elaine b. sharp 2012: does local government matter? how urban policies shape civic engagement....

BOOK REVIEWS

Roger Biles 2011: The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000.Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires (eds.) 2010: The Integration Debate: CompetingFutures for American Cities. New York: Routledge.

While crime, poverty and municipal corruption are conditions frequently encountered inthe small towns and suburban communities of the United States, they seem particularlyvirulent and intractable in the country’s large cities. Not only are problems such asneighborhood abandonment, poverty, crime, racial segregation and poor healthintertwined, but they are often a consequence of forces — interregional migration,national economic conditions — that emanate from outside the city. This logic leadsdirectly to a belief that the national government should take responsibility for the fate ofthe country’s cities. Only a national government can manage the flows of capital andpeople so that no city is left to falter or decline. Biles quotes President Lyndon Johnsonfrom a 1964 speech: ‘Our society will never be great until our cities are great’ (p. 121).

Such logic, or some variant, is firmly implanted among a group of liberalcommentators, elected officials and urban scholars in the United States. For decades,they have bemoaned the lack of a national urban policy. Confronted with tenaciousurban problems, they have turned to the federal government for assistance. (State-levelgovernments are an afterthought in this scenario.) Despite their wish never having beengranted, even when it seemed that the political forces were aligned to do so, advocatesof national urban policy cling to their dream.

In The Fate of Cities, Roger Biles presents the history of federal-level urban policy inthe United States from the second world war through to the end of President Clinton’sadministration in 2001. He describes the many efforts to compel Congress (the nation’slegislative body) and the president to adopt a coherent set of policies that enable citygovernments to function well and to assist cities in addressing the many and variedproblems they face. His effort builds on a similar book published 36 years earlier —Mark Gelfand’s A Nation of Cities (1975). Biles extends Gelfand’s history anotherquarter of a century and adds more detail to the story while following the format thatGelfand had established. Richly documented, thorough and seamlessly written, The Fateof Cities is — to relaunch a ubiquitous and tired but nonetheless appropriate cliché —essential reading for anyone interested in United States urban policy. (The index,however, is much too schematic. The book is an amazing resource, but the facts shouldbe made more accessible.)

In order to make a vast amount of material manageable, Biles focuses on housingand transportation policy, with the former further narrowed to government provisionof housing for low-income families and the latter to mass transit. He considers theseconcerns to be ‘the most significant influences on the physical form and development ofmetropolitan America’ (p. x). (The use of ‘metropolitan’ here rather than ‘urban’is important and I will return to this point later.) Biles additionally links public (andaffordable) housing and mass transit to issues of poverty, suburbanization, unemployment,commerce, property values and municipal finance that often appear under the urban-policyrubric. The focus on housing also enables Biles to address racial residential segregation, aparticularly contentious issue that mainly involves African Americans.

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

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Volume 37.5 September 2013 1852–63 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12107

© 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

The basic arc of these two policy concerns — housing and mass transit — is familiar.From meager efforts to work with city governments to provide low-cost public housingin the 1930s, the federal government increased its commitments through to the 1970s andthen haltingly backed away until the 1990s when it began to dismantle earlierpublic-housing communities while shifting housing policy from public ownershipto subsidies for use in the for-profit (private) housing market. As for mass transit,highway interests and a civil-engineering perspective have always dominated federaltransportation policy, with mass transit only barely recognized in the 1950s andtoday still unable to lay claim to a majority of federal funding.

Biles further organizes his history around presidential administrations — four-yearterms with a maximum of two consecutive terms. After a general introduction, eachchapter focuses on the administration of successive presidents, beginning with HarryTruman in 1945 (upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt) and continuing withDwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and William Clinton. For therespective presidential administrations, he highlights the president’s interest in andpolicy regarding cities, relevant congressional alignments (for example, Republicanand Democrat, urban and suburban, liberal and conservative, northern and southern), andsuch mediating concerns as fiscal responsibility, the state of the national economy andthe need that elected officials have for coalitions that can ensure their re-election. To thishe adds the various groups that lobby and pressure Congress and the president to take oneor another position on these issues: the National Association of Real Estate Boards, theAutomobile Manufacturers Association, the National League of Cities and the UnitedAuto Workers, to name four from a multitude.

Also running through his history is a storyline relating to the debate around whetherto afford cabinet-level status in the federal government to cities. Proponents of a nationalurban policy from the late 1940s to the early 1960s believed that their goal would beachieved only when the cities had equal political and bureaucratic influence to thedepartments of Defense, Commerce and State. Having a ‘department’ of urban affairswould provide an administrative mechanism to focus federal programs affecting citiesand give cities a voice with the president and Congress. This was finally realized in 1965,when President Johnson signed legislation for the Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment (known colloquially as HUD). In 1966, the federal government establishedthe Department of Transportation (DOT) to coordinate all federal transportationprograms. This administrative reorganization, however, did not significantly advance thecause of a national urban policy. HUD and DOT could not overcome the politicalalignments that resisted the privileging of cities in federal policy.

Biles also attends to the role of race in federal policymaking, specifically regarding theprovision of public housing to African Americans and the passage of legislation to ensurethat African Americans are treated fairly in their search for rental apartments and thepurchase of homes. Though dampened since the second world war, racial prejudicespersist in United States politics. Originally designed to serve low-income families, publichousing in most cities in the United States became the housing of last resort forlow-income African Americans. Combined with the Civil Rights movement, thismade housing policy politically charged. Moreover, African Americans still endurediscrimination in the private housing market despite various federal civil rights acts and‘fair housing’ programs. Attempts to integrate public housing, urban neighborhoods andthe suburbs have confronted practices and attitudes that are not easily dislodged. IfAfricanAmericans are discriminated against in housing markets as well as in job markets, localschools, healthcare and municipal services, they will continue to suffer from high levels ofunemployment and poverty. Because they are geographically concentrated (a product ofinvoluntary segregation), cities are particularly burdened by the associated problems.

The endurance of racial residential segregation, its deleterious consequences and thefeebleness of federal policy responses are given thorough treatment by the authorscollected in The Integration Debate (2010). The consensus among them is that racial

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.5© 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

segregation persists. As the editors wrote, racial segregation has ‘remained a dominantreality in virtually all U.S. cities and their surrounding areas’ (p. 1). Fair housing lawshave relied too much on voluntary participation and individual lawsuits for enforcement,leaving the underlying structural conditions untouched, while pro-integration programshave had to deftly negotiate the strictures against the very same ‘race consciousness’which their initiatives are meant to combat.

Segregation, moreover, sits squarely amid a nexus of ills befalling African Americans:poor health, poverty, poor education, high levels of unemployment and low levels ofwealth. Residential segregation is part of a larger racism that permeates American societyand deprives African Americans of resources and opportunities. The authors disagree,though, as to whether residential integration is the appropriate solution. The dominantthinking on integration proposes the geographical dispersion of minorities through theuse of housing subsidies. This, though, is likely to erode the kinds of communal supportsthat many other ethnic groups have used to advanced themselves economically,politically and socially. Moreover, why not disperse affluent whites? Why are AfricanAmericans burdened with both the problem and the solution?

In fact, many critics blame the federal government for contributing to racialsegregation through its inactions (for example, failing to sufficiently enforce the fairhousing policies that it has) and through such actions as building public housing inalready segregated neighborhoods, facilitating home-lending practices that penalizedmixed-race neighborhoods, using interstate-highway construction to isolate minorityneighborhoods and displacing African Americans with urban redevelopment projects. Ineffect, the federal government, to paraphrase Biles (p. 14), has showered benefits on thesuburbs rather than the cities. Here was an anti-urban urban policy. Of particular concern,since it seems to be essential for upward mobility, is access to quality schooling. Parentsrecognize this and hope to move to communities that have schools in which their childrenwill be well-educated. In the United States, though, access to quality schools requiresaccess to affluent white housing markets. Without federal laws and the resources of thefederal government, it seems, racial segregation will not be significantly diminished.

To return to the checkered history of national urban policy, the writings on this topicsuffer from similar flaws and problematic assumptions regarding what is ‘urban’, whatthe substantive and procedural foci of a national urban policy should be, and how toconceptualize the temporal structure of such a history. (Full disclosure: I am guilty of twoof these sins — not the second — Beauregard, 2012).

First, in the United States, the term ‘cities’ is primarily a reference to central cities(that is, independent municipal bodies and political territories) and not to the city in itsfull economic, social and geographical extent. For the past 60 years, the city has beencontrasted with the suburbs in urban policy debates. This makes sense since the interestsof the residents and elected officials of these areas conflict on matters of race, taxation,funding of social welfare programs and transportation policy. In addition, despite beingpart of a single, functional urban region, intermunicipal cooperation has been nearlynon-existent. This explains, in part, why HUD under the Clinton administration shiftedthe focus of its various reports on ‘urban’ conditions to metropolitan areas, arguing thatthese were the ‘real’ cities and hoping thereby to avoid divisive city-suburban contrasts.City advocates, of course, interpreted this as a demotion. This is why Biles’ use of‘metropolitan’ to describe why he selected housing and transportation as his focal pointsseems jarring. National urban policy in the United States, from its origins, has been aboutcentral cities, not metropolitan areas.

Secondly, it is never clear in writings on national urban policy what the object of thepolicy should be. Biles begins by stating that he will focus on low-income housingand mass transit as the two pivots of such a policy, but he also writes about racialdiscrimination, environmental quality and municipal finance. In fact, it often seems thatBiles would — and city mayors certainly would — be satisfied with a national urbanpolicy that provides city governments with sufficient funds to address their concerns, apolicy that had brief existence as general revenue sharing in the early 1970s. A national

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urban policy would then simply be a pro-city fiscal federalism. A national urban policy,though, might also be a settlement policy — that is, take as its object the geographicalmanagement of growth. This, of course, is the least likely of national urban policies inthe United States, a country enamored by private-sector development. Nevertheless,Congress in the early 1970s did debate (though not pass) a national land use act, HUDexplored the possibility of a national growth policy, and the federal government fundeda small ‘new towns’ program (an echo of an equally diminutive program of the 1930s thatbuilt three ‘greenbelt’ communities).

Related to this is the question of what a national policy would do. Biles implies thatit would coordinate all federal programs dealing with urban issues, ideally within a singlefederal department. But the issues he and others have in mind, whether housing or masstransit, are hardly confined to cities. Is it also to be comprehensive? If so, such an idealignores the political fragmentation of the United States — a fragmentation reflected inthe organization of the federal bureaucracy — and the pluralistic bias of its politics thatacknowledges multiple interests even while funding programs (for example, inner-cityhighways) that counteract the goals of other federally funded programs (for example,inner-city air quality). Biles, though, and he is not alone (see Beauregard, 2012), nevercommits to such a definition. This enables him to write across a relatively long timespanin federal policy, adapting to changing definitions and aspirations; it also means that henever fully specifies the book’s subject. Biles neither confronts analytically nor criticallythe substance and form of a national urban policy, though this hardly lowers the value ofreading The Fate of Cities.

Athird deficit of this literature is the tendency to periodize policy history by presidentialadministrations. The argument is that each new president brings to the office a particularunderstanding of cities and their role in American society that differs from those ofprevious and subsequent occupants of the White House. To this is added the belief that thepresident has special powers to shape federal policy during his term. These are goodreasons. However, they ignore a fact that is unavoidable in Biles’ history: each presidenthas to make policy against a background of already existing policies and theirconstituencies. Providing further continuity are bureaucratic politics and practices thatsupport the retention of existing programs. A president does not start anew. The result ismost often a continuation of policies with which the current president does not whollyagree but is powerless to do any more than modify. (Of course, ‘urban’legislation has beeneliminated, especially during the 1980s when Ronald Reagan — intent on downsizing thefederal government — was president.And, HUD, not being a powerful federal departmentlike Defense, is particularly susceptible to presidential influence, with President Reaganeviscerating it and the then-secretary of HUD, the agency’s director, capitulating.)

This path dependency blurs the lines of demarcation that the use of presidential termsestablishes. Periodization by presidential administrations, or even by policies passed andfunded, de-emphasizes the consequences of programs and policies. If national urbanpolicy is about improving the quality of life for the residents of cities and ensuring fiscalhealth for its governments, both of which are consequences of policy, why not periodizethe history in that way? Why does policy have to be periodized on its enactment ratherthan on its impact? Histories and even non-histories of national urban policy are lockedinto a set of tropes that channel our understanding in ways that are not being criticallyassessed.

Only a curmudgeon would deny people their dreams, and so I will resist advisingproponents of a national urban policy to give up theirs. Yet I would like them to take amore critical perspective on what it would mean to have such a centralized policy and toreflect on whether simply pursuing more federal funding for cities will usefully addressthe background conditions that concentrate poverty and minorities there and lead to thenear-abandonment of cities — I offer Detroit as exhibit number one — when investorsdecide to go elsewhere. Dream on, but when awake let’s try to be more realistic.

As for historical writing on this topic, it too needs critical rethinking. Biles has writtenthe definitive book, but only in terms of telling one type of story. If, in 30 years or so,

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another historian merely updates his work, then urban historians will have failed us.What is needed is a rewriting of this history from a critical perspective. What does itmean that certain people think that cities are neglected by the federal government? Whydoes the federal government ignore a settlement policy? What are the consequences, bothpolitically and morally, of positioning federal policy within a strong spatial framework?These are some of the questions with which I would begin.

Robert Beauregard, Columbia University

Beauregard, R. (2012) National [urban]policy. In D.T. Critchlow and P.R.VanderMeer (eds.), The Oxfordencyclopedia of American political andlegal history, Oxford University Press,Oxford.

Gelfand, M.I. (1975) A nation of cities: thefederal government and urban America,1933–1965. Oxford University Press,New York, NY.

Elaine B. Sharp 2012: Does Local Government Matter? How Urban Policies Shape CivicEngagement. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

This is an ambitious and important book. Its main title is, alas, something of a misnomer.Does Local Government Matter? presents plenty of evidence that it does. Yet this is notthe focus of analysis. Rather, as the subtitle suggests, the book examines the relationshipbetween urban policies and civic engagement. Sharp presents some striking findingsand suggests new and vital avenues of urban scholarship. Notwithstanding someshortcomings, discussed below, this book is recommended reading for scholars of urbanpolitics and policy.

The book is framed as an investigation of the empirical range of policy-centeredtheory. The central claim of American policy-centered scholarship is that the design of apolicy affects political engagement by shaping resources and opportunities available tocitizens, as well as by sending normative messages about the desirability of participation.Thus, for example, means-tested federal welfare programs politically demobilize welfarerecipients by sending them the message that ‘government does not care about their input’(p. 6). Sharp aims to test whether such findings, developed through national-level studies,hold in the urban arena.

Does Local Government Matter? covers four policy fields: county-administered socialprograms, municipal neighborhood policies, community policing and development-subsidy programs. In each field, it draws on quantitative data from at least 29 cities. Dataon civic engagement are taken from Robert Putnam’s Social Capital BenchmarkCommunity (SCBC) survey; data on policies come from a variety of sources. In addition,the book develops two qualitative case studies, in the community-policing anddevelopment-subsidy fields.

Each policy-field study is largely autonomous and has its own strengths andweaknesses. However, space constraints prohibit a substantive commentary on eachstudy, so I will restrict myself to a brief review of findings before moving to an overalldiscussion.

Chapter 1 examines the participatory effects of means-tested (welfare and Medicaid)vs. universal (public health) social programs at the county level. Sharp finds that percapita county spending on means-tested programs is inversely related to SCBCmeasures of civic engagement, whereas spending on universal programs is positivelyrelated (although the relationship is weak and contingent). She concludes that socialprogram design impacts engagement at the county level, just as it has been found to donationally.

The relationship between municipal neighborhood policies and participation inneighborhood associations is the subject of Chapter 2. Sharp draws on media coverage

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to assess municipal policy orientations, finding that — contrary to expectations frompolicy-centered theory and urban scholarship — cities that pursue neighborhood-empowering policies have lower rates of participation in neighborhood associations. Sheinterprets this as evidence of a free-rider dynamic, in which most residents of cities thatempower neighborhoods sit back and let a handful of highly involved individualsrepresent neighborhood interests.

In Chapter 3, Sharp turns her attention to community policing. She tests whether theextent of a city’s community-policing programming is related to levels of publicparticipation in neighborhood associations, community projects and public meetings.The analysis shows virtually no relationship; if anything, there is a slight inverserelationship between community policing and neighborhood-association involvement. Inorder to probe why, Sharp develops a case study of Seattle. It suggests that both thedesign and the implementation of community policing may discourage politicalparticipation, especially among African Americans.

Chapters 4 and 5 — which offer, respectively, a quantitative analysis and a detailedcase study — ask whether the design of municipal development incentives affectsbusiness involvement in municipal policymaking. Sharp finds that, contrary toexpectations from policy-centered theory, business involvement is lowest in cities wheredevelopment subsidies are either very generous and universal, or very ‘stingy’ and linkedto performance indicators. By contrast, business involvement is highest in cities that arein transition from generous to stingy subsidies. Sharp interprets this as evidence of‘reactive mobilization’ on the part of business leaders.

There is a great deal to commend Does Local Government Matter? The extensivequantitative work sheds important new light on urban policy questions previously onlyexamined through case studies. The findings on neighborhood policy and developmentsubsidies are particularly striking and have significant implications for scholarsinterested in state-society relations in those fields. Sharp’s nuanced findings alsocontribute to policy-centered theory more broadly, shedding light on complex feedbackprocesses and unintended consequences.

Yet Sharp’s rather glum conclusion — that urban policies amplify the voices of thepowerful and stifle the voices of the less advantaged, even when they strive for theopposite — is not fully warranted. Some chapters suffer from design and measurementproblems that limit the validity of the findings. For instance, community policing isbilled as an example of a program aimed at ‘mobilizing citizens’ (p. 111). But it may notbe a good example, because at heart, community policing is a response to social disorder.As a result, its mobilizational aims are typically limited to select citizens in selected‘problem’ neighborhoods. So there is little reason that we should expect communitypolicing to increase civic participation citywide.

Another problem is that Sharp repeatedly equates increased participation (or‘mobilization’) with increased influence or empowerment. Thus, for example, sheobserves more business participation in cities with mixed or transitional systems ofdevelopment incentives, concluding that business influence is strongest in such cities.Likewise, she observes that cities that empower neighborhoods have lower rates ofneighborhood-association participation, concluding that neighborhood-empowermentinitiatives do not have the desired effects. Yet empowerment is about the structuralposition of players in policymaking, not about their number, and it may well be achievedwithout increased participation.

Notwithstanding these and other methodological and conceptual issues, Does LocalGovernment Matter? is a significant achievement. It is a rigorous cross-sectional studyof policy feedback in a field where neither cross-sectional work nor the idea of policyfeedback have received much attention. As such, the book unsettles many receivedwisdoms and deserves widespread attention among scholars of urban politics andpolicy.

Martin Horak, University of Western Ontario

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Mariana Valverde 2012: Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Inequality and poverty in global cities and the structural forces that fuel social injusticesare central themes in urban studies. But urban studies has neglected the everydayoperation of municipal laws that work quietly in the background. This is a gap MarianaValverde addresses in Everyday Law on the Street, exhibiting a confident knowledge ofurban theory even as she adds her own dimensions from a socio-legal tradition. Valverdeshows that liberal democracy in practice is not necessarily socially just and, drawing onLefebvre, suggests that ‘some people and groups have too many rights, or claim toomany rights, while other groups either do not have rights or are unable to effectivelyexercise them’ (p. 138). Readers might find aspects of this book quite specific to its studyarea, Toronto, Canada. Yet many insights extend well beyond Canadian and NorthAmerican cities, particularly the observation that municipal governance and the law aredeeply shaped by cultural practices, which texture the performance of law in importantways.

Valverde’s methods include analysis of both formal municipal laws and theperformance of these laws in practice, especially the ‘the mundane operation oflower-profile laws that don’t look political’ (p. 7). In so doing, she finds recurring gapsbetween theory and practice: between theoretical ‘big P’ politics and the everydaypolitics of negotiation that characterizes urban governance in action. Valverde introducesthis research trajectory in Chapter 1, where she outlines her empirical work carried outin ostensibly the most ‘diverse’ city in the world. Valverde hones in on the concept ofdiversity, finding that the diversity discourse works its way into urban governance inmyriad ways, even as particular forms of it are emphasized and others largely ignored.

Chapter 2 is a fascinating Latourian journey into the complex assemblage of humanand non-human actors that work to produce some kind of order in the city. Rather thanstressing what is visible, what is brutal, what is unjust, Valverde focuses instead on themundane laws and technical standards that underpin everyday governance practices.Governance includes not only the regulation of people but also the regulation of things,such as water, traffic, building materials, sewage, the subway, and so on. A key actor inurban governance is property itself. Valverde draws on theorists such as NicholasBlomley to problematize the concept of property and to show how property functions inpractice. Whether the object is street trees, private front yards, panhandling or the use ofsidewalks, property is one of the primary ways through which the state regulates peopleand things.

Chapter 3 discusses the regulation of aesthetics and cultural norms in both public andprivate space, particularly through the work of city inspectors. Chapter 4 then focuses onthe micropolitics of urban governance, and on the ways in which local politicians ofteninterfere in the work of municipal officials. Here Valverde illustrates the often destructiveeffects of ward politics that can result in an uneven granting of rights, as constituentswith wealth, influence and the free time to get involved garner support of politicalleaders. Chapter 5 takes up a similar theme — further marginalization of the alreadymarginalized — by focusing on housing and zoning-based planning disputes.Community consultations in theory provide mechanisms for the public to assert theirdemocratic rights to participate in the planning process. However, consultations canbecome dominated by prejudicial ‘nosy neighbors’ and ‘moralizing’ ward councillors,whose own assertions of rights undermine the rights of others. Valverde also showsthat ‘diversity’ is much diminished in these debates, often becoming a reducedversion of (often market-based) multiculturalism rather than including alternativeconceptualizations, such as economic diversity. Valverde’s primary concern is the failureof planning, governance and activism to understand cities and diversity more broadly inall their complexity.

Chapters 6 through 8 focus on the governance of small businesses (street vendors andtaxi operators in particular) and mosques. The sheer number of regulations governing the

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operation of street food carts in Toronto is mind-boggling, and indicates the uneven wayin which municipal law is applied in Toronto. Valverde uses the taxi industry to show the‘delicate interplay between legal structures and legal rules . . . and social and culturalprocesses and assumptions’ (p. 167). In particular, Valverde examines laws informing theadjudication of taxi drivers’ infractions at licensing tribunals. She finds that thesetribunals judge not according to the letter of the law, but rather according to a form ofmorality-based character assessment that privileges the cultural knowledge required tonavigate the legal system. In such a context, immigrant taxi drivers are routinelypenalized, again undermining claims to diversity. Similar forces are at play whenadjudicating zoning contestations around the siting of mosques, which Valverde arguesbecomes an act of territorialization — the control of people through the control ofspace.

The weakest section of the book is arguably the concluding chapter, where Valverdeoffers a specific critique of planning and governance articulated in the following way:‘most important civic issues, including diversity, need to be addressed on a citywidebasis, using city (and/or regional) perspectives, rather than at the scale of theneighborhood’ (p. 211). While I agree that planning needs to move beyond localism,Valverde’s argument is weakened by her reliance on a narrow and undialectical readingof Jane Jacobs’ early work. Planning and governance are unlikely to benefit simply byshifting scales from local to regional. Vancouver, for example, which incorporates bothlocal and regional planning and governance frameworks, is often portrayed (see, forexample, Sancton, 2005) as a progressive planning model (albeit with its share ofproblems), suggesting at the very least a move away from either/or scalar binaries.Despite this weakness, a central theme in Valverde’s book is the gap between theory andpractice: a gap found in governance, the law, notions of diversity and boundaries aroundlocal/global and public/private. This important book asks researchers and policymakersto pay attention to governance and the law in practice, within which one can find bothinjustices and possibilities for more progressive alternatives.

Donald Leffers, York University, Toronto

Sancton, A. (2005) The governance ofmetropolitan areas in Canada. PublicAdministration and Development 25.4,317–27.

Tony Crook and Peter A. Kemp 2011: Transforming Private Landlords. Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell.

Transforming Private Landlords is both a book exploring the specific role of privatelandlords in the British housing market and an instructive analysis of the neoliberal shiftsof housing policy in the United Kingdom. Based on their extensive research on privatelandlords and housing policy for over two decades, Tony Crook and Peter Kemp presenta highly informative and profound volume on the governance of the housing sector andchanging public perceptions of private landlords in the UK.

While for a long period after the second world war until the 1970s the Britishhousing sector was dominated by owner occupation and council housing, thedecreasing private-rental sector was characterized by poor conditions of stock,inefficient and uninformed landlords, thereby confirming the bad image of privatelandlords during this time. Crook and Kemp analyse a shift in housing policy since1979, highlighting a stronger orientation towards free-market mechanisms and theattempt to modernize private landlordism. As one reaction to the deregulations of the1980s, party cross-political consensus emerged about the importance of private rentedhousing to solve the issue of housing needs in the UK. Based on the authors’ line ofreasoning, the manipulation of landlord structure became the crucial aim and a key

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instrument for governing the housing sector in the UK after 1988, when a new HousingAct freed new private lettings from rent regulation. A wide range of stimulatinginstruments was enacted to attract more modern and corporate landlords to the rentalmarket.

The book is chronologically organized in nine chapters: it starts with a shortintroduction of the history of private landlords in the UK (Chapter 1) and then moves onto summarizing government policies related to the housing question since 1979 (Chapter2) and to describing, on the basis of a wide range of empirical data, the changing role andcharacteristics of private renting in the past 30 years (Chapter 3). Whereas publicperception of private landlords remained with the image of ‘Rachmanism’ for a longtime, deregulations in the 1980s were intended to modernize the sector. But instead ofattracting the favoured large-scale and corporate landlords, under free-market conditionsprivate rental housing was dominated by small-scale and part-time landlords. Theauthors characterize this structure of housing provision as a ‘cottage industry’, withreference to former studies.

In Chapter 4, readers can learn about different types of landlords and their differencesin terms of investment strategies, economic rationalities and managerial experiences. Thechapters that follow are focused on financial aspects of the housing sector and onanalysing the impact of the Business Expansion Scheme (BSE) on the provision ofrented housing (Chapter 5), and the role of financial institutions and investment trustsin the private rental-market sector in the UK (Chapter 6). A separate chapter is devotedto the buy-to-let boom (BTL) at the turn of the millennium (Chapter 8). In their finalconclusion the authors summarize the transformation of private landlords from a‘cottage-industry-nature of landlordism’ to a ‘more modern form of landlordism’(Chapter 9).

This is a fruitful read for anybody interested in housing and housing policy. With theirwell-informed and empirically grounded case study on British housing policy over thepast three decades, Tony Cook and Peter Kemp highlight the transformation of landlordstructure as a crucial field of governance in the field of housing. The book shows that,instead of regulation frameworks and distributional policies, the manipulation ofownership was seen in the UK as a highly effective instrument for changing housingprovision. Transforming Private Landlords demonstrates that changing conditions offinancing and modifying institutional frameworks could have the potential to provoke achange of ownership structure in the housing sector. Unfortunately the authors abstainfrom deeper theoretical reflection on the range of interventions into ownership structuresas an effective instrument of housing policy. Nevertheless the British experience oftransforming the sector of private landlords should be taken as a suggestion to reconsiderexisting strategies of housing regulation and to reinforce governance approaches directedat the structure of ownership. However, the authors’ findings demonstrate that socialbenefit in terms of shelter and affordable housing will not be generated by market-basedlandlords and their investment considerations: ‘If the sector [of private rental housing]serves only those with market power it would need minimum regulations, but if widerneeds are served, including vulnerable households with little market power, greaterregulation may be required’ (p. 187). Despite all intentions to renounce a structuralanalysis of capitalist urbanization and beyond all transformations and a newly acquiredacceptance of the private renting sector, the book demonstrates, at least, that the marketwill never solve the housing question.

Andrej Holm, Humboldt-University Berlin

Ash Amin 2012: Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Given the historical origins of sociology it is perhaps not surprising that the concept ofthe stranger has been a recurrent theme in sociological theory and research. Earlysociological thinkers such as Georg Simmel reflected on the changing role of the stranger

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in modernity, and subsequent generations of sociologists have returned to this topic overtime. At the beginning of the twenty-first century this topic remains very much animportant issue in the social sciences, particularly in the context of ongoing debatesabout the role of mobilities of labour, shifting notions of nationality and belonging, andthe seeming growth of everyday forms of multiculture and ‘super-diversity’ in manysocieties. It is in this wider context that the publication of Ash Amin’s Land of Strangersis to be welcomed. Although Amin’s book is much more than a contribution to debatesabout the role of the stranger in modern societies, it is nevertheless an important andvaluable intervention into a range of contemporary debates in the social sciences and inwider civil society.

Amin’s book begins with a nuanced account of the complex ways in whichstrangers have both become an everyday feature of urban public spaces incontemporary societies and yet are ‘not afforded air to breathe’. He argues forcefullythat contemporary political cultures are often preoccupied by the fear of the strangeras a threat to social and political solidarities, and as a result we live in a world inwhich forms of racism and xenophobia have become an entrenched feature of manysocieties. He then moves on from this to explore a range of interrelated issues, such asthe role of social ties, strangers in the city, race and difference, and the role ofimagined communities. All these elements of the book are linked by a concern toexplore the current situation while also suggesting possible avenues for developingalternative modes of thinking about these questions and policy intervention. Indeed,part of the strength of Amin’s book lies in its engagement both with scholarly researchand political and policy debates. Perhaps two facets of the book are worth highlightingin this review.

The first is Amin’s discussion of the shifting urban topologies that shape the role ofstrangers in urban public spaces. Amin’s discussion of this issue forms a strong themethroughout the first three chapters of the book. He argues early on that ‘it is the gap itselfbetween singularity and plurality that interests me, as the space in which some humansbecome labelled as insiders or outsiders, publics and nations define themselves as hybridor otherwise, and the stranger is or is not afforded air to breathe’ (p. 2). From this startingpoint he navigates through debates about how we can develop alternative modes ofthinking about living in diversity and with strangeness. Chapter 2, ‘Collaboratingstrangers’, is a particularly interesting part of the book in this regard and provides anoverview of key themes in Amin’s wider argument.

Another important aspect of the book is Chapter 4, on ‘The remainders of race’. Thequestion of racial and ethnic diversity has become an important part of contemporarydebates in many societies from the second half of the twentieth century to the present.Both within civil society and in the political sphere we have seen intense debate aboutissues such as immigration, community cohesion, diversity and modes of integration ofminority communities. Amin’s discussion of these issues focuses on the ways in whichforms of racist expression have become part of the everyday forms of racism andxenophobia in contemporary Europe. He argues at one point that ‘aggressive politicaldemagoguery, targeting minorities, immigrants and democracy itself, is on the marchagain in Europe’ (p. 119).

Land of Strangers is both a valuable contribution to current debates andpreoccupations and an invitation to engage in debate about how societies can movebeyond current fears and concerns about strangers. In particular there is much of valuein Amin’s questioning of the ways in which ideologies of both the right and the left lazilydrift into the view of the stranger as ‘other’ rather than as an integral part of our moderncities and societies. His discussion in the concluding chapter is suggestive of the kind ofsocial and economic policies that may help us to move away from the fears of the present.No doubt much remains to be discussed about his analysis of these issues, but hisintervention is to be welcomed.

John Solomos, University of Warwick

Book reviews 1861


Martin J. Murray 2011: City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg. Durham andLondon: Duke University Press.

If any city illustrates the role capital plays in the formation and shaping of cities, thenJohannesburg is that city. Martin Murray’s City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics ofJohannesburg is a forceful account of the role capital has played in giving this gritty,harsh and unequal city its distinctive characteristics. His book traces the way the buildingof Johannesburg was driven, first, in the colonial and apartheid periods, by the needs andinterests of the industrial capital of the gold mines, and how, after apartheid, real-estatecapitalism emerged as the driving force shaping the spatial and social politics of therichest city on the African continent, and one of the most harshly divided in the world.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, ‘Making Space’, outlines the history ofthe formation of Johannesburg. It traces the various stages and processes of expansion,speculation, boom, decline and abandonment that the central city has undergone. Thishistory of rapid building followed by equally rapid decline, tied directly to the fortunesof the gold-mining industry, paving the way for the outward growth or sprawl thatcharacterizes the city today. The section shows convincingly that the city owes its shapetoday to a coming together of the pursuit of profits, racial segregation and environmentalchance. For these reasons, the author argues, Johannesburg is not a city that was planned,but one that sprawled with little considerations for the shape it was to take and the effectsspatial layouts have on social relations and civic sensibilities — aside, of course, fromhow to limit these or exclude some populations from them. As a consequence, citybuilding in early Johannesburg gave no thought to the creation of a civic sentimentthrough the design of the built environment or the importance of public space fornurturing this. Rather, it was a city built without any possibility or consideration for‘open places and unimpeded social interaction and congregation’ (p. 77), and this patternis continued in the present period.

The second section, ‘Unraveling Space’, chronicles the historical central city’sabandonment and decay into slum conditions whilst urban development and capitalaccumulation expanded northwards, creating a sprawling collection of edge cities. In thissection, the author relies on historical data and expert-choice interviews to outline thecircumstances in the 1980s and 1990s that led to the Johannesburg Central BusinessDistrict (CBD) experiencing a massive depreciation in property values and systematicabandonment by the mining, financial and telecommunications industries. This narrativeis coupled with rich architectural descriptions of the office parks, shopping malls andexperiments in new urbanism (combining residential, retail and commercial functions ina single, enclosed complex) that have sprung up on what used to be the outskirts ofJohannesburg but now constitute the new, multiple centres of the city. The process of‘hollowing out’ (p. 87) of Johannesburg is driven by real-estate speculators pursuingquick returns through purchasing and developing land on the urban fringe, which hasexacerbated the forms of spatial and racial separation inherited from the apartheid period.This has been all the more destructive because, as wealth and employment opportunitiesfled northwards, the central city decayed into a vast inner-city slum or ‘hyperghetto’ (p.27), which stands in stark contrast to the prosperity and ostentation of the exurbia lyingto the north.

The third section, ‘Fortifying space’, continues to demonstrate the ways in whichJohannesburg is increasingly and intensely fragmented, focusing particularly on the riseof City Improvement Districts, gated communities and fortified architectural forms,which carve up the spatial and consequently social landscape into pockets of wealth andprivilege seeking insulation from the poverty and crime outside. This section isparticularly alarmist and scathing of the city authorities, real-estate capitalists, financialinstitutions and narrow-minded wealthy classes driving this process.

Whilst the book offers a fervent critique of the spatial patterns that constituteJohannesburg and its social relations after apartheid, it is limited in its ability to enhanceour understanding of this extreme but also tremendously complex city. The argument

1862 Book reviews


pursued is repetitive and loses sight of the new forms of social life that are emerging inthe post-apartheid period. For instance, whilst the critique of gated communities focuseson ways in which the white middle and upper classes have retreated from public life andare perpetuating racial segregation, the author mentions only in passing that the majorityof new residents in gated communities are from the growing black middle class and failsto examine the social significance of this trend, focusing instead on demonizing whiteresidents. Most conspicuously absent are the voices and perspectives of residents in bothgated communities and the inner-city ghetto.

Thus, whilst Murray decries white middle-class fears of the inner city, he persists indescribing it in the same alarmist language on which these fears rely. His descriptions ofthis area are drawn from a few selective site visits and articles from newspapers that caterto the same middle-class audience of which he is so scornful. Through this approach heneglects to examine the concerted efforts at both neighbourhood and communityregeneration that are occurring, as well as the strong forms of associational life, civilsociety and chance encounters on the street, which he claims are absent. Alongside thedespair and degradation in the inner city there are also numerous faith-basedorganizations, medical facilities and schools; it is not simply a zone of confinement andexclusion, but also a destination of choice for many who want to access the opportunitiesthis central location provides, particularly in contrast to the disconnected townships andinformal settlements on the city’s outskirts. However, these types of subtleties andnuances are overlooked by paying attention to the extreme sides of the city. Thisapproach, whilst evocative and helpful in parts, also limits an understanding of what isultimately not simply a city of extremes, but rather a still-emerging city of paradoxes,contradictions, possibilities and ambiguities.

Aidan Mosselson, University College London

Book reviews 1863


elaine b. sharp 2012: does local government matter? how urban policies shape civic engagement....

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