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of informational models from which to draw. They have selected the most effective of these models and built something greater. They give the reader the tools to navigate an area of study that is inseparable from a host of other disciplines, and whose history, for that reason, has until now remained muddy.

This book thus serves as a guidebook in several ways. It is a guide to itself. It is a guide to the study of graphic design history. But most importantly it is a guide for structuring future holistic analyses of nearly any subject.

The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (eds)London: Phaidon, 2008, 510 pages, 1,500 color illustrations, 500 black and white illustrations, references, index. Hardback, US$69.95.

Reviewed by Simon Sadler DOI: 10.2752/175470710X12593419555883

The giant city is the enduring figure of modernity, and the inter-disciplinary topic par excellence in the humanities and social sciences in the last two decades. For much of that time it has been the site for an intellectual and ideological tussle between those analyzing the city as the political economy writ large, and those reading the city as the crucible of identity.

The Endless City synthesizes both approaches, and for that reason alone represents an important contribution to the dialectic of urban studies. Further, it prioritizes questions of policy over theory, demanding, by its alarming orange cover, its lap-crushing unwieldiness, and its sheer institutional clout, that decision-makers take notice. Edited at one of the world’s leading academic centers for the study of political economy, the London School of Economics, and sponsored by the Alfred Herrhausen Society, a think-tank of the Deutsche Bank, The Endless City represents the published findings of the Urban Age Project, a transnational touring conference that in 2005–06 pulled into its orbit an astonishing list of academics, politicians, activists, and financiers.

The Endless City thus represents something of an apotheosis for discourse on the city; it is at once progressive – its pedigree stretches back to Europe’s Enlightenment urban-reform and architectural-planning movements – and sublime, imbued with a

Simon Sadler is Professor of Architectural and Urban

History at the University of California, Davis.

sjsadler@ucdavis.edu

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wonder at late- and postmodern global urbanism already familiar to readers of Rem Koolhaas’s and Bruce Mau’s tomes. The cover streams dizzying facts – “121 buildings over eight storeys in 1980 in Shanghai / 10,045 buildings over eight storeys in 2005 in Shanghai”; “65% of New Yorkers belong to an ethnic minority / 56% of new residents in London were foreign born in 2001” – yet The Endless City has passed beyond the various tropes of delirium, apocalypse, ecstasy, and marginality that were key to the postmodern moment. In an effort to renew a social-democratic agenda for cities, this book contends that urban planning is (or should be) the central theme of modern politics, given that both require the negotiation of sustainability and growth, homogenization and diversity, enterprise and justice, statistics and conjecture.

On this point, the forty or so essays, written by academics, journ-alists, architects, and politicians, reach an approximate consensus. Characterized by tidy, sober, unsentimental expertise, the essays consistently (albeit with some repetition and redundancy between them) deliver readable, timely, insightful summaries of problems that might otherwise seem utterly intractable. The text gleams with facts and insights that have the potential to skew a reader’s perspective forever. We learn from Anne Power, for example, that “London . . . requires 293 times its own land surface area – more than the whole area of Britain – to sustain its huge consumption of energy and resources” (366). Or, my personal favorite, courtesy of Saskia Sassen: “in 2004 the UK exported 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany, and imported 1,500 tonnes of the same product from the same country” (281).

To talk with authority about the urban world, from micro to macro scales, as a joint project in the sweep of human history as a whole, requires the book to assume a methodological stance that approaches universal humanism. The name of the organizing body behind the book, “The Urban Age Project,” certainly implies as much, even if this approach unfolds in the book’s 500 pages with little fanfare. A few authors issue minor memoranda about the pitfalls of instrumental reason and the elision of difference, but these warnings are subsumed by the book’s overarching argument about the fundamental variables of the “urban age”: ever-increasing population and a finite environment, the figuring of economy within space, the relation of this generation to the next.

In combination, the essays of The Endless City make the meth-odological point that the universalism of the urban age must be “managed up” from its specific sites. Specifically, managed: The Endless City is the manifesto of a somewhat hip group of experts who believe that social democracy should return to center stage as the world’s great mediator. It is a measure of how far the world slid rightward into neo-liberalism over the last few decades that The Endless City’s attention to humanism and the rational distribution of resources credibly figures as a protest, a call for a happy medium

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between market- and proletarian-based anarchies. We have per-haps already experienced the former kind of anarchy in the banking industry. But the specter that seems most to haunt The Endless City is that of a multitudinous global proletarian rebellion that some recent commentators have argued will be the corollary of an untrammeled capitalist globalization. For example, Wolfgang Nowak of the Alfred Herrhausen Society cautions cryptically in the book’s foreword that “If cities become ungovernable due to their sheer size, new secondary powers will start to emerge that could ignite a general and apparently aimless revolution”(7).

True, Nowak’s warning might feasibly be referring to the menaces of terrorism and fundamentalism, but these receive little direct attention in the book, which is remarkable, given fundamentalists’ and terrorists’ ambitions to usurp democracy and capitalism as the world’s most potent political forces. Terror is referenced only in passing, with an air of noble pastoralism. “One of the great tasks of urban design lies in creating spaces that do not foreground fear,” Sophie Body-Gendrot suggests (359); Richard Sennett concurs that “an ease among strangers [is] the foundation for a truly modern sense of ‘us’” (297). And in their enigmatic meditation for the book, Herzog and De Meuron suggest that threat is itself one of the agents of urban morphology.

Nonetheless, the Urban Age Project reserves its right to a “scep-tical optimism” about mainstream political institutions (7). Skeptical though that optimism may be, it extends, in The Endless City’s con clusion, to an almost Corbusian naïveté, as “transnational corp-orations, the glue of global cities” are felt to “have significant roles to play: becoming champions for market principles like transparency, accountability, innovation and empiricism . . . to accelerate the build-ing of housing and infrastructure [and] . . . the sharing of practices and innovations across cities and nations” (481).

The Endless City’s tacit plea for a return to responsible arch itect-ural planning is strictly ancillary to its call for more intelligent and nuanced administrative policy. As the editors put it in their analysis of Mexico City, the urban challenge is “a matter of the architecture of decision-making rather than a matter of architecture” (11). Design is certainly a recurrent topic in the book – coeditor Deyan Sudjic is director of the Design Museum in London, founder of Blueprint, former editor of Domus, and the 2002 Director of the Venice Arch-itecture Biennale – though it is promoted neither as visionary nor apocalyptic but as process-based, in need of mandate, and, again, endless. Even Rem Koolhaas is conscripted to this drive toward joined-up urban transformation: “I used to be almost contemptuous of architecture myself . . . [but] Recently I have become more impressed again with architecture . . . in its very awkwardness and chaotic multifaceted nature – dealing with economics, politics, aesthetics, civilization – it maintains at least a sympathetic and sometimes impressive ambition to connect the dots” (320–2).

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The Endless City satisfies the designer’s eye with beautiful pictographs, which look like something out of the Weimar Republic, except that they point to no overtly socialist outcomes. In design, as in policy, The Endless City defers to that classic dialectic of freedom and constraint in which the new is managed but unburdened from any overarching teleology (except that of sustainability broadly conceived). The trajectory is directed only by the small-scale inter-ventions of design – buildings, schools, clean-ups, galleries, traffic management, bus services, markets, housing, the servicing of cyclists and pedestrians – and it is marked by a recognition that urban morphology is principally a system of constraint. In his marvelously frank essay on the design of high-rise buildings, Alejandro Zaera-Polo (of Foreign Office Architects) proposes that architects can at best work with existing parameters, such as regional variation; surely, then, The Endless City is no call to “massive change” of the sort found in Bruce Mau’s work or in the recent revival of interest in Buckminster Fuller.

Nonetheless, sustainability acts as the book’s oblique, “non part-isan” call for wealth redistribution. Our world’s ecological impasse is perhaps all the more worrying when described in the pragmatic, centrist terms of The Endless City. Though the narrative of The Endless City seems concerned principally with the fate of the middle class, it does at least present global politics in terms of class privilege and deprivation. There is an end to The Endless City: for all its diplomacy, the book’s insistence on a resurgence in cosmopolitan urban political power necessarily champions a soft-left political progressivism. And that, incidentally, should supply the design industries with a steady stream of business.

Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters by Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. DrescherIthaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009, 216 pages, 255 color plates, bibliography, index. Paperback, US$24.95/UK£13.95.

Reviewed by Angela Riechers DOI: 10.2752/175470710X12593419555928

American labor movement posters have one foot planted squarely in each of the dual landscapes of labor history and design history. Their bold, homegrown iconography is a source of inspiration for workers during difficult times, urging them to join together, take action for the common good, and demand a better future. Yet until now, labor

Angela Riechers is a graphic designer and

second-year MFA student in the new Design

Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts,

New York. artdeptnyc@gmail.com,

ariechers@sva.edu