus Frantz 2006: Private Cities: Global and LocalPerspectives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy 2006: Gated Communities. New York and London:Routledge.ijur_1033 207..218

Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives (2006) and Gated Communities (2006)continue a trend in urban studies that focus on recent manifestations of thesedevelopments in a variety of global locales. As the editors of Private Cities note, ‘thereis hardly another form of urban development that has received so much public attentionsince the late 1990s as privately organized and secured housing developments’ (Glaszeet al., 2006: 1). The two volumes are a fantastic resource for researchers interested inthese contemporary topics and they provide robust survey material for courses focusingon this type of housing. They also evidence a number of trends that typify this area ofscholarship, both positive and negative. The two books share many of the same authors,and many of the chapters are products of a series of conferences on private residence andgated communities first convened in Hamburg in 1999 and of meetings held since thenin Mainz, Glasgow, Johannesburg and, most recently, in Santiago. Questions thatresearchers have posed explore the rationale of individuals who decide to live in theseenvironments, the historical precedents of privatization, the structural conditions thatenable the construction of gated communities and the socio-economic consequences ofthese privatized residential spaces. Whether private neighborhoods are good or bad is leftto the speculation of both the authors and the readership.

The beginning of an interest in gated communities and private residence in academiais debated, but most look upon the publication of Blakely and Snyder’s Fortress America(1997) as the first comprehensive analysis of gated communities. This publication alsomarks an agreed position of most that the phenomenon of localized private residence isa uniquely American invention that has diffused rapidly throughout the world, withglobal capital as the main vehicle. While the landmark survey study by Blakely andSnyder is a touchstone for most analyses of private residence, Teresa Caldeira’spioneering work in São Paulo, Brazil, on crime, fear and segregation (1996) is similarlynoted as a principal study in the field. Besides serving as the first works of their kind onthis particular urban phenomenon, both publications have also plotted trajectories forresearch that has followed in their wake. While Blakely and Snyder provide anomniscient viewpoint that surveys private residence from outside of the gates, Caldeiraattempts to locate the rationale and culture of those that reside within them. Thisbifurcated perspective has marked studies of private residence ever since, and PrivateCities and Gated Communities continue that trend.

Of the two volumes, Private Cities is the most comprehensive collection, as it dealswith gated communities specifically but also with a number of related topics. Theintroduction to the book is an excellent guide through foundational questionssurrounding privatized housing, including their rise as a result of the perception ofgrowing criminality, the notion that they are class markers of prestige, the threat that

Volume 35.1 January 2011 207–18 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.01033.x

© 2010 The Authors. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and BlackwellPublishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St,Malden, MA 02148, USA

privatization places on conceptions of public space, and whether or not privateneighborhoods are indeed an American invention. With this as a basis, the reader thenlooks to the chapters that follow to provide positions on whether privatized residenceseither emulate the rationalization of a ‘culture of fear’ or a ‘culture of prestige’.

Evan McKenzie, one of several authors who contributed to both collections, wrote thefirst chapter of both books. McKenzie is well known as one of the central figures in the fieldand as one of the first academics to focus on homeowner associations as a research site.McKenzie does not solely focus on the gates that surround these enclosures, but on theeconomic and political context that enables their construction and viability. The rise ingated communities in the United States and throughout the world rests on an ideology ofprivatization that provides the impetus for any economic or political decision to constructthem. As McKenzie notes, any perceived benefit of gated-community construction mustbe weighed against the concomitant increase in spatial segregation that results from theirexistence. The question is whether developers or residents ever take this into considerationwhen deciding to build or live within gated communities. He painstakingly details themeans by which gated communities and their private governments are constructed,revealing that the very idea behind community associations is intrinsically antithetical tothe supposed American belief in the sanctity of private property.

Next, Foldvary takes a rare holistically positive orientation towards private-residencedevelopment by addressing the simple reality that their mere existence demonstratestheir economic viability. This is despite the fact that the majority of researchers hesitateto comment on the long-term effects of private-residence development, particularly thepotentiality of residential and societal segregation that occurs from their construction.For Foldvary, resultant segregation is not the by-product of gated communities per se, butthe failure of public government to provide adequate services. What he fails to addressis the possibility of displacement that occurs from the development of private residencethat happens in many nation-states where they are built. This is particularly true in thecontext of South Africa.

While many of the contributions discuss local rationalizations of either security oraffluence that spur the creation of and residence within gated communities, perhaps noother nation-state has the socio-economic and political context of contemporary SouthAfrica as a historical precedent. Jurgens and Landman attempt to discern whether or notfear and security are driving factors for gated-community residence, but they stretchfurther into theoretical positions of the spatial consequences of a new pluralistic post-apartheid society that private residences emulate or create. They build on the idea thatgated communities are a response to post-apartheid social conditions, but they also assertthat these new private neighborhoods may not only be ineffectual at countering a cultureof fear, but that the new class fragmentation, as opposed to the precedent of racialsegregation under apartheid, may have its own set of negative consequences altogether.These three contributions form a powerful triad within the collection to discuss thepolitical, socio-economic and racial aspects of private residence.

Other contributions in Private Cities fulfill the promise of exploring the spread ofthe gated-community model in a variety of global locales, including Russia, China,New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and Lebanon. The reader should be conscious of notsimply falling into the trap of reading the collected works as a globetrottingjaunt through its manifestations in different parts of the world. Many strains ofresearch within the contributions are similar, principally emanating from thefascination of uniformity among residences no matter where they exist in the worldand the various local histories of architecture and varying forms of security concerns.From these positions the authors attempt to explain the local structural conditions thatcreate gated communities historically (Glasze), the specific architecture that potentiallyprovides an allusion to European aristocracy for residents (Frantz), their position as‘predators’ of public resources (Le Goix), as bastions for foreigners (Lentz), or assymbolic and literal barriers between classes within a given society (Janoschka andBorsdorf).

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35.1© 2010 The Authors. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2010 Joint Editors and BlackwellPublishing Ltd.

Problematically, what the majority of the studies also demonstrate is a continuingtrend of focusing on these places from outside the gates, essentially, an ‘outside-looking-in’ perspective. Other than Setha Low’s ethnography Behind the Gates (2003), rare is thestudy that emanates from fieldwork within gated communities, essentially, from the‘inside looking out’ and possesses the capacity to gauge the cultural nuances of the actualinhabitants of these spaces. In her contribution to this collection, Setha Low goes beyondthe dual rationales of either fear or prestige as a driving force for gated-communityresidence and begins to unearth the contradictions that exist within these places.Residents of gated communities are often looked upon as models of conformity owing tothe fact that they have chosen a place to live that is not only uniform in appearance butis also governed by a set of by-laws that determine actual behavior. This assumption isoften unquestioned and reflected in studies of private residence and naturally assumed toexist. Low’s informants within a number of gated communities question the actualsustainability of their habitats. What Low also begins to detail, which has always been asuspicion amongst researchers, is that residents of gated communities are not‘automatons’, but are actually resisting conformity by disregarding or outwardlydisobeying restrictions and covenants placed upon them. With this contradiction in placeevidenced by ethnographic research, Low ends by stating that no one theory can explainthe emergence of gated communities and private government. Their existence and thevarious cultures that are products of them is more about local context, politics and thehistory of various communities. This grounded approach and focus on the localpopulation within private-residence communities is sorely needed in the field.

Gated Communities focuses solely on gated forms of private residence. Like the othervolume, this collection begins with the analysis of homeowner associations. McKenziediscusses the growing political dilemmas in ‘Bonanza Village’ from within the gatedcommunity as a focal point of research, as it was forcefully becoming a gated communityin Las Vegas in order to fit into larger urban planning in America’s fastest growing city.The interplay between newly formed gated-community homeowner associations as theyare being created and local governments evidences the dilemmas and tensions that arerarely addressed in gated-community analysis, as most analysis occurs after the fact oftheir construction. This is picked up by Chen and Webster’s contribution, as they reflecton the lack of homeowner association creation or involvement as the population ofprivate residences increases. They identify key problems with homeowner associations inTaiwan specifically and provide some interesting suggestions on how to possibly makethem more popular and efficient.

Other authors in the collection observe the role of gated communities in thepolarization of space, as markers of social distinction, as a means of creating sociallyhomogenous spaces and as a movement of urban resources into the control of alreadyelite groups. As the editors note, this type of development has the potential to create aloss of social diversity, further social segregation, displace crime to ‘softer targets’outside of the gates and exacerbate an already existent lack of services for the poor viathe withdrawal of elite groups into enclosed spaces. Indeed, work published by CharlotteLemanski on the effects of gated communities on those immediately outside their gatesin Cape Town (2006) and Richard Ballard’s conception of the ‘semigration’ of SouthAfrican residents speak to these conclusions (2004).

Glasze highlights a number of economic approaches to the formation and persistenceof gated-community development through club goods theory and the interplay betweeneconomic and political changes, usually seen as effects of globalization on the one handand nationally or regionally differentiated governance patterns on the other hand. Heraises the profound question of whether or not private neighborhoods create shareholderdemocracies that violate basic democratic principles. While he laments the trend ofutilizing club goods theory to the neglect of a focus on the social construction ofinstitutions within gated communities, the reader is left to ponder this latter researchtrajectory. To answer this, the reader can look to contributions by Thuillier and Roitman,who both focus on the development of gated communities in South America. Thuillier

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moves beyond a discourse of the fear and club goods theory models to explain how thenew spatial layout of Buenos Aires, with the elite living on the outskirts of the city,represents a profound change in urban culture and residential mentality. He discusses theeffects of gated communities on those immediately outside of their confines and pressesthe need for local governments to use legislation to maintain some semblance of controlon this novel form of urbanization.

Roitman provides perhaps the most comprehensive approach to gated-communityresidence in her analysis of one enclave in Mendoza, Argentina. The causes for thegated-community phenomenon are divided between structural and social rationales andthe continued interplay between them. Roitman attempts to understand the desires of thesocial actors involved in gated-community living by focusing both on those inside andoutside the gates and the various perceptions each group has about themselves and theconstructed other. The competing perceptions provide a robust understanding beyond theassumption that gated communities feed social segregation. Interview excerpts from herempirically grounded research with gated-community residents and their immediateneighbors speak directly to the framing devices the majority of gated-communityresearchers use, and provide the welcome voice of actual residents and their sentiments.The fact that Roitman also focuses on an ‘intermediate city’ rather than a largemetropolitan area demonstrates how the phenomenon is present in many urban locales ofdifferent sizes.

Manzi and Smith-Bowers also pursue a qualitative approach in their comparativeanalysis of two case studies in the United Kingdom. They use the oft-quoted ‘culture offear’ paradigm established by Glassner (1999) to establish the most relied-upon rationalefor choosing gated-community residence. They then take this one step further byattempting to uncover the tensions among gated-community residents and thereforecontradict the commonly held assumption that residents are a homogenous social group.In tandem with Roitman and Low’s piece, one can establish a course of study thatforwards the importance of ascertaining the viewpoints of residents as primary in gated-community research.

Although both collections assert the importance of local perspectives, readers mayfind themselves yearning for more of the local voice rather than the consistent surveyanalysis of private residences. Thus, the reader may continually ask why individualschoose to live in these spaces, whereas the majority of researchers themselves are morefocused on where they occur and what structural conditions allow their construction. Oneof the persistent questions constantly discussed in this field is about the reasons whyindividuals actually want to live in these places. This question essentially goesunanswered in the majority of work on private residence. This may reflect a personal biastowards ethnography, but as a researcher in this field one has a pretty thoroughknowledge of the various means by which private residence is constructed. As the editorsof Gated Communities note, ‘the significance of gated communities lies less in theirnumber and more in what they say about a wider bundle of social pressures now directingwhere and how people live’ (Atkinson and Blandy, 2006: xiv). It is now time to movebeyond the fascination of their mere existence and delve further into the cultures of gatedcommunities and how they are changing over time. I look forward to further work by thisprolific group of scholars and hope that they continue to focus on the locales that theyhave already addressed so comprehensively in terms of social justice and the perspectivesof the residents who have chosen to live in these privatized spaces.

Matthew Durington, Towson University

Ballard, R. (2004) Assimilation, emigration,semigration, and integration: ‘white’peoples’ strategies for finding a comfortzone in post-apartheid South Africa. In N.Distiller and M. Steyn (eds.), Under

construction: ‘race’ and identity inSouth Africa today, Heineman,Sandton.

Blakely, E.J. and M.G. Snyder (1997)Fortress America: gated communities in

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the United States. The BrookingsInstitution, Washington, DC.

Caldeira, T. (1996) Fortified enclaves: thenew urban segregation. Public Culture 8,303–28.

Glassner, B. (1999) Culture of fear: whyAmericans are afraid of the wrong things.Basic Books, New York.

Lemanski, C. (2006) Spaces of exclusivity orconnection: linkages between a gatedcommunity and its poorer neighbour in aCape Town master-plan development.Urban Studies 43.2, 397–420.

Low, S. (2003) Behind the gates: life,security, and the pursuit of happiness infortress America. Routledge, New York.

John Ingram Gilderbloom 2008: Invisible City: Poverty Housing and New Urbanism. Austin:University of Texas Press.

Gilderbloom’s Invisible City is written against the background of 25 years of experiencein housing research in the field of US housing policies. His book, many chapters of whichwere written in collaboration with colleagues, is based on numerous case studies anddemonstrates through different dimensions of housing that ‘the private rental marketalone cannot provide affordable housing for all citizens, and this is especially true forminorities’ (p. 200). Invisible City refers to the people ‘whom we walk past every day andnever truly see’: the poor, disabled, elderly and homeless. Invisible City moves beyondand past the front stage of a city and looks backstage. Moreover, Invisible City refers tosolutions to solve the housing crisis that are far removed from the usual agenda ofhousing policy.

Gilderbloom’s work is deeply based on Max Weber’s and Ray Pahl’s framework ofsociology and ‘attempts to explain the causes and consequences of resource allocation toprovide a new direction and meaning for urban studies’ (p. 3). In his work, devoid of apolitical economic analysis in a Marxist tradition, he asks about the political andeconomic structures of the US housing market. In the introduction to his book,Gilderbloom writes: ‘Inequalities are generated within and among cities. Why is it thatcertain cities can provide affordable housing and other cannot? What is the role ofgovernment, banks, developers, and landlords in the allocation of housing needs?’ (p. 2).

In a first step of argumentation Gilderbloom illustrates the economic, social andpolitical dimensions of the housing crisis in US cities and gives a systematic overview ofvarious aspects of the contemporary housing question. Beyond the classical housingquestions, such as access to and quality of housing, the authors point to problems ofovercrowding, disruption of social networks and living with unhealthy chemicals in thehome. They bring the reader’s attention to the often invisible phenomena of trailer-homesand homelessness as a final consequence of the housing crisis.

Gilderbloom and his co-authors identify rent increase as the most important challengeof the housing crisis for millions of American tenants. In the next part of the bookGilderbloom explains why rents rise. He overlays the economic explanation with supply-and-demand-theories, introducing a sociological theory of the housing market, includingan analysis of institutional factors. By analyzing a sample across all cities with more than50,000 inhabitants Gilderbloom updates former studies from 1970 and 1980 with datafrom 1990 and 2000, and finds that the scale of landlord professionalization has lost itssignificance in explaining rising rents. Factors such as median house value, medianhousehold income and age of housing has stronger relevance to Gilderbloom’s currentstudies: ‘the findings suggest that the relationship between rent price and age of rentalhousing is curvilinear. Very old housing stock actually increases the rent prices’ (p. 60).His data analysis seems to be a simple phenomenology of US housing markets, but itclearly points to the social consequences of gentrification (rising rent prices in olderhousing stock) and identifies federal housing-policy programs as a subsidy more forlandlords than for the poor: ‘vouchers turn poor landlords into rich ones and richlandlords into millionaires’ (p. 61). Beyond a market analysis of federal housing policyGilderbloom criticizes the vouchers program from a political perspective: ‘Vouchers are

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also used as a carrot to get tenants groups away from thinking about other ways toaddress the housing crisis, such as rent regulation or social housing programs’ (p. 62).

Gilderbloom analyzes different instruments of housing policy. In doing so hedescribes the different effects of rent-control practices and proposes to research varietiesof rent control. Based on his data sets in rent-controlled and non-rent-controlled cities heargues that rent controls do not have a general impact on housing markets: ‘In terms ofrent control’s distributional impact, it appears that most rent control ordinances havesucceeded in preventing only excessive rent increases . . . But rent control has notreduced rents to a level that is affordable by the majority of tenants’ (p. 101).

A further aspect of the fundamental housing crisis in US cities that Gilderbloomdescribes is the ‘invisible jail for [the] elderly and disabled’. The absence of barrier-freehousing and transportation systems prevent elderly and disabled persons ‘fromparticipating in employment, health care, shopping, social and recreational activities’ (p.102). Neither the private rental market nor the current public-housing policy programssolve these problems.

His analyses of different HOPE IV projects underline that the programs for restructur-ing the public housing sector are a nightmare too, rather than a dream. Gilderbloom citesthe case of Parc DuValle (Louisville, Kentucky) to illustrate how the successfulfulfillment of all formal HOPE IV objectives can still fail the program’s social goal: only12% of 1,273 relocated households later moved into the new HOPE IV community (p.124). HOPE IV in Parc DuValle transformed the neighborhood without reaching thepeople. Gilderbloom’s proposal for a different kind of housing policy suggests a morespatial integration of public housing projects: ‘Scattered-site housing in middle-classresidential areas would substantially reduce economic isolation and residentialsegregation, a problem that the HOPE IV program has not adequately addressed.Moreover, funding community-based nonprofits appears to be significantly more cost-effective and pragmatic, since they are building within existing communities’ (p. 126).

Beyond this spatial argument of decentralization Gilderbloom explains how historicpreservation can be a tool for creating affordable housing. As a successful exampleGilderbloom spotlights the recent renovation strategies for shotgun houses in New Orleansafter the Katrina-disaster and shows that ‘preservation, conservation, and rehabilitation ofolder housing can be dramatically less expensive than new construction’ (p. 151).

Gilderbloom not only generates ideas for a better housing policy but he also pointstowards possible actors for changing housing policies: he shows how universities can playa role in helping to address the housing crisis. Through the example of the SustainableUrban Neighborhood (SUN) program he emphasizes a role for academics as ‘changeagents in promoting revitalization’ (p. 173). Researchers and students of the University ofLouisville had organized a bottom-up planning process for neighborhood revitalizationand developed a partnership of neighborhood activists, public institutions and privateactors. Gilderbloom summarizes the impact of this academic intervention into theneighborhood dynamic as a program that ‘enhances problem-solving capacities by linkingresidents with systems that provide resources designed to increase productive self-sufficiency’ (p. 173). The lesson from Gilderbloom’s experience is that academics do notneed to be isolated in an ivory tower but can be active agents of positive change (ibid.).

This call for academic activism sounds politically critical, but within the report onacademic community activism Gilderbloom presents a very affirmative solution to thehousing crisis. Unfortunately, the term ‘productive self-sufficiency’ means nothing otherthan homeownership: ‘the best kind of affordable housing is homeownership’ (p. 175).His main arguments are that it provides: more control over physical surroundings andtenure, a reduction of monthly payments over time, a protection against unanticipatedchanges in rental costs and the ability of homeowners to generate substantial financialgains from federal taxation (p. 175 et seq.).

In favoring homeownership, Gilderbloom reproduces the real-estate mantra that noother business has made more people millionaires than real estate and presentshomeownership as an individual-freedom-minded model of anti-capitalism. In his view,

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property has the capacity to overcome any dependency on other people. Moreover —Gilderbloom argues — tenanthood promotes a perpetual cycle of welfare dependency.‘Without increased homeownership and the sense of self-determination that accompaniesit, the cycle will be that much more difficult to abolish’ (p. 179). An unintended irony inGilderbloom’s book (written before the outbreak of the financial crisis) is that hespecifically quotes Fannie Mae’s National Housing Survey to assure readers of theimportance of control and autonomy that homeownership allows.

I am more than skeptical that it will be possible to overcome the social disruptions ofcapitalism with strategies of capitalization, and I wonder why Gilderbloom does notsuggest that the structure of public benefits has to be changed. He clearly argues thatcommunity-based non-profit cooperatives would provide the best way of supplyingpeople with affordable housing (p. 188 et seq.). This could be a first step in the directionof the long-term decommodification of housing systems without individual property andwithout the failures of current housing programs. Nevertheless Gilderbloom’s book is amust for anyone who is interested in a critical analysis of current US housing policy.

Andrej Holm, University of Oldenburg

Jennifer Sherman 2009: Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Familyin Rural America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Classic ethnographic work in sociology tends to focus on urban life with an emphasis onpoverty, crime, racial conflict and other dimensions of social disorganization. Bycentering her ethnographic inquiry on the challenges, struggles and survival strategies ina rural Californian community, Jennifer Sherman provides an analysis in Those WhoWork, Those Who Don’t that is a refreshing and much-needed addition to the urban-centric ethnographic literature. Sherman gracefully draws on the key findings from urbanethnographies about family life, support networks and employment while demonstratinghow these social processes unfold differently in rural America.

The community Sherman explores, Golden Valley (not its real name), is a largelywhite, isolated former logging community in rural northern California. In the 1990s, anEndangered Species Act ruling largely put an end to the massive logging industry in thearea, leaving Golden Valley and its residents economically decimated. Sherman’s projectis to uncover the social dynamics that have developed in the community in response tothe dramatic rise in economic uncertainty.

There are three primary components to Sherman’s analysis: the role of moral capitalin social stratification, the meaning of ‘traditional’ family values, and the remaking ofmasculinity. Early in the text, Sherman introduces the concept of moral capital: ‘moralworth has evolved into a form of symbolic capital. This “moral capital” allows the poorto create distinctions among themselves in the absence of significant economic capital’(p. 65). At its core, Sherman’s argument is that in the midst of high unemployment andeconomic uncertainty, economic indicators of worth no longer serve as adequatestratifiers. Thus, she finds that Golden Valley residents employ morality as a way ofdemarcating boundaries between social groups. Sherman even goes a step further toargue that, in addition to serving as a new form of stratification, one’s moral status in thecommunity can actually be converted into social and economic capital (p. 73).

Sherman then provides an analysis of family life in Golden Valley, focusing on howresidents construct for themselves the meaning of ‘traditional’ family values. Sheidentifies three primary meanings of ‘traditional’ family values for Golden Valleyresidents: first, prioritizing the need for family stability over the needs of the individual;secondly, defining the boundary between destructive behavior and functional behavior;and, thirdly, supporting the isolated, homogenous and impoverished lifestyle of GoldenValley over the life of the metropolis (p. 105). These meanings of ‘traditional’ familyvalues, Sherman argues, are used to mark the boundaries between the deserving and

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undeserving poor in Golden Valley, which further serve as mechanisms of socialstratification. However, Sherman demonstrates how, far from being rigid categories, themeanings of ‘traditional’ family values must constantly be negotiated and renegotiatedby Golden Valley residents as their neighbors and family members struggle with highlevels of addiction and domestic violence.

A final component of Sherman’s analysis is an examination of how masculinity isconstructed and negotiated in Golden Valley. She identifies two primary genderideologies among the men in her sample: ‘rigid’ and ‘flexible’. The men who maintain arigid gender construction insist on being the sole breadwinner and on controllinghousehold finances, while maintaining separate spheres for men and women. The menwith more flexible gender constructions, by contrast, have largely dissolved theconnection between masculinity and breadwinning, often participate in childcare andhousehold work and are more likely to share power with their wives. Sherman brandsflexible masculinity as a survival strategy for families in the context of limited economicopportunity. She writes of men with flexible gender ideologies: ‘these men’s familiesappear to have a much better chance of long-term stability than do their more traditionaland less flexible counterparts’ (p. 175).

While Sherman’s analysis contributes in important ways to the sociological literatureon work, family and poverty, there are two primary areas where additional analysis wouldcontribute to her argument. First, she demonstrates the ways in which many of the findingsfrom urban ethnographies do not necessarily hold up in the rural context. The explanationfor this variation, however, is left under-developed. Sherman alludes to the role of isolationand community homogeneity as important factors that distinguish Golden Valley from theurban core, but more analysis in this area could be fruitful. Future research would benefitgreatly from teasing apart the mechanisms that produce urban and rural differences in theuse of symbolic capital, social and family support, and gender constructions.

Secondly, Sherman’s analysis could also benefit from a more nuanced conception ofher respondents’ employment statuses. The author frequently discusses the problemof high unemployment in Golden Valley. Her focus on unemployment rather thanunderemployment unnecessarily dichotomizes her respondents’ employment status.Many of the respondents in her analysis are not completely unemployed, but ratherunderemployed in terms of hours, skills or status. Respondents could be considered ‘hoursunderemployed’ if they are involuntarily working part-time, sporadically or seasonally.They could be seen as ‘skills underemployed’if they are working in jobs that require lowerlevels of education or work experience than they actually possess. Finally, they could beconsidered ‘status underemployed’ if they are working in jobs that provide them withsignificantly less status or prestige than they have had in the past. An examination ofthe consequences for Golden Valley residents’ lives across these categories ofunderemployment would add power, detail and nuance to Sherman’s analysis.

Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t is a well-executed contribution to the sociologicaland ethnographic literatures on the survival strategies of economically marginalizedgroups. By complicating the urban ethnographic literature, Sherman urges sociologistsand ethnographers to include the lives of those people who reside outside the metropolisin their understandings of the social world. Future researchers can continue to move thisagenda forward by grappling with the mechanisms that underlie the different survivalstrategies employed by the poor in rural and urban communities, thus providing a morecomprehensive understanding of what poverty means in America.

David Pedulla, Princeton University

Alice Hills 2009: Policing Post-Conflict Cities. London and New York: Zed Books.

Alice Hills’s substantive point is that all social order is local. That means any program,instrument or administrative unit set up to sustain a city or region must be built on local

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conditions. Across places of the world the specifics of history (‘legacy’ is a word shesometimes uses), of power, of corruption, of personality — and much else — determinethe ways in which order can come into effect. Hence any effort to police a citysuccessfully, particularly in the post-conflict environments that are the focus of this book,must deal with those prior set-ups.

In terms of her ‘method’(in a broad sense of the word), she thinks the state of the policeindicates the nature of the larger social order. Police regimes vary in their level ofefficiency, stability, violence, legitimacy and corruption. They take on these characteristicsby dint of surrounding context. ‘Police represent,’ she says, ‘an accurate indicator of thetrue nature of order, and the relationships of power on which it is founded’ (p. 140). Thus,the police are a route to comparative and historical understandings of place.

These substantive and methodological themes come together in this far-flunganalysis of how order operates, and the specific role of the police in various ‘trouble-spots’, such as Kinshasa, Monrovia, Mogadishu, Basra, Pristina, Kabul, Kigali andGrozny. She has combed official and media reports for details of the situation on theground after (and sometimes during) great upheavals — mostly of war as opposed tonatural disasters (which are not really taken up). Hills conveys a vast amount ofinformation across many diverse urban and national environments, albeit sometimes inlimited snapshot form.

For Hills, there is typically order and not chaos, even under dire conditions (‘Somaliais not anarchic’, she says on p. 152). The problem, from a Western standpoint, is that thecontent of this order often does not conform to ‘our’ standards of liberal democracy.Hence there can be routines of bribery, embezzlement and violence that run counter tointernational law and standing NGO sensibilities. But, in what she regards as thehallmark of ‘order’, they are predictable and indeed predicted by those subject to them.Hence, more or less reliable systems of social and economic life can take root even whenresults are injurious, particularly to minorities, to women, or to those who end up on thewrong side of geographic or cultural borders.

This way of thinking leads Hills to state, on (too) many occasions that there is adistinction between order and security. She holds that analysts conflate the two andindeed tend to think that security is a prerequisite for order, rather than the other wayaround (which is closer to her sense of how things operate). So a regime can be orderlybecause it is predictable even when people, or at least some subset of them, are entirelyvulnerable to autocratic whim.

If order is what is most important, rather than the security to which it might ultimatelylead, situational specifics become important. Extant ‘networks of subjugation’ (p. 179),sometimes deriving from generations of historical practice, may have to be accepted.While it may be possible for an outside authority to impose a security force, order dependson people’s lived routines and cannot be brought in from the outside. The great mistake,therefore, of so many good intentions in military conquests and NGO efforts is the failureto work with prior modes of individual and collective life. Official pronouncements to thecontrary are, in Hills’ words, ‘both paternalistic mantra and a lie’ (p. 75).

This creates a dilemma for those wishing to provide benign intervention, a dilemmato which Hills gives short shrift: it is the problem of universal rights versus relativism.Should outsiders such as UN agencies acknowledge racial, ethnic and gendersubjugation and support structures based on them? Or should they, as Hills thinks theytend to do, embark on programs that arise from sensibilities that do not conform to localhistories and prior patterns of deference and punishment? If they defer to the local theystand a better chance of success. Otherwise, as she reveals across a landscape of failure,efforts will come to naught. Presumably (she does not attempt an accounting), more willstarve or be murdered.

Whatever the merit of the order/security distinction, it enables Hills to display a denseportfolio of instances. She uses the link between war and cities, increasingly gainingattention of urbanists, to further examine the nature of both phenomena. The writing issometimes vague, repetitive and, partly because of the large number of cases, too cursory.

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Hills is not always consistent and there are holes here and there in the argument. But theproblem she discusses — what goes on under conditions of great urban duress — is bothintellectually important and crucial for global policy. Her book is a worthy contributionto confronting these dilemmas.

Harvey Molotch, New York University

Duanfang Lu 2006: Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space,1949–2005. London, New York: Routledge.

In the wake of the unprecedented urbanization of China, many books, special issues andarticles have appeared on Chinese urbanism over the past decades. Almost withoutexception, these studies contrast the current cities with the pre-reform Maoist city inwhich work units (danwei) functioned as urban building blocks. But while there havebeen several social-science studies on the socio-political dimension of the work unit —most notably Lu and Perry’s Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historicaland Comparative Perspective — it was hard to find a good inventory of Maoist spatiality.Remaking Chinese Urban Form happily fills this gap. On the basis of both interviews andarchival material, Duanfang Lu — architect, architectural historian and urbanist — givesa rare inside view into the processes underlying the spatial production of Maoist China.This book is a very welcome addition to literature on urban China.

In the first chapter, Lu announces that she will examine Chinese modernity as both asocialist and developing-world modernity. Her object for this analysis is the physicaldimension of the work unit. Lu is clear that in her view the built environment is not anautonomous arena (p. 2). She follows Lefebvre in maintaining that every societyproduces its own space. But at the same time she criticizes the overly structuralistpolitical-economy framework: the Maoist city did not only result from a socialist modeof production, but also from scarcity and weak planning powers in the specific Chinesesocialist/developing-world context (p. 11).

While the six chapters that follow relate to this theoretical point of departure, they arequite loosely organized. Thus, instead of a structured general history, the book presentsa pastiche of relatively independent stories, each with its own theoretical accents (p. 16).As a result, the chapters can be read separately too, and not surprisingly many have beenpublished individually. The first chapter, on ‘Travelling Urban Form’, for instance, wasalso published in Planning Perspectives, where it received the 2006–2007 best articleaccolade. This chapter shows how the western concept of the neighbourhood unit as wellas the Soviet concept of the micro-district were interpreted, negotiated and contested inthe Chinese context. It thus positions the idea of the work unit against the background ofsimilar international concepts.

The third chapter presents the work unit as an urban form. This results in a ratherdescriptive account of the physical characteristics of work units around China beforereaching a discussion of various related social issues such as community development,equality, women’s rights and environmental sustainability. The fourth chapter presentsone of the core stories of this book. On the basis of archival material on urban developmentin Beijing, it looks into concrete processes that shaped the physical development of thework unit. It shows in particular how the central government’s strong emphasis onproduction and resulting limited investments in consumption — especially in housing —forced work units to take up the role of housing developer. The chapter gives anenlightening account of the practical organization of these illegal work-unit activities andthe resultant conflicts between work-unit leaders and municipal planning departments.

A somewhat weaker fifth chapter highlights commune planning from 1958 to 1960.The chapter does outline the general context in which commune planning took place, itdiscusses the organization of the Chinese planners involved and it focuses in particularon implied utopian aspects of commune planning. However, at the same time it does not

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show the processes behind the demise of the commune movement in the same detail asthe preceding chapter.

An interesting sixth chapter highlights the walling of work units against thebackground of the history of the Chinese tradition of wall building. The seventh chapterpresents three micro-studies of the spatial practices of different groups — former work-unit inhabitants and rural migrants — that have come to inhabit the work units after thereforms. Based on the concept of ‘liquid urban space’, this chapter shows how work unitsare transformed in a new context of high mobility. The relatively egalitarian Maoistco-worker places become highly contested spaces where heterogeneous practices ofmixed inhabitants — especially former work-unit members and rural migrants — workout in unpredictable ways. It is through these and other practices that a new urban Chinais taking form today.

The epilogue pulls together several threads that run through these individual stories.It restates in particular that space should always be studied in relation to society, and itreemphasizes that Chinese urbanism is not only the result of a socialist mode ofproduction, but also of the specific historical developing-world condition of scarcity. Forsure, the stories on work-unit urbanism in the various chapters seem to imply that astructuralist political-economy explanation of the production of socialist space alone isinadequate to account for the specific characteristics of socialist Chinese urban form.However, the addition of scarcity as an explanatory factor to the political-economyframework, while leading to interesting observations, might not be sufficient to create ageneral theoretical framework that is sensitive to the local variation of urban formswithin diverse modes of production. After all, such a framework should be able to showhow specific goal-oriented groups are able to create their own spaces within variousinstitutional settings. In short, the overarching theoretical framework of this book couldbe further developed. Having said that, this theoretical discussion on the limits of thepolitical-economy framework is not the core of Remaking Chinese Urban Form. Its mainstrength is in the individual chapters that present intriguing and highly informativestories on the production of Maoist urbanism. Each chapter is illustrated by an abundanceof architectural designs, maps and pictures that provide welcome visualizations. Theresult is a highly interesting read that definitely leaves the reader begging for more.

Bart Wissink, The University of Hong Kong

Jackie Hogan 2009: Gender, Race and National Identity: Nations of Flesh and Blood.New York: Routledge.

If Henri Lefebvre’s ‘complete urbanization of the world’ (2003: xxii) has come to pass,and the globe is an abstracted human space of flows, transactions, webs and networks,swimming with the dialectics of differences, of centres and peripheries, of horizontalchannels and vertical structures, then where and wherefore is the space of the national?Jackie Hogan shows us. Hogan’s objective, premised on the view that nations areimagined communities, is to demonstrate that the collective narrative of a nationinvariably replicates widespread social disparities and internal hierarchies of power, andfurther, that these discourses reinforce categories of gender and race, which materializespace. Hogan shows how selective national histories are formed and have an impact onbodies today in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the endHogan shows how gender, race and national identity clearly remain lasting categories ofan urbanized planet.

In part one, Hogan examines the mainstream histories of each nation and shows overand over again that throughout these collective stories it is easy to find engenderedarchetypes of national identity that adhere to rigid, stereotypical and binary categories ofthe feminine and masculine. Australian popular identity can be traced back to the arrival

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of the Europeans (p. 18). The 1851 Gold Rush, the forming of the Federation, the Firstand Second World Wars, the Olympic Games, the Constitutional Referendum, thecentennial celebrations and 9/11 were all moments that shaped the widely acceptedcollective identity of the nation. Similarly, the contemporary national metanarratives ofJapan also reach back to stories of the divine ruling system (p. 34), and are built uponongoing changing relations with China as its other, and on the Heian, Edo and Meiji eras.These narratives are rich with dualized male–female symbols (p. 34). Notwithstandingthe problematic and recurrent conflation of British identity with English identity,Britannia, King Arthur and Robin Hood stand out as enduring icons of national identity(p. 55). American national identity is about frontiers, good wars, heroes, the immigrationmelting pot and Christianity (pp. 77–86). All of the national discourses repeatedly reflectracist and prejudiced views of others, who are often demonized and constructed as asource of social problems. In part two, Hogan substantiates the materialization ofnational identities and corresponding social hierarchies and inequalities throughout eachof the four countries’ respective Olympic ceremonies, journalism, tourism and nationalmuseums. This is a section that is packed with data.

From a perspective of urban studies, or social spatial theory, Hogan’s book isremarkable because she demonstrates the dominance of borders and structures (that is,categories) and their corresponding hierarchies across horizontal webs. By contrast,Doreen Massey’s For Space (2005) describes space as a complex ever-transforming webof coeval trajectories. Everything is in motion — even the rocks and mountains (ibid.:130). In its theoretical extreme, there is no centre, and no vertical structure. Similarly,Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Times (2007) is a snapshot of space in which everything —including minds and bodies — is hyper-fragmented or liquid. The national narratives,and the rigid concepts of gender and otherness revealed in Nations of Flesh and Bloodstand out against this background of horizontal fluidity, as inflexible vertical structuresthat privilege light, authority, strength and severity over weakness, chaos, suppleness,uncivility and darkness. Hogan’s book therefore offers insight into the character ofnational vertical structures that stand in contrast to the decentralized lateral pathways thatcriss-cross over an urbanized landscape.

The language of the text could have profited from a more careful use of the word‘race’ in view of her proposition that discourse shapes space, but also because of recentpoststructural conceptions of space (such as those from Massey, 2005) that radicallyobliterate spatial categorizations without turning a blind eye to the problem of differenceand power. In my view, any anti-racist project must take extra care to use a language thatcan critically analyse racism while at the same time departing from the categories thatpractices of racism require.

Notwithstanding this weakness, Hogan clearly reveals the problematic materializedforms that manifest themselves as a result of discourses and their embedded powerstructures. It is therefore an important contribution to the literature on national identity. Forsocial spatial theorists, human geographers and urban scholars, Hogan’s research alsooffers profound insight into the vertical arrangements and configurations that dialecticallyrise, structure, interweave and reinforce themselves across the fabric of urbanizedlandscapes. In a worldwide space of coeval flows, and endless simultaneous multipletrajectories, it is fascinating to consider the continual production of these vertical and rigidformations that can ensnare entire social milieus into geographies of exclusion.

Constance Carr, University of Luxembourg

Bauman, Z. (2007) Liquid times: living in anage of uncertainty. Polity Press,Cambridge.

Lefebvre, H. (2003) The urban revolution.University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis.

Massey, D. (2005) For space. SagePublications, London.

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Gender, Race and National Identity: Nations of Flesh and Blood – By Jackie Hogan

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