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Book reviews quality of these vases. However, Beligiojoso turns out to be uninterested in explaining how these installations operate to change or reinforce how different people perceive, move and feel in the city. There is little critical analysis about the transformative potential of these sound installations along the lines of either the social, psychological, cultural, material or visceral processes. The treatment of theoretical ideas is patchy as illustrated in the discussion of urban excursions. Instead, a lot of space is devoted to describing and listing rather than interpreting the experiences of these sound installations. He is more interested in listing the work of various prominent sound artists. The third and final part of Beligiojoso’s book turns specifically to consider the role of sound and how we sense, and make sense of different places. To do so Beligiojoso (p. 94) argues this section of the book investigates ‘methods and concepts of space’. This is now a huge topic. However, Beligiojoso has overlooked many of the recent discussions found in the pages of journals that span across anthropology, urban studies, geography and sociology. His discussion focuses on the important work of the Cresson Centre for Research on Sonic Space and Urban Environment, Grenoble founded in 1979. In particular, singled out is the edited collection by Gre´goire Chelkoff published in 1988 titled Entendre les espaces publics (Hearing Public Places) that characterised and categorised the aural specificity of eight public spaces. The discussion of the work of Pierre Marie´tan L’environment sonore seems random and superficial. A much more substantial treatment is required of both the methods and concepts of space. Beligiojoso thinks that urban planners and architects would do well to pay closer attention to how sound helps people make sense of place. I am sympathetic of this vision. Detracting from its potential, however, is the gendered language, figures that
2291 contain unreadable text, sketchy explanation of theoretical concepts, and lack of engagement with more contemporary literature. This book offers a starting point in helping understand the importance of sound in everyday urban life.
Brodwyn Fisher, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero (eds), Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, 2014; 304 pp.: 978 0 8223 5533 5, £20.86/US$46.66 (pbk) Reviewed by: Juan Velasquez Atehortua, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Cities from Scratch studies what has come to be known as the informal city by dealing with two paradoxes, which are stated in Brodwyn Fisher’s introduction. The first paradox is that while the photogenic misery of informal cities is often wielded in debates about poverty, capitalism, race and state failure, it seldom forms the starting point of such conversations. The second paradox is that the dual nature of informal cities as global phenomena and local social formations is often described in universalistic terms. To contest these paradoxes, the book aims to create a fractured portrait of informal cities to advance a multifaceted argument about the nature and consequences of urban informality. The chapters of the book, by scholars based in History, Sociology and Social Anthropology, cover urban informality in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Caracas and Managua within a historical framework. The book begins with a chapter by Brodwyn Fischer, whose historic approach contests the presentism associated with studies on the informal city. Presentism is the notion that the informal city, although an
2292 enduring feature in the urban history of Latin America, is persistently defined as a symptom of contemporary crisis. To explain this approach, Fischer examines three historical waves of writing on the role of informal cities, focusing on both hemispheric and Brazilian polemics pertaining to race, poverty, development, citizenship, revolution and cultural modernity from the late 19th century to the early 1970s. Edward Murphy’s chapter is a study of the low-income urban poor, the pobladores, who, in the late 1960s, led many urban land seizures and built ‘campamentos (encampments) and poblaciones callampas (a reference to mushroom that grows uncontrollably at night)’ (p. 75). The pobladores were trapped in an ideological battle in which neither the marginality school and Christian Democrats nor the Communists satisfied their demands for homeownership. Bryan McCann’s chapter illuminates the current aspirations and anxieties that exist between the favela Morro dos Cabritos and the middle-class barrio Peixoto, which lie adjacent. The rise and fall of their atypical positive exchanges are studied along with the life efforts of Italo Coelho, a priest schooled in liberation theology, and his strategies to overcome the limitations and challenges posed to both neighbourhoods by military dictatorship, police surveillance (intended to curb the favela’s criminal gangs) and the power of real estate to displace favela residents. Dennis Rodgers’ chapter presents a longitudinal study of the impact of large-scale transformations on compadrazgo in barrio Luis Fanor Herna´ndez in Managua. During the Somoza dictatorship, compadrazgo had a central role in dealing with misery and repression. Throughout the Sandinist revolution of the 1980s, the barrio became restructured through the active participation of men, women and children. Compadrazgo was then at its weakest. In the 1990s,
Urban Studies 52(12) compadrazgo reappeared with the imposition of neoliberalism and was inhabited by youth criminal gangs who re-established social differences and illegally participated in middle-class consumption. Emilio Duhau considers progressiveness, meaning the scope and limits of the informal city’s ability to improve over time in Mexico City. The city’s expansion and densification demonstrate that the colonias populares still constitute a popular housing alternative. This chapter can be read in unison with Mariana Cavalcanti’s chapter, which stresses that decades of infrastructure upgrades have made favelas regulated, institutionalised and valued. In this regard, she studies a ‘threshold effect’ emerging from the convergence of monetary value between favela–pavement or the informal–formal divide. This threshold inaugurates a passage that is part of an ongoing reconfiguration of the symbolic spatial and social boundaries of the city’s favelas. In between these chapters there is one with a vignette of photos, including the cover photo, about life inside favelas taken by Rata˜o Diniz with captions by Bryan McCann. Sujatha Fernandes’ chapter approaches the origins and consequences of a bitter dispute related to Teatro Alameda, which, although located in the informal barrio of San Agustin, was a concert and cinema hall that attracted the most popular Latin American artists of the 1940s. Fernandes addresses what this dispute suggests about social movements in the era of the socialist president Hugo Cha´vez (1998–2013). During the movement against the dictatorship in the 1950s, the place supported subversive meetings. After the dictatorship, when Action Democratica came to power, it ceased to function and was turned into a depository of films. On 13 April 2004, an assembly of 278 residents from San Agustin del Sur decided to occupy the theatre and turn it into the
Book reviews Casa Cultural Alameda. Fernandes writes that the occupation of Teatro Alameda ‘happened mostly with the implicit support of the state, and particularly Cha´vez, who encouraged this activity’ (pp. 198–199). In this sense the chapter complements Murphy’s statements about the pobladores prior to and under Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile. The last chapter, by Javier Auyero in Buenos Aires, states that slums, shantytowns and squatter settlements are closely associated with environmental risks and unsanitary living conditions. Shanty residents are ‘always waiting for something either good or bad to happen’ (p. 240). Auyero explores the relationship between political power and waiting, in which the unequal distribution of waiting time corresponds with that of power. He concludes that the particular relationship between waiting and politics is a general phenomenon applicable to all those who live in territories of urban relegation (p. 258). The book introduces a refreshing approach to the history of informal cities. However, most of the chapters still deal with local social formations in a way that is characterised by a universalising principle. Although race and class are consistently broached, gender and age issues are undertheorised. This does not mean that both issues are not addressed. On the contrary, the captions written by McCann on the 15 photos taken by Diniz do reflect a gendered way of looking at the favela. The cover photo shows generations sitting on the stairways of Providencia, but also says a lot about the predominance of caring women in the absence of men of the same age. In the other photos young males and boys are painting graffiti, skateboarding and playing ping-pong, basketball, soccer or boxing, while women are arriving at night walking away from the camera, demonstrating or working. Murphy stresses the crucial role played by housewives in organising the homeless
2293 committees who carried out the land seizures. He also exemplifies this tendency by referring to one, in particular, in Santiago, which was carried out on May Day as an important statement of solidarity with working-class power and the possibilities of revolutionary activism (p. 85). MacCann shows how ‘Dona Vito´ria’ provided amateur video footage to the O Globo, prompting a shamed (masculine) police force to take action against (masculine youth gangs’) criminality. In Rodger’s chapter, the compadrazgo is shown to be weaker during the Sandinist revolution in Nicaragua, when both women and the community he studied were at their strongest. In Venezuela, Fernandes shows with precision how a male clique took over the Cultural House Alameda to (re)impose (the old) hierarchy ‘between the community work being carried out by mainly women residents and political militancy, as supposedly represented by (male) leadership’ (p. 200). Fernandes stresses that both the subsequent takeover of the house by this male clique and the state occupation of a space left dormant by the community points to the fragility of communitybased visions (p. 204). However, another conclusion could be that this takeover shows the limited support given by the community to a hermetic masculine leadership independently of its political orientation. As with the compadrazgo studied by Rodgers, what seems at issue here is more the crisis that such masculine leadership faces when the local female leadership become more empowered as a result of increased state investments in social welfare. Another interesting gender approach in need of further analysis can be seen in Cavalcanti’s chapter. She makes the ‘threshold effect’ understandable by identifying how it affects two favela women who left it, one who grew up in the favela and became educated as a teacher and a migrant woman who moved from rural poverty to the big
2294 city to be a live-in domestic worker. The former was able to earn an income that allowed her to move from her favela to a condominium, the value of which decreased as a result of being too close to it. In her desire to move upward socially, the migrant woman experienced a transition throughout her long life of hard work: from a peasant to the resident of a favela community to the owner of an apartment indistinguishable from the ones she cleaned for most of her working life. Both women exemplify changes in lifestyle, which, incidentally, demonstrate the roles of women as peasant, migrant, favela, working class and middle class through their growing agency in the current gentrification of cities. Continuing this path of hidden gender agency in Auyero’s text, it is precisely a woman among his informants who stops ‘waiting’ and raises a lawsuit against the male-dominated political and economic establishment and wins! By contesting the presentism of informal cities, Cities from Scratch offers a nuanced perspective on their place in the history of our contemporary urban world. However, a study that looked more systematically at gender and age issues, together with race, class and other dimensions of inequality, could offer further insights. Jon Shaw and Iain Docherty, The Transport Debate, Policy Press: Bristol, 2014; 264 pp.; 978 1 84742 856 1, £14.99 (pbk) Reviewed by: Colin G Pooley, Lancaster University, UK This is a relatively small book on a very large topic. It clearly cannot cover everything, but what the authors do attempt they do well. The book is designed to provide an accessible entry to the key issues informing debates about transport in Britain. It is organised around a number of different trips undertaken by a fictional family (the Smiths)
Urban Studies 52(12) consisting of two adults and three children living in the West Midlands. This device gives the book a novel approach and allows the authors to personalise their narrative in an engaging way. It is easy to read and should appeal to students from a wide range of disciplines who are studying transportrelated topics. The book is not specifically or exclusively concerned with urban transport, but does demonstrate clearly the extent to which travel within urban areas is an integral part of most trips as travellers leave, arrive or pass through urban locations. Thus cities necessarily experience transport externalities generated by many more people than the immediate urban residents. Chapter 1 sets the scene, providing an overview of current transport provision in the UK. The overall tone is optimistic: many things do work – but most could be substantially improved, especially when compared with the transport systems of comparable countries in continental Europe. It is argued that the British have low expectations of their transport system compared with their continental neighbours (higher levels of recorded satisfaction in Britain despite a poorer service than in comparator countries), and that this has contributed to decades of under-investment in transport in Britain. The authors neatly summarise the contrasts between a ‘predict and provide’ approach to transport and the ‘new realist’ view of sustainable transport: a theme they return to in their conclusions. The next five chapters focus on different journeys undertaken by the Smiths: the daily commute by parents; the journey to school; a business trip from Birmingham to London; a family trip to relatives in Scotland; and a family holiday in the south of France. In each chapter these supposed ‘typical’ journeys provide a springboard to discuss relevant transport provision and policies. Mostly this structure works well, but in some chapters I felt that the link between the
2291 contain unreadable text, sketchy explanation of theoretical concepts, and lack of engagement with more contemporary literature. This book offers a starting point in helping understand the importance of sound in everyday urban life.
Brodwyn Fisher, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero (eds), Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, 2014; 304 pp.: 978 0 8223 5533 5, £20.86/US$46.66 (pbk) Reviewed by: Juan Velasquez Atehortua, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Cities from Scratch studies what has come to be known as the informal city by dealing with two paradoxes, which are stated in Brodwyn Fisher’s introduction. The first paradox is that while the photogenic misery of informal cities is often wielded in debates about poverty, capitalism, race and state failure, it seldom forms the starting point of such conversations. The second paradox is that the dual nature of informal cities as global phenomena and local social formations is often described in universalistic terms. To contest these paradoxes, the book aims to create a fractured portrait of informal cities to advance a multifaceted argument about the nature and consequences of urban informality. The chapters of the book, by scholars based in History, Sociology and Social Anthropology, cover urban informality in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Caracas and Managua within a historical framework. The book begins with a chapter by Brodwyn Fischer, whose historic approach contests the presentism associated with studies on the informal city. Presentism is the notion that the informal city, although an
2292 enduring feature in the urban history of Latin America, is persistently defined as a symptom of contemporary crisis. To explain this approach, Fischer examines three historical waves of writing on the role of informal cities, focusing on both hemispheric and Brazilian polemics pertaining to race, poverty, development, citizenship, revolution and cultural modernity from the late 19th century to the early 1970s. Edward Murphy’s chapter is a study of the low-income urban poor, the pobladores, who, in the late 1960s, led many urban land seizures and built ‘campamentos (encampments) and poblaciones callampas (a reference to mushroom that grows uncontrollably at night)’ (p. 75). The pobladores were trapped in an ideological battle in which neither the marginality school and Christian Democrats nor the Communists satisfied their demands for homeownership. Bryan McCann’s chapter illuminates the current aspirations and anxieties that exist between the favela Morro dos Cabritos and the middle-class barrio Peixoto, which lie adjacent. The rise and fall of their atypical positive exchanges are studied along with the life efforts of Italo Coelho, a priest schooled in liberation theology, and his strategies to overcome the limitations and challenges posed to both neighbourhoods by military dictatorship, police surveillance (intended to curb the favela’s criminal gangs) and the power of real estate to displace favela residents. Dennis Rodgers’ chapter presents a longitudinal study of the impact of large-scale transformations on compadrazgo in barrio Luis Fanor Herna´ndez in Managua. During the Somoza dictatorship, compadrazgo had a central role in dealing with misery and repression. Throughout the Sandinist revolution of the 1980s, the barrio became restructured through the active participation of men, women and children. Compadrazgo was then at its weakest. In the 1990s,
Urban Studies 52(12) compadrazgo reappeared with the imposition of neoliberalism and was inhabited by youth criminal gangs who re-established social differences and illegally participated in middle-class consumption. Emilio Duhau considers progressiveness, meaning the scope and limits of the informal city’s ability to improve over time in Mexico City. The city’s expansion and densification demonstrate that the colonias populares still constitute a popular housing alternative. This chapter can be read in unison with Mariana Cavalcanti’s chapter, which stresses that decades of infrastructure upgrades have made favelas regulated, institutionalised and valued. In this regard, she studies a ‘threshold effect’ emerging from the convergence of monetary value between favela–pavement or the informal–formal divide. This threshold inaugurates a passage that is part of an ongoing reconfiguration of the symbolic spatial and social boundaries of the city’s favelas. In between these chapters there is one with a vignette of photos, including the cover photo, about life inside favelas taken by Rata˜o Diniz with captions by Bryan McCann. Sujatha Fernandes’ chapter approaches the origins and consequences of a bitter dispute related to Teatro Alameda, which, although located in the informal barrio of San Agustin, was a concert and cinema hall that attracted the most popular Latin American artists of the 1940s. Fernandes addresses what this dispute suggests about social movements in the era of the socialist president Hugo Cha´vez (1998–2013). During the movement against the dictatorship in the 1950s, the place supported subversive meetings. After the dictatorship, when Action Democratica came to power, it ceased to function and was turned into a depository of films. On 13 April 2004, an assembly of 278 residents from San Agustin del Sur decided to occupy the theatre and turn it into the
Book reviews Casa Cultural Alameda. Fernandes writes that the occupation of Teatro Alameda ‘happened mostly with the implicit support of the state, and particularly Cha´vez, who encouraged this activity’ (pp. 198–199). In this sense the chapter complements Murphy’s statements about the pobladores prior to and under Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile. The last chapter, by Javier Auyero in Buenos Aires, states that slums, shantytowns and squatter settlements are closely associated with environmental risks and unsanitary living conditions. Shanty residents are ‘always waiting for something either good or bad to happen’ (p. 240). Auyero explores the relationship between political power and waiting, in which the unequal distribution of waiting time corresponds with that of power. He concludes that the particular relationship between waiting and politics is a general phenomenon applicable to all those who live in territories of urban relegation (p. 258). The book introduces a refreshing approach to the history of informal cities. However, most of the chapters still deal with local social formations in a way that is characterised by a universalising principle. Although race and class are consistently broached, gender and age issues are undertheorised. This does not mean that both issues are not addressed. On the contrary, the captions written by McCann on the 15 photos taken by Diniz do reflect a gendered way of looking at the favela. The cover photo shows generations sitting on the stairways of Providencia, but also says a lot about the predominance of caring women in the absence of men of the same age. In the other photos young males and boys are painting graffiti, skateboarding and playing ping-pong, basketball, soccer or boxing, while women are arriving at night walking away from the camera, demonstrating or working. Murphy stresses the crucial role played by housewives in organising the homeless
2293 committees who carried out the land seizures. He also exemplifies this tendency by referring to one, in particular, in Santiago, which was carried out on May Day as an important statement of solidarity with working-class power and the possibilities of revolutionary activism (p. 85). MacCann shows how ‘Dona Vito´ria’ provided amateur video footage to the O Globo, prompting a shamed (masculine) police force to take action against (masculine youth gangs’) criminality. In Rodger’s chapter, the compadrazgo is shown to be weaker during the Sandinist revolution in Nicaragua, when both women and the community he studied were at their strongest. In Venezuela, Fernandes shows with precision how a male clique took over the Cultural House Alameda to (re)impose (the old) hierarchy ‘between the community work being carried out by mainly women residents and political militancy, as supposedly represented by (male) leadership’ (p. 200). Fernandes stresses that both the subsequent takeover of the house by this male clique and the state occupation of a space left dormant by the community points to the fragility of communitybased visions (p. 204). However, another conclusion could be that this takeover shows the limited support given by the community to a hermetic masculine leadership independently of its political orientation. As with the compadrazgo studied by Rodgers, what seems at issue here is more the crisis that such masculine leadership faces when the local female leadership become more empowered as a result of increased state investments in social welfare. Another interesting gender approach in need of further analysis can be seen in Cavalcanti’s chapter. She makes the ‘threshold effect’ understandable by identifying how it affects two favela women who left it, one who grew up in the favela and became educated as a teacher and a migrant woman who moved from rural poverty to the big
2294 city to be a live-in domestic worker. The former was able to earn an income that allowed her to move from her favela to a condominium, the value of which decreased as a result of being too close to it. In her desire to move upward socially, the migrant woman experienced a transition throughout her long life of hard work: from a peasant to the resident of a favela community to the owner of an apartment indistinguishable from the ones she cleaned for most of her working life. Both women exemplify changes in lifestyle, which, incidentally, demonstrate the roles of women as peasant, migrant, favela, working class and middle class through their growing agency in the current gentrification of cities. Continuing this path of hidden gender agency in Auyero’s text, it is precisely a woman among his informants who stops ‘waiting’ and raises a lawsuit against the male-dominated political and economic establishment and wins! By contesting the presentism of informal cities, Cities from Scratch offers a nuanced perspective on their place in the history of our contemporary urban world. However, a study that looked more systematically at gender and age issues, together with race, class and other dimensions of inequality, could offer further insights. Jon Shaw and Iain Docherty, The Transport Debate, Policy Press: Bristol, 2014; 264 pp.; 978 1 84742 856 1, £14.99 (pbk) Reviewed by: Colin G Pooley, Lancaster University, UK This is a relatively small book on a very large topic. It clearly cannot cover everything, but what the authors do attempt they do well. The book is designed to provide an accessible entry to the key issues informing debates about transport in Britain. It is organised around a number of different trips undertaken by a fictional family (the Smiths)
Urban Studies 52(12) consisting of two adults and three children living in the West Midlands. This device gives the book a novel approach and allows the authors to personalise their narrative in an engaging way. It is easy to read and should appeal to students from a wide range of disciplines who are studying transportrelated topics. The book is not specifically or exclusively concerned with urban transport, but does demonstrate clearly the extent to which travel within urban areas is an integral part of most trips as travellers leave, arrive or pass through urban locations. Thus cities necessarily experience transport externalities generated by many more people than the immediate urban residents. Chapter 1 sets the scene, providing an overview of current transport provision in the UK. The overall tone is optimistic: many things do work – but most could be substantially improved, especially when compared with the transport systems of comparable countries in continental Europe. It is argued that the British have low expectations of their transport system compared with their continental neighbours (higher levels of recorded satisfaction in Britain despite a poorer service than in comparator countries), and that this has contributed to decades of under-investment in transport in Britain. The authors neatly summarise the contrasts between a ‘predict and provide’ approach to transport and the ‘new realist’ view of sustainable transport: a theme they return to in their conclusions. The next five chapters focus on different journeys undertaken by the Smiths: the daily commute by parents; the journey to school; a business trip from Birmingham to London; a family trip to relatives in Scotland; and a family holiday in the south of France. In each chapter these supposed ‘typical’ journeys provide a springboard to discuss relevant transport provision and policies. Mostly this structure works well, but in some chapters I felt that the link between the
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