Modern Architecture and the End of Empire – By Mark Crinson

Volume 29.1 March 2005 205–12 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

© Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing.9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAIJURInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research0309-13172005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.March 2005291205

12Original ArticlesBook reviewsBook reviews

BOOK REVIEWS


David Harvey 2003: Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York and London: Routledge.

David Harvey’s brilliant essay on Paris during the Second Empire is a most successfulwork which will help scholars and generations of students. First, the study is astutelyconstructed in a series of small chapters covering wide viewpoints. The first part, whichwas never published before, begins with representations of Paris before the revolutionof 1848. The second and third parts, the revised and extended versions of the essayConsciousness and the Urban Experience, published in 1985, relate to changes aboutthe organization of space relations, housing, finance, labour, the conditions of women,consumerism, class, science and urban transformations. The building of the Sacré Coeurbasilica ends the work. There is a lot of coherence in the study’s development, helpingto understand what is new and what is not, and making sense of the title. What ismodernity in its putative birthplace about? Is it a radical break with the past and a‘creative destruction’? Or were changes already latent and visible before 1848?

The author’s position is that every innovator borrows from innumerable plans andproposals. In the case of Baron Haussmann, for instance, in order to reinvent Paris heborrowed from the report of a commission appointed by the Emperor in 1853 whichhad produced an elaborate plan of urban renewal. Marx borrowed from Proudhon andFlaubert from Balzac for Madame Bovary. While the term modernity has replaced thatof capital, Harvey prefers capital that he links to modernity in the title in order to explorewhat forces and processes construct new sensitivities.

Inspired by Carl Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna and by Walter Benjamin’s study ofParis in the Arcades project, the work proceeds as a giant kaleidoscope, laying outinformation from archival work following J. Gaillard’s outstanding study of Paris andfrom secondary sources, weaving themes and persistent threads together to render somevision of the totality of the city possible (p. 18). At the same time, a variety of micro-perspectives on material life, the role of families, working-class and bourgeois culturalactivities and patterns of thoughts, dreams and phantasmagoria contribute to ourunderstanding of the dynamics of urban change. Linkages between very different areasof research bring in literary analysis, Daumier’s drawings, portraits and cartoons, thereproduction of over a hundred period photographs including those of Marville, as wellas reproductions of paintings, as Patrice Higonnet had done in Paris, Capital of theWorld (2002).

The first part focuses on representations and borrows from Balzac’s ninety novelsand novellas written between 1828 and 1850. It looks at changes brought by ruralmigrations, class relations, the incorporation of the uprooted in city life, spatial patternsand moral order. In fact, the moral narrative is here at the forefront. Take for instance,Ferragus, a story in Balzac’s History of the Thirteen. Everyone transgressing the spatialpattern and moving in the wrong place at the wrong time dies, Harvey observes.‘Characters out of place disturb the ecological harmonies, pollute the moral order andmust pay the price’ (p. 40), whereas the powerful members of society appear when andwhere they want. They command space while everyone else is trapped in it. This is thekey to their secret power.

Another interesting point in that part of the study concerns the image of the idealRepublic formulated by the utopians. ‘France should think of its territory on the model

Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005

of the city’ wrote Foucault. That the city as a form of political, social and materialorganization is emblematic of what the state and what the future society should be. Thisis not an American idea. It is distinctively French and fusional. There is a subtle analysishere of community and communism and of the legacy of the French revolution. Harveycontests, however, that ‘The idea of the city as a body politic got smashed in 1848 andthen interred in the commercial world of commodification and spectacle in SecondEmpire’ (p. 88). He suggests instead that during this period, attempts were made toreconstitute a sense of the body politic around imperial power in the face of forces ofcapital accumulation. But economic liberalization eventually undermined imperialpower, he observes, and the second empire was brought down as much by capital, byrepublicanism (private property and entrepreneurial freedoms), as by worker opposition.

The second part focuses on the demolition of the body politic as imagined by socialutopians before 1848 and on its replacement by Haussmann’s vision of how capitalshould re-conquer Paris via authoritarian means, how order should prevail via newadministration, how the bourgeoisie should consume nature, parks and feasts, how thebuilt environment should be transformed with regular, straight and large boulevards. Thegoal of understanding the geopolitics of an urban historical geography is reached here.Spirals of themes start with spatial relations, move through distribution (credit, rent,taxes), production and labour markets, reproduction and consciousness formation, andreveal how space is set in motion (p. 105). The central figure of this narration is BaronHaussmann. Parallels between him and Robert Moses come to mind. Art historian T.J.Clark suggests that Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris depended upon a capitalistic re-imagining of what the city both was and could be about. ‘One might even say that capitalpreferred the city not to be an image — not to have any form, not to be accessible tothe imagination, to readings and misreadings, to a conflict of claims on its space — inorder that it might mass-produce an image of its own to put in place of those it destroyed’(p. 59).

One cannot help noticing the Marxian lens with which the book has been conceived.At times it oversimplifies Parisian society, which is made more complex by profoundchanges taking place at that time. To take an example, the bourgeoisie of the secondEmpire was made of many components and was as divided in its aspirations andtrajectories as the working classes, immigrants and rural migrants included, were. Allthe social strata experienced a malaise generated by social transformations taking placeboth in the spheres of consumption and production. This point is perfectly illustratedwith the chapter on women and on class strictures. It seems that women from diverseconditions learned that ‘if they were a valued commodity with money value, they coulduse the democracy of money as a tool for their own liberation, whether as consumersor producers’ (p. 104).

On the whole, Harvey achieves a remarkable synthesis of intellectual, political andsocial history. The book should interest all the scholars from these disciplines, but moreparticularly urban scholars.

Sophie Body-Gendrot, Sorbonne, Paris IV2005291Original ArticlesBook reviewsBook reviews

Linda McDowell 2003: Redundant Masculinities: Employment Change and White WorkingClass Youth. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

The effects of economic restructuring at the global level on the welfare of local areasand the workers tied to these areas have been the focus of a significant amount of recentresearch and much of this research has argued that workers are increasingly disposablein nature, both within the workplace and in society at large. While the notion ofdisposable workers may seem far removed from McDowell’s analysis of white, working-class young men in Sheffield and Cambridge, Redundant Masculinities demonstrates

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that even in the heart of the advanced capitalist economies, gender, ethnicity and classprocesses work together to create people who — both within and outside of theworkplace — are increasingly ‘redundant’.

McDowell’s book focuses on the ‘problem’ of young, white, working-class men inthe contemporary UK, a topic which has received a significant amount of attention fromboth the media as well as government agencies and has been popularly described as acrisis of youth and masculinity. Arguing that this so-called crisis is not fundamentallyabout gender, McDowell provides a lens for understanding the position of youngworking-class men as a product of both the transformation of the labor market and class-based inequalities in school and beyond, which, combined with long-standing ways ofperforming masculinities, systematically disadvantage working-class boys in the labormarket.

McDowell thus argues that the shift to a service-based economy, which increasinglyrequires not only formal educational qualifications but also social and cultural capitalappropriate to the type of emotional labor involved in many low-end service jobs, isespecially disadvantageous to young men who leave school early and who depend ontraditionally male jobs as a part of their masculine performance. In order to make thisargument, McDowell relies on interview-based research which she conducted with 24white, working-class young men living in Cambridge and Sheffield. Drawing on a seriesof three semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of 12 to 18 months asthese young men transitioned from school to the labor market, McDowell addresses howthese men perform masculinity at school, home, and in their leisure time; their attitudestoward women and people of color, especially as they intersect with the men’s successin school and in the labor market; their previous and current work and educationalexperiences; and the connection between the performances of different masculinitiesand these experiences.

As in her earlier work on gender and merchant banking, McDowell provides a verysolid theoretical foundation for her arguments, skillfully combining feminist theories ofgender and contemporary research on masculinities with an assessment of the economicand social structures that shape the lives of the young men in her study. Although muchof the material presented in this book overlaps with the material included in the seriesof articles by McDowell based on this same set of interviews, McDowell succeeds inmaking a unique argument in Redundant Masculinities which complements rather thanduplicates arguments made in other venues. While her analysis of labor marketrestructuring is woven throughout a number of the articles she has written, and whilegender performance is the focus of one of these articles, in this book these two topicsare addressed as aspects of a larger argument which, in essence, revolves around themisrepresentation and misunderstanding of young working-class men in the nationalmedia, social policy, and within the school system.

As McDowell’s stated aim in Redundant Masculinities is to challenge negativeassumptions and portrayals of these young men, at the heart of this text are the fiveanalytical chapters which give voice to their perspectives and experiences. McDowell’sinterview-based research method is clearly appropriate and revealing for the matter athand, and her experience in working with this type of method is evidenced throughoutthe book, as she reveals nuanced information not only about relatively straightforwardtopics such as work history of the young men, but also about their relationships,sexuality, ‘laddish behavior’, and perspectives on controversial topics. While thestructure of the book unfortunately forced a slight divorce between the empirical resultsand the rich theoretical arguments made by McDowell in the initial chapters, whichprovide critical structural and contextual information necessary for understanding thesignificance of the young men’s experiences, the result of McDowell’s research is ananalytical section amazingly rich in detail. In a similar way that ethnographic workprovides ‘thick description’ of culture and place, Redundant Masculinities provides afeeling of intimate knowledge and understanding by the reader of the lives andcircumstances of the young men.

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Although McDowell intentionally tries to avoid romanticizing these young men’slives by making working-class heroes out of them, she is clearly sympathetic to herresearch subjects, who become the protagonists of her book. Yet while it is evident thatMcDowell identifies with them and is acting as an advocate on their behalf, she resistsboth the simplification of their lives and experiences as well as the construction of aclear ‘antagonist’ against which to juxtapose the plight of these boys. The economicrestructuring and traditional gendered performances structuring these young men’s livesare not viewed as necessarily problematic in and of themselves, but are analyzed asfactors which work together in a unique way in this geographic context to create bleakfutures for these boys and misunderstanding of them at the societal level.

Overall, McDowell’s book represents an important and unique contribution to anumber of fields, including feminist geography, masculinity studies, developmentstudies and research in economic restructuring across disciplines, as it serves as a modelfor a serious and nuanced incorporation of gender processes and identity formation intoresearch on class, economic processes and structural change.

Risa Whitson, Ohio University2005291Original ArticlesBook reviewsBook reviews

Mark Crinson 2003: Modern Architecture and the End of Empire. Aldershot: AshgatePublishing.

Architecture is probably the oldest, and most widely used method of projecting politicalpower, whether of reactionary dictatorial regimes or democratic republics. For newnations, it is also seen as an instantaneous way of both ‘becoming modern’ andprojecting ‘modernity’. Yet ‘Modernist’ or ‘Modern Movement’ architecture of the earlytwentieth century, couched by its European creators within a discourse of social reform,was largely introduced into Asia, Africa or the Middle East as part of imperial orimmediately post-colonial regimes.

What Mark Crinson examines in this innovative and challenging book, is ‘howmodernism and other aspects of modern architecture is refracted through the prism ofBritish imperialism and its dissolution and aftermath’ (p. xii). In a series of buildingand urban case studies (in Iraq, Iran, London, India, Ghana, Malaya, Hong Kong) headdresses ‘the discursive play between modernism and nationalism, or modernism andtradition, in newly independent countries’ and the ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ of post-imperial immigration in London. As Head of the University of Manchester’s Art Historyand Archaeology School, the author has a fine sense of the iconic and symbolic, atheoretically sophisticated framework informed by postcolonial critiques, and makesperceptive and original observations. His sensitivity to the political potential of visualimagery is reflected in a lively and gutsy narrative with case studies containing muchnew and fascinating material. For the international (and in cases, postcolonial)readership of this journal, the obvious point to make is that Crinson writes,understandably, from a critical post-imperial British position, though one informed bythe work of indigenous post-colonial critics. Space being limited, I highlight here onlya few themes.

What Crinson emphasizes is the notion of an imperial architectural culturerepresented by ‘continuities of vision’ between London, New Delhi, Pretoria, HongKong and elsewhere, showing links between ‘the older order of imperialism and the newone of globalization’ (a theme also addressed in King, 2004) He moves easily betweenmetropole and colony, foregrounding the symbiotic continuities between, for example,the British-designed Baghdad Railway Station of the l940s (‘its decorative formscharacter[izing] Iraq as a locality within the world-system at a time when empire wasgiving way to a new global order’, p. 27) and Iraqi architects discovering (their own)vernacular building traditions in the architecture school at Liverpool. His discussion of

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the interrelationship between constructions of modernism, traditionalism andimperialism here is highly relevant to contemporary debates about the supposedhomogenizing cultural effects of globalization.

In ‘Oil and Architecture’ Crinson opens up a case of previously unexplored informalcolonialism: the ‘colonial mini-state’ of Abadan, Britain’s ‘most significant overseasinvestment in the l940s’ (p. 53), run by BP’s forerunner, the Anglo-Iranian OilCompany. This was a classic example of a racially divided colonial city: expatriatesuburb and ‘native town’, with Persian labor living in tents and huts and the company’splanning skills focused on the spatial control of political activity among its non-Britishlabor.

This, and disparities of housing provision between expats and locals, were tocontribute to Mussadiq’s 1951 nationalization of the industry. Chapter 4 traces the ideaand history of the ‘national pavilion’ as a representation of Britain at seven internationalexhibitions between the l920s and l940s. While this effectively (and visually) illustratesthe way ideas of national identity change according to historical, geographical andpolitical conditions, it also says much about the politics of space. That the cultures ofWestern urbanism are linked, through imperialism, with those of colonial cities, andtherefore need to be understood in this unitary context (a notion which, incidentally,precedes Said’s Orientalism [1978], as Crinson suggests) is nonetheless welldemonstrated here. His account adds significantly to the growing body of work oncolonial architecture and urbanism which complement the literary and other culturalspheres addressed by Said in his magisterial Culture and Imperialism (1993).

An analysis of London’s two main institutions built to display the empire, thenineteenth-century Imperial Institute and the twentieth-century Commonwealth Instituteforms another essay. Crinson’s interesting interpretation relates the spatial layout of eachto the construction of different subjectivities, the more recent (CI), in Homi Bhabha’swords, ‘spatialising the mythology of multiculturalism’ and a ‘spurious egalitarianism’where different cultures are presented in the ‘same time and universal space’ (p. 126).Later chapters discuss issues of modernism and nationalism in Malaya, the ‘discrepantcosmopolitanism’ associated with London’s Regent Park mosque, and architecture inGhana in the era of welfare-state imperialism. Here, the deconstruction of the idea ofthe ‘Tropical Architecture’, linked with the work of British architects, Fry and Drew,might have been taken much further using recent work in geography deconstructing the(European) discursive invention of ‘the tropics’ as such. Addressing the move towards‘Africanization’ of what was previously a ‘colonial architecture culture’, Crinson citesthe skeptical views of Nkrumah, about ‘the universalist claims of Western education’and ‘of African students who adhered to its values’ (p. 130).

This is a book replete with interesting ideas, though some readers will want toquestion the position from which the author writes. While drawing on postcolonialtheory, the unstated assumption throughout the book is that of a single notion of‘modernity’, and one (Chakrabarty’s critique of Europe’s acquisition of the adjectivemodern for itself notwithstanding) that begins and ends in the West. It’s also worthasking whether, in the context of multiple indigenous building traditions, modernarchitecture itself remains the best example worldwide of a process of self-colonization,irrespective of location. These comments, however, should not detract from what is aninteresting, provocative and well-researched book.

Anthony King, State University of New York at Binghamton

Chakrabarty, D. (1992) Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts? Representations 32, 1–32.

King, A.D. (2004) Spaces of global cultures: architecture, urbanism, identity. Routledge, London and New York.

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. Penguin, London.—— (1993) Culture and imperialism. Vintage, London.

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Jean Hillier 2002: Shadows of Power: An Allegory of Prudence in Land-Use Planning.London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group (The RTPI Library series).

A second subtitle to this book could be proposed: ‘Concepts and Metaphors forUnderstanding Planning Practices and Decisions’. Five dimensions of Jean Hillier’swork are very attractive:

1 Interpreting planning practices with concepts drawn from Habermas, Foucault andBourdieu;

2 Setting the terms of a debate in the planning theory field with Patsy Healey, JohnForester and Judith Innes;

3 Focusing on planning decision-making and particularly on the actors’ values andideals in these processes, especially the hidden dimension;

4 Reflecting on planning as a political activity which can manipulate through discoursesand actions;

5 Using in-depth case studies in Australia in which actors and processes are describedin a very lively way and open a door to everyone’s experience in planning.

Concepts are tools extracted with caution from the social and human sciences toolbox.Jean Hillier considers them very carefully to make sure they are adequate to the situationwhich is to be interpreted. If they are not entirely appropriate she readjusts them, orbuilds new ones to be sure that planning officers and politicians’ logics will be usefullyinterpreted. This conceptual debate is underlined by metaphors which help the readerto intuitively grasp the perceived ‘reality’ — shadows, chiaroscuro, for example, makeuse of the metaphor of light to illustrate her approach to power.

Hillier also tries to understand the nature of powers in the decision process, or, moreprecisely, the power logics which envelop the rational and formal processes of decision-making. To attain this goal she critically utilizes the concepts and approaches of JohnForester, Patsy Healey and Judith Innes. Debates are opened on many aspects of theirwork. For example, Hillier considers that consensus is only one extreme possibility ofthe decision process, conflict being much more adequate to understand planningsituations. In doing so she is deliberately more on the Pierre Bourdieu side than on theJürgen Habermas one.

I will not review all the concepts and debates of this very rich and dense book, butconcentrate on one question. In what way do these concepts help us to understand therole of planning officers in practice situations? Chapter 10, ‘Planners as Missionariesor Chameleons’ is illuminating on this subject. Hillier is working on the schemes ofperception, appreciation and action of planning officers, their habitus in Bourdieu’sterms (p. 210). It helps us to understand that ‘action is generated by the interaction ofthe opportunities and constraints of situations with actors’ dispositions (habitus)’ (p.211). Her theoretical intention is to go further than Habermas’ concepts in using theBourdieu concepts of habitus, field and capital (p. 212).

Missionaries are very kind people with strong beliefs and ideas: in today’s terms onecould say that they have a marketing attitude. They want to make you think what theythink is best for your soul, beliefs, behaviour. Their core values — social justice, thepublic good and personal integrity (personal integrity: ‘consistency between their innerbeliefs and their public actions’ (p. 208)) — in planning officer terms means that theynecessarily work at two mental levels: the official level and the shadow level. They gettheir hands dirty to achieve the public good. It is very difficult for planning officers toremain missionaries.

Chameleons are fascinating creatures. They change their skin colour, but slowly.There is one thing they do quickly: eat insects with their tongues. The eyes are also verymobile and independent, and they can observe and react using very completeinformation. They have only one problem: they need some time to change colour, andthere are colours they don’t like. What does this mean in Joan Hillier terms? A planningofficer could be born a chameleon, but he could also become a chameleon. Chameleons

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are adaptive planning officers who are believers in the magic of free markets. Their corevalues? No moral content in planning practices, retaining one’s job, and no interest ininnovation and change.

Is this black and white thinking? On one side the good (social justice, deprivedcitizens); on the other side the bad (market forces)? It is not so simple in the author’sterms: she is reflecting on the way planning officers live their professional lives, thevalues and the tensions with which they experiment. Nevertheless, a question remainsabout the position of the author: Are planners the only ones qualified to interpret andrepresent the ‘public interest’? What makes the analysis so interesting is the fact thatthe author shows concretely that a planning officer needs to be ‘an expert, a bit of apolitician, an assistant negotiator, a stickler for procedure, and a stoic who can acceptdisappointment with equanimity’ (Minson, 1998 cited by Hillier, p. 209). Her mainmessage to them is: prudence and anticipation!

Shadows of power will be enriching first of all for planning officers and all those whoare looking for new ways to understand planning practices, and secondly for academicsinterested in debates in the planning theory field.

Alain Motte, Université Aix-Marseille III2005291Original ArticlesBook reviewsBook reviews

H.V. Savitch and Paul Kantor 2002: Cities in the International Marketplace: The PoliticalEconomy of Urban Development in North America and Western Europe. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Savitch and Kantor have made a major contribution to the urban politics literature withthis book, which focuses on ‘the comparative dynamics of urban development’ (p. xvi).Its impetus came from both empirical and theoretical dissatisfaction. Empirically, theauthors express disappointment with the growing volume of case studies, many of whichcover only one city and few of which are cross-national. On a theoretical level, Savitchand Kantor argue that research on urban development has not incorporated majoreconomic, technological, political and social transformations of recent decades. Theyalso lament the degree to which research has examined the economic or the politicalfactors — but seldom both — shaping urban development. As a result, they have plungedheadlong into the structure-vs-agency debate.

As an alternative paradigm, Savitch and Kantor propose a ‘bargaining’ model ofurban development. They identify the ‘driving’ and ‘steering’ variables shaping localdevelopment decisions in the face of post-industrialization, spatial deconcentration andglobalization. Driving variables include market conditions and intergovernmentalsupport. In contrast to such exogenous influences are the steering variables of popularcontrol and local culture, which are more subject to local manipulation. The four typesof variables are operationalized in multiple ways, with cities generally compared usingordinal measures. These variables affect bargaining, which in turn producesdevelopment policies. Within this framework, bargaining is ‘the ability of a city to garnerresources in order to maximize its choices and ultimately realize its objectives in thecapital investment process’ (p. 43).

The study utilizes the years 1970–2000 to examine ten cities in five countries: Canada(Toronto), France (Marseilles and Paris), Italy (Milan and Naples), the United Kingdom(Glasgow and Liverpool), and the United States (Detroit, Houston, New York). Theseplaces were selected based on diversity in the steering and driving variables. Includingmultiple cities in four of the countries is critical in analysing the effects ofintergovernmental support.

Savitch and Kantor’s analysis yields a typology of cities. The ‘dirigiste’ categoryincludes Paris, Toronto and Milan. On the driving side, these places have integratedintergovernmental support and favourable market conditions; on the steering side, theyhave a post-materialist local culture and active popular control. They enjoy the greatest

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bargaining advantages over development, which has permitted them to pursue social-centred policies. The second-most advantaged bargaining group includes the ‘dependentpublic’ cities of Glasgow, Liverpool, Marseilles and Naples. These communities havefaced unfavourable market conditions, but integrated or mixed intergovernmental supporthas allowed them to use fiscal assistance and regulation to counter weak economies. Thesteering resources of these four cities have varied, which has led them to adopt differentmixes of low to moderate levels of both market-centred and social-centred policies.

In the third category are the ‘entrepreneurial’ cities of Houston and New York. Theseplaces have enjoyed favourable economic conditions, but they have contended withdiffuse intergovernmental support. Their policies have been heavily market-oriented,although New York’s local culture and active political participation have been associatedwith moderate levels of social-centred policy, which has been virtually absent inHouston. The final category is made up of Detroit, which is labelled a ‘dependentprivate’ city because of its low rankings on both driving and steering variables. Indeed,its almost exclusively market-oriented strategies are promoted within a context of ‘neardesperation’ (p. 157).

Savitch and Kantor also enter the debates over urban regimes. For them, regimes are‘governing coalitions that engage in bargaining over development’ (p. 53). A regimeneed not include the private sector, but it could include a range of public actors fromdifferent governments. The authors devote two chapters to bargaining patterns, furtherrefining their typology according to the regimes present in each city. Here, their 30-yeartime frame allows them to conclude, first, that despite unfavourable driving variables,‘political agency is also important — even in the poorest cities’ (p. 263) and, second,that ‘new political leaders eventually brought about significant regime changes’ (p. 264).

The authors follow this analysis with a chapter examining whether cities areconverging in their policies. Relying on an examination of both national and localpolicies, Savitch and Kantor conclude that, despite some changes, local developmentpolicy remains different in Europe and Canada compared to the United States becauseof the actions of higher-level governments. This is followed in chapter 9 by prescriptionsfor three development strategies: community development, regionalism and nationalpolicies. The ultimate lesson that Savitch and Kantor draw from this study is that: ‘Citieshave choices, [which] are not immutable, but capable of expansion, constriction, andmodification’ (p. 347).

Readers might fault Savitch and Kantor on several counts, including methodology.The authors should have provided more detail about their choices regarding cities andvariables. Some variables, especially when converted into rankings among the cities,seem ‘squishy,’ although this is undoubtedly due in part to the lack of comparable dataacross countries and cities. Still, this could prove troublesome as others attempt toreplicate or ‘test’ their model in other settings. If so, it is unclear how well their ordinalmeasures and typology will hold up. Some readers also might complain that their threegeneral propositions (pp 149–50) are too general and not easily falsified.

Ironically, some might criticize Kantor and Savitch for simultaneously trying to dotoo much and too little. They could be overreaching by moving beyond a test of theirmodel to devote substantial space to the convergence/divergence debate and policyrecommendations. On the flip side, the authors’ focus does not address directly thosewho criticize urban scholarship for a seeming preoccupation with development to theexclusion of social issues and other local policy debates. Some treatment of the study’srelation to broader questions of governance and policy might have been a good —though certainly not necessary — addition.

These concerns notwithstanding, this admiral effort moves the urban politicsliterature forward in important ways and should serve as a foundation for other fruitfulresearch. Indeed, this study could have the staying power and significance of such booksas City Limits, Urban Fortunes, and Regime Politics.

Arnold Fleischmann, The University of Georgia

Modern Architecture and the End of Empire – By Mark Crinson

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