and what he identifies as the war of the hot labels. Few readers of this journal ...... 'labyrinth of loyalties' that determines an individual's response to participation ...
Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 10, 1899– 1918, September 2006
Book Reviews Review Article: Do Cities Need Architectural Icons? The Last Icons: Architecture Beyond Modernism MILES GLENDINNING , 2004 Glasgow: Graven Images (The Lighthouse Scottish Architecture and Design Series Issue 1) 40 pp. £9.50 paperback ISBN 0 780954 710323 paperback The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma CHARLES JENCKS , 2005 London: Frances Lincoln 224 pp. £19.99 hardback ISBN 9 780711 224261 hardback The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World DEYAN SUDJIC , 2005 London: Penguin/Allen Lane 346 pp. £25.00 hardback ISBN 9 780713 997620 hardback When Will Alsop (well known to discerning cultural consumers in Britain and elsewhere as the ‘blob’ architect) won the prestigious competition to design the Fourth Grace project in Liverpool in 2002, a storm of protest was unleashed in the architecture and urban design communities. His scheme was voted the least popular in a poll of 15 000 Liverpudlians. In a star-studded shortlist for this £200 million plus project, Alsop’s blobby design was ranked well behind those of Foster and Partners and Richard Rogers in the public’s esteem. A spokesman for Alsop Architects defended the design in the following terms If you propose any icon the instant response is negative because it challenges perception: it is the nature of an icon. None of the other schemes were icons. They were landmarks.1 David Dunster, head of Liverpool University’s School of Architecture at the time, supported Alsop, arguing that most of the other proposals “were simply repeating things we had seen before and were trying to pass them off on Liverpool”. (These quotations are from
the report in the London-based weekly for those in and around architecture, Building Design, of 13 December 2002). As not infrequently happens with these grand urban redesign schemes and not only in Britain, in summer 2004 it was announced that funding had been cancelled for the Fourth Grace and other ‘iconic’ projects by Libeskind and Vinoly, leading Building Design (23 July 2004) to ask on its front page: “End of the iconic age?”. The architectural media in Britain and the US and to some extent elsewhere have, in recent years, devoted a good deal of attention to the place of architectural icons in cities, with the dividing lines between the pros and the antis clearly drawn. The three items reviewed here are good representatives of both the polemics and the subtleties of a debate that is far from over and whose implications for urban design are yet to be fully explored. While these three publications cover very similar ground and, indeed, repeat some of the same stories, they are very different in several ways. The Last Icons by the Scottish architectural historian Miles Glendinning (hereafter MG), is the first in a new series on Scottish Architecture and Design sponsored by the highly esteemed Lighthouse in Glasgow. This is a short, lively and profusely illustrated pamphlet that attacks the phenomenon of iconic architecture as yet another wicked manifestation of modernism. Glendinning, parodying the critique of McDonaldisation, identifies the icon phenomenon in architecture as McMoMoTM . The Iconic Building by Charles Jencks (CJ), one of the leading entrepreneurs of architectural ideas at work today, is published by a small specialist publisher and very inexpensive for an architectural book of this quality. It is beautifully produced, well referenced and full of spectacular images that literally make all the difference to the architectural arguments made in it. The images of the three iconic buildings that Jencks particularly commends—Ronchamp by Le Corbusier, Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Foster’s ‘erotic gherkin’ (see Figure 1)—illustrate what all the fuss is about, whether one happens to like them as works of art or not. A common complaint is that a proliferation of new ‘iconic’ buildings of variable quality makes a mess of cities. This has been wittily labelled a ‘Costa del Icon’2 with
0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=06=101899 –20 # 2006 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080=00420980600888627
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Figure 1. Foster’s Swiss Re building (‘the gherkin’), the icon of choice today, standing out on London’s ‘Costa del Icon’ skyline. Source: Leslie Sklair. reference to new architectural development along the Thames—namely, that too many of these buildings brazenly pander to Mr Prescott’s ‘wow effect’ and the media coverage that goes with it. The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic (DS), the influential architecture critic of The Observer and much else besides, is published by the mighty Penguin Allen Lane. However, this is a dull-looking book (despite its glossy dust cover and higher price), it is poorly referenced and contains not a single illustration of the many buildings and spaces it discusses. While Glendinning (anti-icon) and Jencks (pro-icon) both develop sustained, if flawed, arguments for their central ideas—that iconicity in architecture is best explained in terms of McMoMoTM or of the ‘enigmatic signifier’ respectively—Sudjic (anti-icon as a corollary of being antiedifice) is less obviously concerned with architectural icons. His main argument is that what he labels ‘the edifice complex’ of the rich and powerful explains why prominent architects build what they build, often very badly. Nevertheless, Sudjic’s book is centrally about what other people refer to as icons, although he uses the word mainly with reference to buildings that are designed to serve the interests of nationalism in his chapter 6 on “Inventing a nation”;
and in chapter 12 on “The uses of culture”, largely on corporate architecture.3 Let us start with the case for the value of architectural icons. Jencks, who is best-known for his books on post-modernism in architecture, appears to know everyone who is anyone in the field of celebrity architecture and his book is peppered with interviews—not all entirely vacuous—with the movers and shakers of contemporary architecture. It is hardly surprising that he begins his book with a discussion of the much-publicised Guggenheim Bilbao, completed in 1997 (or rather with the Bilbao Effect) and what he identifies as the war of the hot labels. Few readers of this journal will miss the melodramatic reference in his claim that
A spectre is haunting the global village—the spectre of the iconic building. In the last ten years a new type of architecture has emerged. Driven by social forces, the demand for instant fame and economic growth, the expressive landmark [what follows makes clear that this is what he means by ‘icon’] has challenged the previous tradition of the architectural monument (CJ, p. 7).
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This claim is illustrated by spectacular images of the Guggenheim Bilbao and a photo of a smiling Frank Gehry, then a short dialogue between the two friends. This book, therefore, is very much an insider’s account of contemporary iconic architecture with all the costs and benefits that this usually implies. While Jencks suggests that Gehry opens the door to iconic architecture, Gehry himself opines that Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in New York of 1978 was the first iconic building, citing as evidence that it made the front page of the New York Times and Time magazine. Jencks himself later argues both that Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp (1955) created a similar media frenzy and that there have been iconic buildings for millennia, creating a little confusion about the chronology of the idea. Gehry reveals that the Bilbao job called specifically for an equivalent to the Sydney Opera House, presumably both in architectural and media impact. The Opera House is another widely cited architectural icon, commonly agreed to have successfully rebranded Sydney, thus cementing the relationship between icons and urban design. Jencks evaluates the consequences as follows Now every new corporate headquarters seeks to be an icon, has to have a nickname that sums it up, a one-liner, a bullet point that journalists love to hate, love to spice up (CJ, p. 13). Taken by itself, the reader would be hard put to identify the writer of this quote as pro- or anti-icon— indeed, this is precisely what those who detest iconic architecture routinely say. However, it is clear that for Jencks high impact in these two senses—architectural and media—is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for architectural iconicity. He does not begin with a formal definition of icon, but offers an interesting discussion under the title of “Judging the icon” (CJ, pp. 20 – 63). ‘Judging’, as we shall see, is a highly significant pointer to how Jencks approaches his task. Three methods of judging the icon are put forward: how enigmatic meanings do or do not relate to each other and the possible significance of the building; how architecture negotiates between explicit sign and implicit symbols; and, emergent qualities. Definitions, or rather classifications, now follow: distinguishing the religious and the secular, and the tensions created because iconic buildings share aspects with iconic religious objects; ancient icons, pointing out that: “While the amount of iconic building that goes on today is unique, the practice is old”, from the Pyramids to the Colossus of Rhodes (CJ,
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p. 23); then the first modern icons, notably Ronchamp (giving Jencks the opportunity to introduce more systematically his key concept of the enigmatic signifier, about which more later), via public housing equated with the idea of the palace and thus the Palace of Abraxas by Bofill (1982), which Jencks’ aficionados will be familiar with from the cover of the Penguin paperback of his Modern Movements in Architecture (1985). But we are not yet finished! The iconic icon, the first being Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan (1959) is introduced and explained This kind of icon can be, and has been, reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still hold up. It was incessantly painted by one of the fathers of Pop Art, Richard Hamilton (CJ, p. 28). Jencks argues that Eero Saarinen followed Wright with the TWA terminal at Idlewild airport (1962; here Jencks makes an uncharacteristic small mistake in the caption on p. 31, it was only later renamed JFK) in New York. Notably in this category is the Sydney Opera House (Jorn Utzon, 1973), “the Bilbao Effect before the fact” (CJ, p. 33, picture caption). Just as the Opera House became iconic for Sydney and the Guggenheim became iconic for Bilbao, Jencks argues that Pei’s Pyramids at the Louvre (1988) have become the (surely a?) city icon for Paris. This suggests that iconicity could be usefully studied in terms of geographical scale, at the local or city level, but he does not develop this important idea.4 After all these types, are we any closer to a definitive answer to the question: what is an architectural icon for Charles Jencks? Commenting on Cesar Pelli’s Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles (1962; known locally as the ‘blue whale’ after a nearby fish restaurant), he argues that, “it became iconic in the area for all the classic reasons: it was big, compressed as a form, and highly unusual” (CJ, p. 35). And, presumably, reducible to a postage stamp. The next section—“Anything can be an icon”— sums it up, suggesting that in architecture, there is no single type of building that is or becomes iconic. Rather out of the blue, he then confesses What concerns me here is the way the corporate icon has usurped the throne, captured the urban hierarchy (CJ, p. 41). He connects this thought, through the equation “museum ¼ shop ¼ icon” and Andy Warhol’s reported insight that: “All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores” (CJ, p. 44) with the recent
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phenomenon of celebrity architects designing upmarket boutiques (Jean Nouvel for Galleries Lafayette in Berlin, Herzog and de Meuron for Prada in Tokyo, Rem Koolhaas for Prada and Christian de Portzamparc for LVMH in New York, Ando for Armani, Chipperfield for Gucci and so on). All of these, he suggests, show two defining characteristics of successful icons—namely, reduction and strangeness. But Jencks is not yet finished classifying iconic types. Confusingly, Ronchamp—the first modern icon—is also the prototype of what he labels the spiritual icon When it was finished, in 1955, the building became an international icon. It featured on a French stamp, on French tourist advertisements, in countless newspaper articles, and on the cover of many architectural magazines (CJ, p. 57). Jencks uses the critical literature on Ronchamp to good effect as evidence for the enigmatic signifier, his key conceptual tool for analysing the icon. James Stirling saw in Ronchamp a ‘crisis of rationalism’, and, while granting its power, Nikolaus Pevsner (probably the most influential architecture critic of his era in Europe) called it the “most discussed monument to the new irrationalism”. Contradictory reactions, Jencks argues, are normal for iconic buildings and, allied with the varying images through which they are experienced, are the source of his enigmatic signifier. The reason why Ronchamp is great architecture, along with Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and so on, is that they are all examples of what Umberto Eco meant by the open work, the enigmatic signifier . . . a standard against which to measure the iconic buildings of our time, and a hard one to equal (CJ, p. 63). A cynical reading of Jencks would suggest that, after all these characteristics and defining features and types of iconic buildings engagingly but not exactly systematically argued, iconic buildings are really buildings Jencks loves and admires and the rest— especially those marketed as icons—he simply does not like. Clearly, most works of architecture, in contrast to buildings as such (a conventional architectural distinction), are easily susceptible of an enigmatic signifier analysis. The temple complex at Chandigahr, according to Jencks, is iconically good; Niemeyer’s Congress buildings of phallic secretariat and bowls in Brasilia are bad (Jencks gives only one reading of the latter, the corruption reading—ignoring the open democratic Chamber of Deputies/closed e´litist
Senate reading and other possible readings); Foster’s Reichstag project in Berlin is good; Canberra Parliament is not so good; the Imperial War Museum North by Liebeskind succeeds as an icon with its three enigmatic shards but the Hungarian Pavilion at EXPO 92 in Seville by Imre Makovecz does not succeed as an icon because his signifiers are not seen by Jencks as sufficiently enigmatic or well-executed and so on. This concludes the analytical core of the book, the remainder consists of many entertaining case studies and interviews with the main players convincing the reader of his closeness to his subjects, such as the iconic media wars surrounding the acrimonious competition for redeveloping the World Trade Center Ground Zero site (now subject to an excellent documentary film that reinforces Jencks’ story); the work of Rem Koolhaas, ‘The Flying Dutchman’; the story of the Scottish Parliament by Enrico Miralles and what happened after the death of the architect; Renzo Piano’s Rome Concert Hall (here, Jencks loses his analytical cool, condemning it as “a botch, full of bloopers” (CJ, p. 132), concluding “it’s all so bulky and inert” (CJ, p. 134)); Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia (the verdict on this being that it ends up as “media-driven engineering that appeals more to the public than to those interested in a complex architecture” (CJ, p. 140)), despite wonderful finish and marvellous interior spaces. Also considered are Alsop (interviewed at length); Zaha Hadid (whose Pritzker Prize was “a recognition that the image of the idea, in the age of the icon, is part of the idea” (CJ, p. 158)); and Peter Eisenman being clever through fractals (Jencks’ conclusion on his work is that few icons “can sustain the kind of reading of a Ronchamp and a Bilbao, the standards for the emergent genre” (CJ, p. 168)). And this takes him back to Gehry and Guggenheim Bilbao, and a reflection on what the successful icon is doing in architectural and urban terms. The answer is that it is heightening experience and playing on positive natural overtones and paranoid comparisons, codes of natural creation and destruction (CJ, p. 182). This gnomic thesis leads on to “the cosmic skyscraper”, Foster’s Swiss Re building in London, which became an instant icon. Jencks comes to what he finds are “surprising conclusions”—namely, that the iconic building is a “long term global trend” explained by deep and irreversible reasons, both commercial and spiritual. Given the desire of society and architects to have great icons and yet not to agree on any iconography, they will inevitably produce enigmatic signifiers of varying quality. While the iconic building is relatively recent and special to our time, it is only
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one of five or six important trends of contemporary architecture (CJ, p. 196).
the rich and powerful shape the world. Sudjic starts at a deeper level than Jencks
This, he claims, represents a new paradigm in architecture that originates with the complexity paradigm, the new sciences of fractals, CAD, etc. but with, of course, interesting antecedents. This gives Jencks an opportunity to reveal that about 200 years ago in France King Louis-Philippe had stumbled on the enigmatic signifier—the obelisk solution—in Place de la Concorde (which had not always been Place de la Concorde). But wait, we are not quite finished: via the Eiffel Tower, de Chirico (who said he was painting enigma in its various forms), T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, to name but a few, the enigmatic in these and other incarnations is identified as the predecessor of the iconic building. Confusingly, when he comes to draw the lesson for architecture from this sparkling history of ideas, he speaks of the “successful landmark” as enigmatic and expressive, apparently forgetting about the icon (or perhaps the icon is the landmark and vice versa, which creates a new set of problems). The book finally comes to an end with a short discussion of emergent meaning, nature and cosmogenesis, and the problem of our modern/postmodern age conventionally described in terms of the decline of faith and reason and the absence of a ‘deeply held metanarrative’. (Jencks, at least, has not abandoned the main tenet of the postmodernist moment.) A little surprisingly, perhaps not so surprising when we remember Jencks’ role as a major entrepreneur of architectural ideas and practice, all this decline and absence is at least partly rescued by two cheers for capitalism, presumably the third cheer is withheld due to Jencks’ worries that iconic architecture has been captured by the corporate sector, particularly in cities that aspire to be or already are globally significant.5 It is difficult not to be enthusiastic about this beautiful and exciting book enhanced by many spectacular images and witty illustrations, not least the drawings by Madelon Vriesendorp, but, in the end, it does not deliver a clear analysis of the iconic building despite the brilliance of its scatter-gun method. While it offers many hints and bons mots on the role of iconic architecture in cities, it follows none of them through.6 Jencks makes several references to the work of Sudjic, in particular his comparison of the iconic age to the age of Art Nouveau, a nineday wonder. Jencks rebuts this view, with his own assertion: “The iconic building is not a nine-day wonder, but a future condition that has deep causes” (CJ, p. 143). The Edifice Complex, as noted above, presents itself as a book about the buildings through which
It is still an open question, though one that is often asked, whether architecture can project an inherent meaning at all. Is there, in fact, such a thing as a totalitarian, or a democratic, or a nationalist building? (DS, p. 6). He keeps this question open, to some extent, but attempts to demonstrate that Building is the means by which the egotism of the individual is expressed in its most naked form: the Edifice Complex. . . . [and goes on to argue that the attack on the Twin Towers] was a literal acceptance of the iconic power of architecture (DS, p. 10). Similarly, the Nazis bombed the Houses of Parliament because “Britain had deliberately conceived 19thcentury Westminster as a national icon” (DS, p. 134). So, the answer to the question about meaning appears to be that, while buildings may not project an inherent meaning, the rich and powerful (and by implication other groups with access to the vehicles of communication) can imbue buildings with meanings. Successive chapters work through this theme: Albert Speer’s attempts to carry out Hitler’s grand plans for Germania, the proposed new capital of the Third Reich; Stalin’s designs for Moscow; Mussolini and the impact of fascist architecture in Italy; the uses of monumentalism by Mao and his successors in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and many more contemporary examples. The Italian case is something of an exception for Sudjic. Mussolini had several great architects, especially Terragni (of whose Casa del Fascio in Como, Sudjic echoes the verdict of recent architectural history: “It’s not easy to call it a humane building, but it does not obviously oppress, even if those who built it did” (DS, p. 70). Also cited are Piacentini and Pagano, whose EUR project for EXPO 1942 in Rome is also credited with architectural virtue and is said to have later inspired Eero Saarinen’s St Louis Arch, whose democratic credentials as home of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, are impeccable.7 These Italians were notable architects even if they were fascists, and most Italian cities still have their fascist architecture. Nevertheless, the substance of Nazi or Fascist or Socialist Realist architecture amounted to a pathological obsession with size, symmetry and a blatantly literal iconography [of swastikas, and eagles for Hitler, stars and
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hammers and sickles for Stalin, sticks and axes for Mussolini] . . . Sheer size was more important than the way in which the detail of a building or its organisation could be understood as representing a state (DS, p. 49). The case of China has its own special elements, partly summed up in the title of chapter 5, “The architect who swept the floor”, but even here the man who controlled the regime displayed the edifice complex: “Mao’s Tiananmen was the most ubiquitous image of China, the icon by which the country was recognized all over the world” (DS, p. 97). Sudjic, like Jencks, points out that now China has major foreign architects—notably Herzog and de Meuron, Andreu, Foster and Rem Koolhaas—deliberately designing buildings that they intend to become icons in Beijing and Shanghai, with other Chinese cities and other architects hot on their heels. Both Sudjic and Jencks himself (CJ, pp. 106–112) discuss the role of Jencks in organising support for the Koolhaas Cenral Chinese Television design and both appear to consider it as not only a supremely Chinese building but also as more than just a Chinese icon (perhaps one of a select band of global icons whereby Beijing becomes a ranking city for the purposes of capitalist globalisation?). And, no doubt, all this will become clearer once the building is actually finished. But even if it is never actually finished, the case still raises many interesting questions, not least the issue of the role of architects and architecture in building and sustaining support for authoritarian regimes, a key plank in the edifice complex theory not to mention the underresearched question of what happens to people displaced by grand iconic projects in crowded cities. By raising these questions, though not resolving them, Sudjic attempts to further the on-going debate about architecture and national identity, moving it beyond the idea that it is simply a matter of the egotistical and monomaniacal fantasies of dictators. His assertion on this is strong Architecture plays a powerful part in the manufacture of national iconography. It creates the landmarks that define national identity, all the way from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to L’Enfant’s master plan for Washington. These can become logos for a country, composed very often for that express purpose (DS, p. 134). Similar processes are traced in places as disparate as cities in South Africa and India, and in Brasilia, Ankara, Tehran and Manila, but with different, sometimes disastrous consequences.
The very buildings being presented as the icons of a bold new republic suddenly seemed to embody the corruption and incompetence of the regime (DS, p. 154). At this point, the focus of the book begins to wander, as the motif of problematic identity in an age of uncertainty begins to replace the totalitarian imposition of identity in the age of the dictators. Put simply, the edifice complex is too feeble a concept, let alone an analytical framework, to bear the weight of the bewildering me´lange of brief case studies presented: on airports, the Millennium Dome, various Expos, the Scottish Parliament (good) and the Greater London Authority’s City Hall (bad), recent developments in Australian cities (mixed), the use of marble, the architecture of the Rockefellers, the EBRD and Mitterand, Agnelli and Renzo Piano, Presidential libraries in the US, Richard Meier and the Crystal Cathedral in California. Despite his disagreement with Jencks over icons, Sudjic also asserts that Ronchamp is a hard act to follow. Curiously, in chapter 12 on the uses of culture through iconic museums, Sudjic suddenly begins to write about icons. In pages 294– 299, the term is used at least 11 times but never defined, although Sudjic does offer the opinion that “the icon has become ubiquitous just as it is about to vanish” (DS, p. 299). It is impossible to assess this opinion properly in the absence of even a rough definition but, if it involves spectacular museums intended to attract tourists to cities, the evidence is overwhelmingly against for the time being. In the following chapter, “High-rise syndrome”, the discussion turns to skyscrapers, reinforcing the impression that in the recent past the edifice complex expresses itself through iconic museums and skyscrapers. And again, while rejecting icons, he agrees with Jencks that the Swiss Re building (well, at least the topfloor interior) is “sensational”. Sudjic’s conclusion, in a rather melodramatic final chapter entitled “An incurable condition”, is not only fatalistic but demonstrably false. His assertion that Whatever the architect’s intentions, in the end they find themselves being defined not by their own rhetoric, but by the impulses that have driven the rich and powerful to employ architects, and to seek to shape the world (DS, p. 327) ignores the fact, amply evidenced in his book and generally in the historical record, that ‘good’ architecture can be produced even where ‘bad’ people, usually men, are in control of ‘bad’ systems, whether they
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be driven by political or economic or egotistical motives or mixtures of these. Compared with Jencks (and Glendinning), Sudjic is somewhat cavalier with respect to scholarship. His book contains no notes and few exact identifications of sources, simply a list at the end, making it often difficult for the reader to follow up (and check up) on his representation of facts and debates. One particularly sensitive example concerns his discussion in chapter 4 on Philip Johnson with reference to the issue of how compromised architects working in Italy were during the fascist period and, incidentally, the well-known fact that, if given the opportunity, Mies van der Rohe would have worked for the state during the early days of the Third Reich. Sudjic uses Johnson’s correspondence, now available in the archives of the Getty Center in Santa Monica, to brand Johnson as pro-Nazi in the 1930s, which he certainly was at that time. While he includes the evenhanded biography of Johnson by Franz Schulze in his list of sources, he makes no specific reference to this work in chapter 4. This is unfortunate, as Schulze’s thorough study, from which Sudjic probably borrows, is most instructive not only on the case of Johnson as might be expected, but on the broader themes of architecture and power and celebrity. Just as Jencks’ book is enhanced by its wonderful images, Sudjic’s is diminished by their absence. Was the publisher too mean to include them? If Sudjic deliberately excluded them, it is difficult to understand why—given his position in the architectural world and his ready access, as one of our most distinguished architectural critics, to the pick of the archive. All in all, this is a rather disappointing book, particularly as Sudjic misses the opportunity, for which he is so well qualified, to contribute more seriously to the study of what the edifice complex and/or iconic architecture has done to cities. Glendinning has written what could be described as a polemical scholarly pamphlet, filled with moral outrage at how politically progressive modernist urbanism—for example, the Cumbernauld experiment—has been subverted by iconic consumerist modernism. He labels this “the second tragedy of modern architecture”—the first being modernism on the cheap, more of a crisis of production than consumption. For Glendinning, “the most aggressive aspects of McMoMoTM are closely associated with the building of cultural complexes for city-boosterism” (MG, p. 11), denoted by the term ‘icon’ (from the Greek for mirage or false representation). The difference between the modernism he likes and the modernism he detests, captioned from ‘the sublime’
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to ‘the ridiculous’, is illustrated by contrasting images of respectively, the Ninewell’s Hospital Complex in Dundee by RMJM (1961) and Frank Gehry’s ‘iconic’ cancer clinic of 2002 next door (MG, pp. 12 – 13). He quotes the style guru, Stephen Bayley, on the defining characteristic of the icon (or signature) as the ability to produce instant recognition with zero ambiguity (the opposite of Jencks on the icon as enigmatic signifier). Whereas Sudjic blames those driven by the edifice complex for the shortcomings of iconic architecture, Glendinning points the finger at iconic modernist reception. The real culprit, we believe, is a far more impersonal force: the Modern Movement itself, drawn through its own core values to a self-destructive excess, lunging first towards the one extreme, of collectivism, and now towards the other, of unrestricted competition (MG, p. 17). This impersonal force evolves from the age of the heroic architect (notably Wright and Le Corbusier, followed by Utzon and Saarinen) then in the 1980s to images and icons. Here, Glendinning singles out for special scorn none other than Charles Jencks, “the high priest of the competition ethos in architectural style” (MG, p. 20). Having set out his theoretical/historical stall, Glendinning now narrows his focus to what he wittily labels “commodification in one country”— namely, McMoMoTM in Scotland. He illustrates this with reference to the original vision of Cumbernauld New Town, an “icon-free zone”.8 Those who follow the debates on Scottish cultural life will not be surprised to find a brief and excellently illustrated discussion of the phenomenon of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (from Mackintosh to Mockintosh). At more length, like our other two authors, he ponders on the new Scottish Parliament building: is it an icon or an anti-icon? His conclusion is revealing. It “is still a complex and lovingly crafted building, which, from a purely architectural perspective hardly seemed an obvious candidate for iconic status” (MG, p. 25) which, nevertheless, the forces of the McMoMoTM reception machine, led by Jencks, immediately iconised (through the media and architectural prizes, notably the Stirling Prize). What this tells us is that, according to Glendinning, iconic buildings are rarely “complex and lovingly crafted”, putting him in the same boat as Sudjic when it comes to icons they admire. Glendinning ends with some rousing rallying calls to save the world from McMoMoTM and
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icons: “modernism is finished!” (although he problematises what can replace it) and “no more heroes!” (banish the signature architects) and, more positively, “towards an architecture of solidarity” illustrated with a rather grey image of Alexander (Greek) Thomson’s masterpiece, St Vincent Street United Presbyterian Church, “fusing entrepreneurial zeal with a civic dignity designed for the benefit of future generations” (MG, p. 34). Paradoxically, Thomson is clearly one of Glendinning’s heroes. It is intriguing that this “fusing entrepreneurial zeal with a civic dignity designed for the benefit of future generations” is precisely how the proponents of urban icons—the public and private developers as well as the architects—justify their interventions in the cities they are trying to boost. All the drivers of icon-based regenerations of cities around the world, from Pudong in Shanghai to the Bull Ring in Birmingham and all points between in all directions, frame their discourse of urban boosterism and place marketing in precisely these terms. While the Bilbao effect did not create this process, it has uniquely focused the debate directly on the role of spectacular architecture and the ways in which images of what are now commonly called ‘iconic buildings and spaces’ are mobilised to serve the interests of the urban boosters and place marketers.
question: do cities need iconic buildings? It is exactly the same as the answer to the question: Do cities need beautiful and exciting buildings? Of course they do, and you cannot wish away the iconic architecture in cities by refusing the label, especially when the anti-icon ‘policemen of taste’ love and admire many of the same buildings that the pro-icon ‘policemen of taste’ do. Much, but admittedly not all, of the disagreement between those claiming to be for iconic architecture and those against is more about what we can term ‘iconic overdose’ rather than icons themselves—the ‘Costa del Icon’ phenomenon that Morrison (2004) identified. But this is to throw out the embryonic potential for great architecture with the iconic bathwater. Those who live in cities will always want (and, I would argue, need) buildings and spaces that mean something special to them and that lift their spirits. The real issue is not iconic architecture as such, but to what extent architectural icons enhance the built environment that surrounds them. LESLIE SKLAIR London School of Economics and Political Science
Notes In his opening statement in a debate in 2005 with Jencks, Sudjic proclaims
1.
It is not the job of an architecture critic to be a policeman of taste. I believe our purpose is to try to provide some sense of what is really happening in the world of architecture. To that end, we will get further if we concentrate on what buildings mean, rather than how they look (Jencks and Sudjic, 2005, p. 23).
2.
Fine sentiments, but when it comes to the crunch, none of our three authors can resist settling matters with reference to how buildings look to them (and, perhaps more fundamentally, make them feel). The relationships between what buildings mean, how they look and how they make different categories of those who experience them feel, need to be explored and the field of iconic architecture, especially as part of urban life, is a fruitful site for such explorations. Despite the misgivings of Glendinning and Sudjic, it seems that iconic architecture is here to stay for the foreseeable future. As has been demonstrated above, both Glendinning and Sudjic clearly welcome the best of these buildings and spaces that Jencks and others label iconic. So, what is the answer to the
3.
4.
This distinction, which makes sense to me, is unusual in the literature on architectural icons. Most writers on the subject use landmarks and icons more or less interchangeably, as we shall see. The first occurrence of this phrase appears to be by Graham Morrison (2004) (an edited extract from his speech to the Architects’ Journal/ Bovis Awards for Architecture dinner). Here he distinguishes between ‘true icons’ (those he likes) and ‘second-rate structures’ (those he condemns). Morrison’s intervention conflates landmarks and icons and was broadly seen as antiicon per se. In their debate on the ‘age of iconic architecture’ in Prospect magazine (Jencks and Sudjic, 2005)—which provides brief summaries of their books—Glendinning receives an honourable mention. Jencks and Sudjic also debated this live at the Hay-on-Wye Festival in May 2005. In my own research, I distinguish between architectural icons at the global, national and city/ local levels and ask three questions: iconic for where, for whom and for when? (see Sklair, 2006).
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5.
6.
7.
8.
For an analysis of this issue in terms of the four fractions of the transnational capitalist class— corporate, state, technical and consumerist— see Sklair (2005). For example, Jencks appears to argue that all great architecture is iconic in at least one of his senses (modern, spiritual, etc.). For a discussion of the view that it is useful to distinguish between icons for professionals, meaning those in and around architecture, and icons for the public, and that it is instructive to study in particular those architectural icons that are both, those that have ceased to be iconic and movements in both directions, see Sklair (2006). The Casa del Fascio is the only remotely ‘totalitarian’, let alone, fascist building that has the seal of approval in the modernist canon. It is the only one represented in the collection of icons of 20th-century architecture edited by Thiel-Siling (2005, pp. 62 – 63) and is favourably mentioned in most critical histories. Sudjic suggests that, compared with Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini presided over a “relatively benign dictatorship” (DS, p. 68)—an opinion that Primo Levi among others might have contested. Sudjic’s chapter 4, “The world in stone” argues, to some extent, that some of the architecture in Italy of the fascist period—notably EUR in Rome—has lost its fascist connotations. Glendinning appeared as an architectural tour guide to the virtues of Cumbernauld on the entertaining and instructive Channel 4 (UK) TV series Demolition in late 2005. The point of the series was, via ‘vox pop’ and expert assessments, to decide which of various city developments (urban negative icons?) was most deserving of demolition. The Cumbernauld Town Centre won, or rather lost.
References JENCKS , C. and SUDJIC , D. (2005) Can we still believe in iconic buildings?, Prospect, June, pp. 22 – 26. MORRISON , G. (2004) Look at me! They’re bold, sophisticated and impossible to ignore. But are ‘landmark’ buildings ruining our cities?, The Guardian, 12 July, Features, p. 12. SKLAIR , L. (2005) The transnational capitalist class and contemporary architecture in globalizing cities, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(3), pp. 485– 500. SKLAIR , L. (2006) Iconic architecture and capitalist globalisation, City, 10(1), pp. 21 – 48.
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THIEL -SILING , S. (Ed.) (2005) Icons of Architecture: The 20th Century. Munich: Prestel.
The Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs NICHOLAS LOW , BRENDAN GLEESON , RAY GREEN and DARKO RADOVIC , 2005 Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd; London: Routledge 247 pp. £19.99 paperback ISBN 0 415 37231 3 paperback This is an unusual book in the fertile world of sustainability titles. It is well written, full of useful practical examples, aware of the dubious political manipulation of sustainable development principles and very much people-centred. This is quite an achievement. The authors make a strong commitment to “the perspective of the citizen” (p. 40). In this they eschew the top– down, plan-led and (usually) developer-friendly approach to urban development and planning, resulting in a very refreshing analysis and prescription. It also provides the springboard for the book’s emphasis on houses, open spaces, workplaces and transport. The book adopts a very positive, ‘can-do’ approach to its subject matter and works through sustainable homes and suburbs (ch. 2), nature in the city (ch. 3), sustainable workplaces (ch. 4) and sustainable transport (ch. 5). It would be splendid if the results of this detailed review and evaluation could be translated immediately into an implementation schedule which cities, suburbs and municipalities could easily adopt and deliver. Sadly, this is not the case and, even though the authors have taken their subject matter as far as it is possible to go in the realms of reports, evidence and exhortation, there still remains a dreadful barrier to implementation. This barrier lives in the minds of politicians and in the weak structures of governance that pervade the democratic institutions of the developed world. We have now had more than 20 years of really good ideas about sustainable ‘everything’ and the trends are still very much in the opposite direction. The housing discussion in chapter 2 illustrates the implementation gap. There are large numbers of examples of ecologically high-performing homes around the world but the standard new-build home in the UK and Australia is not impressive in terms of grey water systems, renewable energy and lowimpact local building materials. The situation is worse still for the traffic and transport impacts of new homes on new housing estates. The authors
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paint an attractive picture of best practice, but have little to say about how to shift the current non-sustainable patterns into a much more sustainable direction. The authors present examples of large ‘green’ suburbs in Hanover (Germany) and Malmo (Sweden). In both cases, impressive efforts are made with renewable energy (wind and photovoltaics) as well as transport and water conservation. The authors leave unanswered the rather more depressing question of how many housing estates are built in European countries or Australia that do nothing whatsoever to embrace meaningful sustainability. In ‘Sustainable workplaces’ (ch. 4) the authors start to explore the problematic workings of the market economy, its need for regulation and its necessary aim for growth. There are few examples of profit-oriented organisations deciding to scale down production as part of a sustainability policy. The food industry is a good example (p. 103). Food is increasingly moved over long distances, increasingly processed with a high-energy input and increasingly wasted by the consumer. All this contributes to significant environmental problems including climate change. The sustainable workplace discussion echoes the conclusions of the sustainable homes section. It is abundantly clear that we can design and build highperforming buildings and workplaces. Melbourne’s green town hall and the ‘Ing’ building in Amsterdam both provide best-practice models. Yet again, little is said about the vast bulk of new office blocks and business parks around the world that are badly designed and expensive users of energy. The growth in popularity of air conditioning in office blocks in British cities provides a strong indicator of non-sustainability tendencies. The chapter on transport takes the reader through more familiar territory. Sustainable transport is without doubt the best-understood and leastimplemented policy area of almost any human activity. It is glaringly obvious that we cannot proceed on the basis of 100 per cent motorisation, massive road building, the decline of walking and cycling, and oil depletion. It is equally obvious that Zurich’s public transport system is considerably better than any in the UK or Australia. Furthermore, integrated planning within a public-sector governance model of land use planning and transport is better at producing sustainability than current practice. The book ends on a rather disappointing note, although this is most definitely not the fault of the authors. Given the task at hand, clearly the authors would find it very difficult to work out exactly how we can shift society from its non-sustainable
trajectory and to give us the tools to do the job. Nevertheless, the authors attempt (ch. 6) to flesh out a way of ‘getting there’ in “Making the green city ”(ch. 6). Sadly, it does not work. The chapter is very interesting, especially the section on ‘greenwash’, but it offers little practical advice on how we should ‘get there’. Similarly, in the final chapter (ch. 7), with the enigmatic title “Green shaded cities”, there is little of direct tangible relevance to achieving the paradigm, political and cultural shifts that are required. The picture that is painted of the desirable destination (p. 225) is as good as it gets and ought to be presented to every civic leader in Europe, North America and Australia with a request for an endorsement. Maybe it should also be presented to every university student training to be an engineer, planner, economist, architect or government employee as a kind of Hippocratic Oath to be signed and adhered to. The authors of this book have given us a strong analysis and a strong steer with some really good examples of what success looks like. It would be splendid if they would now write the sequel and tell us what has to be changed, in what way, when and where to give us some certainty that their vision can be achieved. JOHN WHITELEGG Stockholm Environment Institute University of York
City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience KEITH J. HAYWARD , 2004 London: Glasshouse Press 248 pp. £19.95 paperback ISBN 1904385036 paperback Keith Hayward’s City Limits, a book emerging from the field of cultural criminology and published by Glasshouse Press—an imprint synonymous with critical legal theory—is something of a coup. Coming from a tradition without a mainline connection to urban studies (despite some well-established overlaps and obvious resonances), Hayward finds himself in a position to offer fresh perspectives on even the most familiar urban studies landmarks (see, for example, ch. 4—‘Fear and desire in Los Angeles’, on Mike Davis’s urban musings). Yet more than this, City Limits is a book that ably and instructively connects crime to consumerism and the city by exploring the multifaceted nature of both topics, managing to highlight a variety of contingent connections between the
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two. As an admirable synthesiser of numerous research fields, Hayward has a talent for spying out the hidden connections between different disciplinary endeavours, such that his observations might variously draw on art history, political economy and urban geography (for example) within the space of merely a couple of pages. As Jock Young notes, in a glowing back-cover endorsement, Hayward’s book “roots crime in the new rhythms of consumerism and . . . is infused with the bustle of the city”. This distinctly urbane approach has managed to generate a thoughtful, readable and memorable piece of work, which adds much to the still-expanding literature on consumption and the city; and not only because of the specifically criminological focus it supplies. As long as one can refrain from judging it by its rather garish cover, it is also an attractively produced book, incorporating 17 plates, around half in full colour. Between a brief Introduction and a couple of pages offered by way of Conclusion, City Limits contains five chapters of varying length. If the Introduction provides a general orientation and an outline map of the book as a whole, chapter 1—“Imagining the urban experience”—is a full-blown engagement with a me´lange of ideas the author has assimilated, assessed and worked up into a coherent and convincing argument. The writing is intelligent, coolly impassioned and committed. Whilst travelling over (to me) relatively familiar ground in this first chapter, Hayward manages to weave together a compelling story, throwing up enough novelties—in terms of both thoughts and findings—to sustain interest. The chapter is presented as an attempt to consider how various . . . commentators on the city have attempted to conceptualise the subtle yet discernible ways our experience of urban space has been framed by the modern industrialised city (p. 14). But in delivering a whirlwind, whistle-stop tour of the modern city, Hayward sets the tone for the entire book. Although readers with different backgrounds will, no doubt, discover different degrees of familiarity with different sections of the book, the balance struck between laying out the preliminaries and getting on with the business at hand is commendable. The next two chapters differed considerably in terms of my own prior knowledge, for instance. Thus, chapter 2—“City life at modernity’s edge: a tour d’horizon” ranged over far more familiar territory than chapter 3—“The forgotten city and the lost offender”. Chapter 2 effectively provides the
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post-modern supplement to chapter 1, tracking a range of recent debates and corralling together the usual suspects—Harvey, Baudrillard, Jameson, Bauman, etc.—whilst managing to demonstrate their differences and incompatibilities. Chapter 3, on the other hand, is an impressively wide-ranging overview of urban criminology, from the early days of social physics and urban ecology to more recent approaches: situational crime prevention, rational choice theory, realist criminology, and so on. The quality of the writing—from apt epigrams to virtuosic argument—made both chapters equally enjoyable, despite my uneven knowledge-base. The reason for this is relatively straightforward. Hayward does not simply follow the most fashionable line or accept the arguments of the most celebrated authorities; nor does he resort to offering a vague outline of competing positions, as if a blurred picture of ‘alternative’ schools suffices as a substitute for incisive analysis. Instead, and with a more or less persistent rigour, Hayward presents a precise, focused, clinical assessment, which— whilst not consistently unerring, of course—does manage to do far more than merely gesture towards the advancement of understanding. Hayward thus restores faith in the idea that careful thought pays dividends at a time when greater value is too often placed on weak thought accompanied by significant quantities of (supposedly) new ‘evidence’. Chapter 4—“Fear and desire in Los Angeles”—has already been singled out for mention and underscores this last point. Hayward is arguably at his most interesting when he turns his attention to more tightly focused areas such as this. Coming from the perspective he does, Hayward’s engagement with Mike Davis’ work is particularly valuable. He brings to bear a level of expertise that can, when necessary, take issue with Davis on his own terms, yet without ever intending simply to dismiss Davis’ hallmark idiosyncratic scrutiny of the urban obscene. Thus, Hayward provides a wonderfully sympathetic critique of ‘Davisteria’, drawing on a variety of criminological insights and authorities in a deft and virtuosic way. Drawing on the same expertise, chapter 5—“Crime, consumer culture and the urban experience”, the final chapter of the book—reaches a climax in terms of the book’s ultimate purpose. In essence—and at the risk of caricaturing a nuanced and subtle set of suggestions—Hayward claims that “[t]he seductiveness of crime may . . . derive, in large part, from the new kinds of sensations . . . it offers” (p. 175), in a world where sensation-seeking has become allimportant. The real value of Hayward’s book, therefore—beyond providing a wealth of absorbing
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insights—lies in the argument it makes about the significance of crime to an increasingly consumerist, sensation-driven city. The final chapter hammers this argument home in a style that demands and deserves attention. I would entreat all those with interests in cities and consumption not only to read City Limits but also to recommend it to others, not least final-year undergraduates, for whom the material will prove challenging but ultimately accessible. DAVID B. CLARKE Department of Geography University of Wales Swansea
Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social capital in a Boston Barrio MARIO LUIS SMALL , 2004 Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press 246 pp. No price given, hardback; £14.00/US$20.00 paperback ISBN 0 226 76291 2 hardback; 0 226 76292 0 paperback The intention of Mario Luis Small in this book is to present a vivid account of the social history of Villa Victoria (‘Victoryville’) as it transformed itself from rundown ghetto to showcase urban village to little more than just another ‘project’ within a mere 20 years. Abandoning social integration theory (the notion that voluntary participation at neighbourhood level can be linked to the density of institutional resources) as empirical explanation for social decline, Small tries to assess qualitatively the depth of social capital as motivator for action. He does so by demonstrating the structural links between poverty and culture: “in some fashion, culture mediates or tempers or complicates the effects of neighbourhood poverty on social capital” (p. 8). This approach is a useful antidote to attempts to find too causal a chain of circumstances to account for poverty in one place or, alternatively, to extrapolate explanations (or ‘solutions’) from one place to another. The author is concerned to explore the relationship between poverty and the extent of community participation, paying special attention to culture, agency and ‘variation’ in responses to poverty. By any measure, Villa Victoria is a remarkable community. Situated in the South End of Boston, it was developed in the early 19th century as comfortable middle-class housing, but had gone through a subsequent cycle of emiseration and decay to the extent that it was to be comprehensively redeveloped (i.e. demolished) by the 1960s. This was bitterly resisted
by the remaining residents—“not a homogeneous united front but a complex and contradictory cacophony of competing parties, ad hoc groups, and special interests” (p. 33). The study is concerned especially with the Puerto Ricans, who arrived in large numbers from the 1950s onwards. In Parcel 19 (to become Villa Victoria), an Emergency Tenants’ Council (ETC)—inspired by a local church and with the help of ‘outside’ professionals and more ‘bohemian’ middle-class incomers (including many lesbian and gay residents)—produced its own alternative development plan in opposition to City Hall and succeeded in attracting sufficient finance to rebuild the area according to an imagined model of ‘home’ (Puerto Rico). However, although the physical transformation of the area was successful—[the residents considered] “the astonishing beauty of the area, incredulous that so much had changed for the better in so little time” (p. 41)—it had deteriorated again by the 1990s due to a combination of changes in personnel and the loss of trust through petty scandals and maladministration. The level of volunteering and participation had also declined; the purpose of the book is to explore why. The chapter layout follows very closely the development of the author’s narrative; there is throughout a neat interweaving of description and case history with theoretical exposition and analysis. Chapter 1 explores the relationship between neighbourhood poverty (the leitmotif of the study) and social capital (and the density of local networks). Chapter 2 has an extensive description of Villa Victoria and its relationship to Boston South End. Chapters 3 and 4 may be seen as a couplet, detailing the rise and fall of social capital in Villa Victoria, seen through the lens of social organisation theory and what the author calls cohorts and collective narratives (a detailed account of the world-views of local residents), with an analysis of the link between structure and culture. Small concludes that Villa Victoria is not a ‘bowling alone’ phenomenon; there is a great wealth of neighbourhood ‘projects’ and institutions. What is crucial is how the residents ‘frame’ the area in relation to their own life-chances. Chapter 5 discusses the ecology of ‘group differentiation’, with particular reference to social isolation and the need to encourage more ‘porous’ boundaries between communities. Chapter 6 looks at social capital and the spatialisation of resources. Small believes that “the poverty of the neighbourhood, independent of the individual’s poverty, results in . . . disconnection from the mainstream” (p. 123; emphasis added). Chapter 7 considers a crucial element in understanding how social capital operates: the
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‘labyrinth of loyalties’ that determines an individual’s response to participation in ‘their’ community. Finally, chapter 8 summarises and concludes by developing the author’s concept of a ‘conditional’ response to the issue of participation. Much contemporary urban regeneration policy may be summarised in what may be seen as a ‘false’ assertion: We have assumed that, whatever differences exist among actual poor neighbourhoods . . . their main effects are common, such that the mechanisms by which neighbourhood poverty affects individuals must also be common to most poor neighbourhoods (p. 175). The book’s contention, by contrast, is that these mechanisms have been ‘decontextualised’; indeed, many poor neighbourhoods are not deprived of social capital and there is a need to understand the heterogeneity of factors influencing it, at both neighbourhood and individual levels. Community participation (a ‘macro’ concept) depends upon a complex interplay of structural and cultural factors (a ‘structuration’), as well as the processes whereby neighbourhoods are ‘framed’ (i.e. regarded by their residents and others; a ‘micro’ concept). Therefore (and crucially) a small number of committed residents with ‘vision’ can make a huge difference to their neighbourhood (an 80/20 phenomenon; a small number can gear a disproportionate influence). (This may indicate that the contemporary obsession in much urban policy with involving ‘the community’ and striving for ‘democracy’ or ‘representation’ may be singularly misplaced.) Except on rare occasions (as in the perception of a major external ‘threat’), it may be that only a few individuals are sufficiently motivated to become involved. Equally, this phenomenon explains why participation has a ‘half-life’; it will tend to decline over time depending on the lifechanges of a relatively small group. The mechanisms for participation may be distinguished as either initially inciting or in the longerterm sustaining involvement. Social capital may also work in two apparently antipathetic ways: either the life-chances of an individual are likely to be met within a neighbourhood (equalling participation) or they will be met outside it (hence a tendency to leave), independent of the density or otherwise of local networks and the strength of local connection. Hence, networks will ‘ramify’ across space and not be constrained by neighbourhood boundaries, which may be irrelevant to network formation. There is an ‘ecology’ of resources, where local density may actually accentuate poverty
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(by limiting the ‘need’ for external networking or experience) and confirm deprivation. So what is the best approach to neighbourhood poverty? According to Small, it can be seen as either paucity or a preponderance of available resources, again at a macro- or micro-level. What is needed is a conditional analysis, avoiding either universalist or particularist nostrums: “the notion of a ‘typical’ poor neighbourhood is unhelpful in unpicking the black box” (i.e. of social deprivation; p. 184; original italics). Attention must be paid to the differing characteristics of neighbourhoods and the capacity of their residents, as well as the availability of resources. The conclusion may not be startling, but this study is strong both in its characterisation of the local residents (it is an exemplar of good case study narrative) and in its rigorous analysis of theory (and weaving the two together). It has an extensive bibliography and offers many challenging insights. It is a pity it is so poorly illustrated (this is one study where pictures of the area and its residents would have made it truly vivid) and that there is no sense of the potentially radicalising power of social capital at the neighbourhood level. For all that, it can be recommended as a thorough and deeply reflective insight into its character. JOHN CROTTY University of Glasgow
Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform DAVID BRAY , 2005 Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 277 pp. £43.95 hardback ISBN 0 8045 5038 6 hardback This book is a long overdue and important contribution to the literature on modern urban institutions and spaces in China. Drawing on a Foucauldian methodological orientation and analytical stance, Bray—a political scientist at the University of Sydney—offers an insightful genealogy of China’s socialist work unit (danwei). His focus on the work unit is important for several reasons. First, he calls it “the foundation of urban China” since it has been the source of welfare provisions, employment, education and even a person’s identity under socialist rule (p. 5). Secondly, it became the central mode of governing the urban population in post-1949 China. Also, the danwei, and the distinctive socialist governmentality embedded in it, lend themselves well to a genealogical study, having emerged from “a complex process
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of layering disparate practices on top of each other” (p. 7). The “disparate practices” Bray connects are wideranging. They include the use of walls in pre-modern family courtyard homes; Haussman’s plans for a more efficient and ‘regularised’ Paris; the role of cadres in mass line politics in China; and socialist planning practices that privileged production, mobilised people for political campaigns and distributed goods and services through the danwei. Rather than seeing these practices as embodying one coherent historical narrative, Bray reveals how such disparate technologies and rationalities of governing came together to forge the contingent and distinctive socialist danwei. The genealogical method makes connections between ideas, ways of governing and historical times that we otherwise might miss by depending on more obvious conceptual binaries such as tradition vs modernity, state vs society, centralisation vs decentralisation. Bray begins his discussion of ‘socialist spatial practices’ with walled compounds, arguing that certain kinds of spaces produce certain kinds of subjects. Walls—found in the everyday spaces of traditional Confucian family courtyards, surrounding cities and in Republican-era urban residential compounds—are productive of subjects and are not just prohibitive mechanisms of social control. These walled spaces (he calls them “machines”), along with practices such as communal policing, produced collective, and not individualised, subjects. They are then, an important feature in the urban danwei’s origins. Bray also argues Haussman’s technical interventions into the workings of Paris are a part of its origins. The governmental rationality that made it reasonable and legitimate for the state to ‘intervene’ through urban planning is an important component of the danwei system. Layered upon these modern urban planning practices are political visions of social transformation through architectural design, developed by avant-garde Soviets. This genealogy of spatial practices offers several contributions. First, it shows us there are premodern origins for this very modern spatial and institutional formation. Making this link does not mean that the danwei is “a remnant of the traditional past”, but rather that governmental technologies (such as walls) “are quite flexible and open to a range of reappropriations” and thus may be deployed in quite different historical and political contexts (p. 36). Also, by drawing on Haussman and radical Soviets, Bray illustrates how the danwei’s walled space was linked to pre-modern familial and collective practices and distinctly modern rationalities of
technical intervention and social progress. Secondly, he systematically illustrates that collectivised subjects emerged in ‘modern’ urban institutions, such as Republican-era factories, even though both Marxist and Weberian interpretations assumed that “the rise of modern industry” would lead “to the isolation and atomisation of the worker” (p. 42). Although he argues that collectivism appeared in traditional, modern and socialist contexts, it did so in various ways. In the Confucian home, for instance, there was an inward focus on the family (an important discourse of collectivism), while in the socialist danwei there was an outward focus on the ‘big public family’. In contemporary times, many studies again suggest that individualised subjects will emerge in the transition from socialism (and the breakdown of socialist governmentality in the danwei) to a market economy. While Bray acknowledges the more individualised and disciplinary governing of today’s workers and the significant shift in productive work from the danwei to the ‘street’, he also insightfully cautions against narratives with “inevitable” outcomes. For instance, danwei remain a major player in the recent commodification of housing by building, selling and subsidising housing for many urban residents. Urban workplaces also remain important resources for securing housing, whether through loans, joint ownership or housing subsidies paid in cash. And, many of the new gated complexes are walled, making “enclosed communal living” a dominant spatial form in today’s cities as well (p. 192). Finally, discussion of Haussman and rationalities about the legitimacy and efficacy of urban planning suggests that practices developed by Western liberal regimes could be “adapted to the task of socialist construction” and revolution (p. 80). By leading readers through these linkages, Bray convincingly argues that we must be able to account for the ways that past technologies are mobilised—and appropriated for new purposes—in contemporary times. Only then may we fully understand the complex and contingent nature of the social and political formations we study. In addition to challenging the tradition – modernity binary, Bray suggests that we see centralisation and decentralisation as “fundamentally interconnected” rather than as opposites (p. 47). Through a careful analysis of the Yan’an model of communal organisation and calls for local units to be economically “self-sufficient”, he explains how the danwei embodied centralised control and local political and economic autonomy. The cadre played an important role here, as s/he worked to organise and mobilise the grassroots according to central goals, but also in
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autonomous ways. In doing so, Bray argues, cadres engaged in “pastoral care” wherein they provided for people’s welfare needs and incited a politics of “salvation . . . through collective, mass effort”—all based in danwei (p. 61). Writing of the Christian tradition, Foucault describes pastoral power as the governing of minds and souls, a pastor shepherding his ‘flock’ to salvation. Significantly, danwei became critical sites of the cadres’ work and Bray identifies the provision of social welfare through the danwei as “a decisive moment” that transformed “the urban workplace into a socialist danwei” (p. 99). Bray also highlights the interesting relationship between state-owned danwei and the cities in which they were located. State-owned units received construction funding from central (not city) authorities and were responsible for building everything from housing to production facilities to the danwei’s infrastructure. These danwei thus “became virtually independent of the city in which they were situated” (p. 129) and were “able to exercise near absolute power over [their] spatial realm” (p. 155). In addition, the danwei received standardised architectural plans for communal living from central authorities, resulting in a fairly regularised morphology of collective spaces across urban China. Bray offers a very important contribution in this wonderful book. It should be read widely and as a methodological and conceptual intervention into much social science literature on urban spatial and governmental forms. His explicit and consistent Foucault-informed analysis is illuminating, powerful and very accessible. Not only does his genealogical move open up new questions and avenues of research, but his argument that Foucault’s concept of governmentality is applicable to non-Western places without a liberal governmental tradition is compelling. Yet while I applaud the way he makes Foucault relevant for the study of China, I would have been more circumspect in comparing the expert in liberal regimes with the “red and expert” cadre in China. Much of his argument hinges on the idea that cadres exercised pastoral power, working to shepherd and guide the flock. While it is convincing that a form of pastoral care is a part of socialist governmentality, one is left wondering about the notion of ‘salvation’ and how it in fact played out in Maoist (vs Christian) practices. This question is important as Bray argues the cadre and pastoral methods remain important governmental practices in the push for community building (shequ jianshe) today—an important new form of urban governance that aims to build a “new collective home” for urban residents (p. 185). Community building is the subject of Bray’s current project and it is at the end
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of the present book that he suggests that the unexpected mixing of collectivity, mass mobilisation, the decline of the danwei and market reforms should “force us to realize that transition in China is far more complex than we had ever imagined” (p. 190). LISA M. HOFFMAN Urban Studies University of Washington, Tacoma
Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World ROBERT NEUWIRTH , 2005 New York: Routledge 335 pp. £16.99 hardback ISBN 0 415 93319 6 hardback This book deals with a topic of central importance to anyone interested in urbanisation: squatters. According to the author, every day close to 200 000 people leave their homes, mostly in rural areas, and move to cities. Currently there are 1 billion squatters in the world and this number is expected to double in the next 25 years. Who are these squatters? The majority are people who came to the city and could not find affordable housing, so they built their own housing on land they either did not own or did not have permission to build on. In the author’s own words These squatters mix more concrete than any developer. They lay more brick than any government. . . . Squatters are the largest builders of housing in the world—and they are creating the cities of tomorrow (p. 10). The strength of the book, however, is not the compilation of facts and figures; it is the telling of squatters’ stories. It is through these stories that Neuwirth, an investigative reporter, illuminates the multifaceted, complex and diverse phenomenon that is squatting. The author has lived in squatter settlements in four cities: Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul. The first half of the book is divided into four chapters that focus on squatting in each city. The squatters have different standards of living and face unique obstacles as well as opportunities based on how the squatting settlement started, how it evolved and various contextual factors, such as the political administrative system, legal statutes, economic conditions and geography. The author treats these issues by artfully weaving together historical descriptions, direct observation and individual narratives.
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These chapters are accessible, fascinating and enhanced by pictures of the different settlements and people. A significant accomplishment of the book is that it dispels common stereotypes about squatting. In Rio de Janeiro, Neuwirth lived in a flat with piped water, a tile floor and a balcony with a view of the ocean. The settlement is economically vibrant. Ironically, one of the most serious threats is asfaltizaca˜o (asphaltisation) or gentrification. In this chapter, the author tells an amusing story of a tourist named Mick, “a seriously sun-burned fellow wearing Teva sandals, ill-fitted shorts and a stained T-shirt”, who moved to the squatter settlement because it was safer than the area around the hotel where he had planned to stay (p. 49). Then the author extends the story to demonstrate how the success of this squatter settlement, in terms of achieving a safe, liveable environment, is related to the threat of speculation where landlords hold flats empty to obtain higher rents. The author should also be commended for his ability to describe the settlements in such a way that the reader gets the sense of what it is like to visit each of the cities. Probably the least developed settlement the author has lived in is Kibera—“Africa’s largest mudhut metropolis” (p. 70). Approximately 500 000 residents live here without running water, sewage, sanitation or toilets. Yet the book gives you a clear sense of the human side of this story; for example, Neuwirth’s description of a resident he met In that mud-encrusted environment, where you have to purchase water at immense markup, having clean, well-ironed clothes is a major achievement—and a major preoccupation . . . Joachim’s clothes glowed, and his pants—even his carpenter jeans he wore on the weekends—had a perfect crease down each leg. His shoes showed not a speck of Kibera’s thick soup of mud—the same mud that had already sucked the replacement heals off my nicest pair of boots (p. 85). Later in the same chapter, Neuwirth tells the story of the ‘squatter millionaire’ in Kibera. While stories likes these are fascinating, Neuwirth never loses sight of larger, structural issues encountered by the squatters, such as the provincial administrative system in Nairobi that is a major source of corruption. The third squatter settlement Neuwirth lived in was Sanjay Gandhi Nagar, where he climbs through a hole in the ceiling of his landlord’s tailor shop to get to the room he is renting. The story of the settlement is heart-wrenching: the government destroyed the
residents’ homes and the residents responded by occupying the adjacent pavement for nine months during which time one family’s son was killed by a speeding car. After their story got the attention of the media, the residents were relocated to a plot of land that consisted of a giant hole in the ground that they had to fill before they could begin to construct their homes. After these struggles, however, residents were eventually able to achieve co-operative ownership of their homes. Probably the least well-known case is the squatters in Istanbul. Neuwirth describes a series of legal mechanisms that the squatters have manipulated to their benefit. One example is an ‘ancient legal precept’ that half the population of Istanbul has taken advantage of: if someone builds a house at dusk and they are moved in by morning, undetected by the authorities, they have achieved legal standing. Houses built this way are known as gec¸ekondu—which means “it happened at night”. Also, under Turkish law, communities with at least 2000 residents can apply to the federal government to become a “quasi-independent municipality” (p. 145). The result is that, in a large city like Istanbul, residents are citizens of two local governments. In Turkey, Neuwirth describes the squatter settlement of Sultanbeyli, a suburb of Istanbul and a devout Muslim community. He becomes friends with a leftist Kurd named Zamanhan. Through his friendship and acute observations, the author provides insights into not only the perspective of those living in gec¸ekondu housing, but also the Kurdish and Muslim experience as well. In the second part of the book, Neuwirth examines squatting outside the developing world to illustrate that squatting is neither new nor is it limited to developing countries. The second half of the book begins with a chapter that looks at the history of squatting in ancient times, in the 21st century and in Shanghai, as well as in a number of major cities in the US (including Minneapolis – St Paul, Sacramento, San Francisco and Chicago). In this chapter, Neuwirth draws on historical documents and newspaper archives and even refers to lesser known stanzas in Woody Guthrie’s song This Land is Your Land that critique the dominance of private property in the US (p. 203). The subsequent chapter focuses on different cases of squatting in New York. The last three chapters focus on substantive issues. Planning and policy practitioners will appreciate that there is a chapter on the United Nation’s Human Settlement’s Programme (UN– HABITAT); however, this was the least satisfying chapter in the book. In the next chapter, Neuwirth examines the
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criminality of squatting using another interesting story of a political battle between drug dealers and the media in Brazil. The Brazilian media tried to turn residents against local drug dealers by telling them that the drug dealers would harm people who wore red clothing to the local swimming hole ( piscina˜o). The drug dealers fought back by spray painting (even on the local police station) “It’s OK to wear red to the piscina˜o. Lies of the press”. In chapter 9, the author gives equal treatment to multiple sides of the complex debates regarding property rights and arguments for and against giving squatters land titles. The last chapter in the book is an argument in favour of grassroots political activism. The book is relevant to anyone interested in urbanisation, housing, squatting or development. The author’s first-hand account of many diverse contexts is powerful and the writing style is engaging. The only weakness of the book is that the author fails to link his case studies or the substantive issues to the broader geo-political and economic contexts. For example, the standard of living in the various squatter settlements is obviously influenced by the countries’ position in the global economy. Readers should also be aware that the book is not a typical ‘academic treatment’ of the topic, but this is not its purpose. What this book attempts to do, it accomplishes extremely well. The book would be excellent in courses on housing and/or urbanisation where the instructor could pair it with a more theoretical treatment of the issues. VICTORIA A. BEARD Department of Planning, Policy and Design University of California at Irvine
Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia’s Mega-urban Regions APRODICIO A. LAQUIAN , 2005 Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 488 pp. £50.00 hardback ISBN 0 8018 8176 5 hardback In the opening chapter (“Why this book?”), Aprodicio A. Laquian gives his reasons for adding another weighty tome to the literature on giant urban areas in Asia. His short answer is straightforward: “This book is an attempt to respond to planning and governance needs of mega-urban regions” (p. 8). His longer answer, however, is diffuse and overambitious, seeking to explain how mega-urban regions arise, how they affect economic, social and political development, whether they are sustainable (in all
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dimensions), etc. The weaknesses of the book reflect this lack of focus. The initial chapter is a typical academic introduction, which tries to cover a wide range of openended topics, with the obligatory references to the literature. (Do we really need a quick selective review of out-dated prescriptions for controlling urban growth?) It is therefore not until page 47 that important sections on the nature of the book and its methodology are finally reached. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the core topics of planning and governance. In planning, the first “key problem” is identified as the “wide gap between planning visions and economic and social realities” (p. 79). One could (although the author did not) consider this “gap” as a key problem for governance in general and for a wide range of specific public-sector interventions, the failures of which owe a great deal to inability or unwillingness to address “economic and social realities”. Both chapters, however, suffer from a desire to explain ‘planning’ and ‘governance’ in general before going on to analyse them in relation to the chosen mega-urban regions. The governance chapter has some useful information, but the efforts to systematise governance in abstract terms do not work well and do not provide a clear framework of ‘governance’ for actually analysing specific cities. As elsewhere, there is oversimplification of the complexities of local government structures, leading to a misunderstanding of why things are the way they are and how they work in reality. In this respect, illustrations from the Philippines are well understood and more focused than those from Indonesia or China. Discussions of sustainability are weakened by the author’s preference for the ‘academic/green’ (“conservationist-holistic”) approach rather than the ‘brown agenda’ which actually preoccupies the practice of environmental planning in Asian cities. Indeed, reading this chapter gives little hint of the diverse environmental problems (in some cases, disasters) which characterise so much of urban Asia. There is also a tendency throughout the book to report uncritically official assertions of how problems are being dealt with, especially in China and socialist regimes, and this is particularly the case in relation to environment. The economic folly of local autarky is put forward as a commendable idea—for instance, in the context of Chinese efforts to have ‘local’ food self-sufficiency; this is not only an impossible task, but it can have perverse consequences, as in the case of northern China where large areas of maize were replaced by irrigated rice (previously brought from south China), thus greatly exacerbating a critical
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water shortage. Much of the discussion (for instance, of transport or energy) seems divorced from the economic reality that low-income cities have huge low-income (or very-low-income) populations. Discussions of economic sustainability are cursory and show little understanding of the economic context and constraints. A separate chapter on water resources is welcome, given the critical shortages of urban water supplies in many of the countries covered. Also welcome is the realistic acknowledgement that the first factor, underlying chronic water problems, is the lack of value attached to water, by citizens or by governments. Certainly in countries such as India, an unwillingness to treat water as an economic (i.e. scarce) resource has led to disastrous misuse of limited supplies. The other factors identified are mainly to do with poor management and certainly the water sector in most Asian cities has been plagued by bad policy (such as extravagant and wasteful use of water for irrigation or the unwillingness to charge for water) and worse management. A separate chapter on mobility provides considerable detail on a variety of initiatives but also underlines the continuing lack of adequate planning and the general lack of political will to tackle the problem—a feature shared in most large urban regions whether in richer or poorer countries. The chapter on inner-city redevelopment has rather too much of a rich-country model in its approach. As elsewhere, there is a naı¨ve and uncritical acceptance of ‘official’ versions of what has gone on in Chinese cities, which results in a much rosier view than one sees and hears on the ground. Only brief mention is made of the failure of cities to do much with existing older areas, especially those of historic interest, an inheritance most of them either ignored or actively sought to eradicate. (However, in an introductory chapter, the author made the more trenchant comment that “In choosing between the old and the new, many Asian urban planners seem to have succeeded mainly in bastardising the cultural character of their cities” (p. 96). The chapter looking at peripheral development is too heavily weighted on Chinese experience—which in most ways is quite different from that of the other countries—and spends more time on peripheral agriculture than on trying to understand the dynamics of how peripheral areas are urbanised. Housing and basic services are rolled together into one chapter and, as a brief overview, it is necessarily rather shallow; once again, there is too much focus on China combined with an imperfect understanding of how the Chinese system actually works. There is
relatively little analysis of ‘basic services’ and the variety of ways of providing them, which is surprising given the importance of this topic. The final chapter attempts to bring it all together, a Herculean task given the wide scope of topics dealt with. The main conclusion, although trivial-sounding is nonetheless both true and important: “innovations in planning and governance are needed to enable mega-urban regions to become more viable” (p. 381). To illustrate this point, seven “successful interventions” are examined. The first of these—development of polynucleated mega-urban regions—is not an intervention in any meaningful sense. Instead, it is a geographical description of how urban centres are linking both spatially and otherwise, but very little of this has anything to do with government policies or actions. (It is difficult to credit a suggestion that planning for Bandung is related to the planning of the Jabotabek region.) The other successful interventions described in the closing chapter are somewhat more grounded in reality but not always very convincing. For the new student and generalist reader, Beyond Metropolis may be a useful synthesis, bringing together information and analysis over a wide range of topics and providing a reasonable introduction to planning and governance in giant Asian cities. But for the specialist or practitioner, particularly those with experience in the cities and countries covered, the book is less satisfactory, not only because it is a study in breadth rather than depth, but also because the sources and the analysis are quite uneven in quality of understanding. For example, the handling of Chinese experience is often weak and the quantity of information gathered does not compensate for the willingness to take official prescriptions at face value (along with a certain romanticisation of the pre-Deng period). For another example, there is inadequate understanding of economics and of economic source material (virtually none of the highly valuable World Bank documents have been used) and the private sector remains a shadowy presence which is apparently seen as having little or nothing to do with planning or governance. One comes away with a feeling that the so-called mega-urban regions are not in fact particularly unique; indeed, most of what was examined in the book could apply equally to large urban areas of many different sizes. DOUGLAS MC CALLUM Ministry of Works and Housing Kingdom of Bahrain
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African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam ANDREW BURTON , 2005 Oxford: James Currey 301 pp. £50.00 hardback; £16.95 paperback ISBN 0 85255-9763 hardback; 0 85255 975 5 paperback Curiously, while development studies and Africafocused social science, have generally circumvented African cities, Africanist historians have been ‘going to town’ in recent years, joining ranks with geographers who have had an enduring professional interest in the continent’s cities. Urban historical studies have been largely concerned with the racial dimensions of colonial rule, so clearly evidenced in urban spatial politics. For the most part, the historians have taken inspiration from European social histories such as Stedman Jones’ classic Outcast London. Andrew Burton’s study of the ‘wahuni’ of Dar es Salaam is grounded in this genre. According to Burton, wahuni could best be translated ‘hooligans’—young bachelors seen as unemployed, lawless wastrels and gadabouts (p. 5). The monograph documents how these youthful men—who were most prevalent in the migration flow into the city—were marginalised to the point of criminalisation and equated with ‘demographic degeneration’. The introductory chapter illuminates the meaning of ‘wahuni’ and this social category’s pivotal role in colonial officialdom’s acerbic views on African urbanisation. Most of the basic argument of the book is outlined in this chapter. British colonial policies were posited on a three-tier racial, economic and political order. It was assumed that an African’s rightful position was that of a rural farmer subject to tribal authority. African urbanites were therefore residentially, occupationally and politically anomalous. Urban Africans faced exceptionally high rates of unemployment or extremely low wages when employed. Some turned to crime or at least could not conform to the neat and tidy housing and employment strictures of the colonial government. Their multiethnic composition made tribal government infeasible and in short they posed a major governance problem for the colonial state. Thus, from the outset of British rule in Tanganyika, colonial law-and-order policies were directed at restricting ‘disorderly’ African residence and economic activity. The urban Asian trading class was squeezed uncomfortably between the two opposing sides of this governance struggle. The second chapter in the book incongruously discusses colonial policies in cities everywhere in
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sub-Saharan Africa except Dar es Salaam. While it is clearly intended to provide a wider context and does convey useful information, nonetheless, in a book focused on Dar es Salaam, and without sufficient explanation of its significance to the author’s argument, it is distracting. The reader would have been better served with more background information on urban colonial policies in Dar es Salaam, prior to the arrival of the British during World War I, when the city was the capital of German East Africa. The little documentation that can be found for that earlier period suggests that the Germans were far more receptive to the existence of an African urban population, which potentially raises several fascinating issues about the German colonial foundations and foregone trajectories of urban development. The book is divided into three main sections covering: African urbanisation 1919– 46, crime 1919 –61, and urbanisation and the colonial order 1947 –61. The first section reveals that, despite the Tanganyikan government’s desire to curb urban migration, there was a reluctance to introduce pass laws, similar to those of South Africa and various European settler states. Tanganyika had a distinctive urban policy related to the fact that it was a League of Nations mandated territory, rather than a British colony, which restricted official efforts to curtail African freedom of movement. Thus, from the outset of British rule, government intervention tended to be more tolerant of the African urban presence than elsewhere in British colonial Africa. The African population of Dar es Salaam faced job discrimination throughout the period under study, but popularisation of the wahuni social label dates back to the wartime 1940s, when African migration to the town was escalating. Towards the end of this period, the colonial government began to reconsider its urban policies spurred both by the local fear of demobilised African soldiers flocking to the city as well as signals from the Colonial Office in London. In section 2, Burton addresses the nature of Dar es Salaam crime and its perpetrators. Although there is some evidence of hard-core criminals operating up and down the East African coast using dhows for not-so-quick getaways, above all, the lawlessness of Dar es Salaam was that of men’s and women’s attempts at earning a daily livelihood as traders, brewers, rickshaw-pullers, prostitutes, etc. Most of their activity was unlicensed and hence illegitimate in the eyes of the colonial authorities. Furthermore, they lived in overcrowded residences that were deemed illegal. Thus, the majority of Dar es Salaam’s African population was criminalised.
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Colonial officialdom saw them as escapees of tribal authority causing chaos in the city. Section 3 covers the decolonisation period when the colonial government policy was revamped in a number of respects. Newly available funds from the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, made investment in African housing possible. There was a growing acceptance on the part of the colonial regime that Africans could be ‘citizens’ of the city, but this was contingent on their having jobs and preferably education—in effect, a middle-class status. Those who did not conform to this ideal were subject to increasingly more government efforts to deny them a legitimate place in Dar es Salaam. Although pass laws were not introduced, the colonial authorities began systematic efforts to rid the town of the unemployed through wahuni or ‘spiv’ raids. Burton estimates that about 2000 were repatriated to the countryside annually and, in the run-up to independence, their numbers grew. Burton’s conclusion is essentially a postscript, offering the observation that Nyerere’s post-independent government carried on with the longstanding tradition of treating Dar es Salaam’s unemployed as a major threat. The national party was keen to restrict urban citizenship. The raids against them continued erratically right up to 1983, and 2002 witnessed a campaign against Dar es Salaam’s burgeoning population of informal traders (machinga). This is a book for devotees of Tanzanian urban history. The author has provided a wealth of information about the unfolding urban colonial policies, perhaps narrowing his readership with excessively detailed reporting of the colonial records at the expense of a more analytical eye to trends. The interwar, war and post-war periods tend to blur into a long repetitive chronicle about the colonial campaign against the wahuni, not helped by the author’s vacillating rather than nuanced assessment of the
unfolding policy. In several places, the reader is told that there is a more benign policy towards African urbanisation, looser governance measures and more peaceful conditions in Dar es Salaam compared with elsewhere in British colonial Africa (pp. 126, 230), yet the conclusion comes down heavily against the Tanganyikan government’s “inappropriate policies towards the urban poor” and abuse of fundamental rights to freedom of movement (p. 281). There is a lop-sided exploration of the triangular relationship between unemployment, crime and urban governance. Concentrating on political and social history, the author fails to give due attention to the economic fundamentals. While criticising colonial policy, some of its main tenets are accepted by default, notably the thesis of ‘overurbanisation’. This term implies an African population influx over and above that which can be economically absorbed, a common normative assumption that begs the question of why the historical shift of an agrarian rural population to urban settlements within a country could or should necessarily achieve an urban labour equilibrium. Cities represent complex political, economic, social and cultural amalgams of a highly dynamic nature which are stimulated to a large extent by global and national influences beyond a city’s boundaries. How, then, can draconian or even enlightened governance measures with respect to African urban migration and livelihood be expected to generate ‘balanced urbanisation’ within the city? Certainly Dar es Salaam, which experienced quite a light touch in terms of colonial policy towards African urban population control, is living proof of the unlikelihood of this happening. DEBORAH FAHY BRYCESON African Studies Centre Oxford University
