McCreary Review Colonial Proximities

Reviews / Comptes rendus
Water as a human right for the Middle East and North Africa edited by Asit K. Biswas, Eglal Rached, and Cecilia Tortajada, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2008, ix + 191 pp., paper C$49.95 (ISBN 978 0415461351)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00373.x
This essay collection, part of the Routledge studies in the growth economies of Asia series, was previously published as a special issue of Water Resources Development (Biswas et al. 2007) that emerged from an invitation-only workshop initiated by the International Development Research Centre (Cairo, 2006), in collaboration with the Third World Centre for Water Management (Mexico). The authors are current or former academics, all of whom are active as members and advisors to national government bodies, international NGOs, UN agencies, and the full range of global water policy/advocacy organizations. The stated aims of the book are to systematically and comprehensively [analyse] the legal development of the concept of water as a human right: implications for national governments, and international and national organizations; progress made on this front in dierent (MENA) Middle East and North African countries; obstacles to universal access to water-related services and how they can be overcome. (cover) The chapters by Antonio Embid Irujo and Abdullah Abu-Eid address the legal concept of water as a human right and its development, whilst the other contributors explore its implications in a range of contexts. Abu-Eids essay is a particular delight for its clarity in discussing the sources of international law (public and humanitarian) from which the concept of water as a human right has been derived, and its consideration in the context of the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Irujos complex analysis shows how, at a domestic level, the application of the right to water as currently interpreted leaves gaps in terms of the regulation of communal uses of water, and that legislative rights to services are not synonymous with fundamental rights to water. Irujos analysis demonstrates that the impossibility of separating eorts to address poverty from
implementing the right to water means that the impact of implementing the right will, due to the legal context, vary greatly from country to country. David Brooks provocative argument that much of the debate about human rights to water is trivialbecause it restates the obvious whilst ignoring glaring omissions such as water rights for food production and to support human life through maintaining ecosystemsis a welcome addition to the collection. Olli Varis solid quantitative overview of eorts to meet the Millennium development goals is the only chapter to explicitly consider all MENA countries. Despite his cautious optimism about the successes in the region, the point is well made that the challenges will continue to grow through a vicious cycle of socio-economic and geo-physical realities. Shaden Abdel Gawad supports the points made by Brooks and Varis in her chapter on Egypt, where the escalating gap between availability and multi-sector demands, along with waters imbricated cultural meanings, require a nationally coherent governance strategy. While Abdel Gawads positive assessment of Egypts national plan corresponds with Varis analysis Egypt tops the region on coping with water poverty (along with Iraq)it would be useful to hear about what unexpected obstacles were dealt with and how. Karim Makdisis sophisticated discussion of the human rights approach in the Lebanese context is thorough, but less reassuring: the lack of political commitment to legislative reform supporting development agendas is identied as the most signicant obstacle to implementing the right to water in Lebanon. Peter Laban focuses on the implementation of rightsbased approaches at the local level, emphasizing structural reasons why people struggle to exercise their right to water and are unable to assume accountability for resource management; unequal relations of power, knowledge, and capacity are implicated here and Laban lays out research questions to guide those seeking to facilitate community-oriented water governance. The remaining contributions are from Simone Klawitter (understandings of water rights in Palestine), Odel R. Al-Jayyousi (interrelations between water as a human right, markets, society and government), and Asit K. Biswas (overviews
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of the human right, the regions water governance situation, and key issues for future consideration). The concept of the right to water clearly implies, and allows for, multiple layers of abstraction and modes and depth of enquiry. In these essays it is framed alternatively and/or simultaneously as a legal concept, humanitarian concern, governance strategy, and development paradigm. The collection does not entirely full the objective of providing a systematic and comprehensive analysis though. We hear about Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, but little of the other 19 MENA countries. This is not a true criticism, since the absences and presences serve to highlight the much lamented reality that water policy research is made possible only through access and information; in a region of states with vastly dierent political economies and cultural practices, the data discrepancies are signicant. An unfortunate omission is the lack of any bibliographical information on the authors, not least because some understanding of their professional experience, expertise, and research interests would provide insight into how their chapters should/could be read. Since this collection did originally appear as a special journal issue, it was disappointing to note that the collection had not been revised in any way and the weaknesses in the layout of the earlier journal articles remains in the book. The collection has clear relevance to water practitioners, who may not monitor academic journals. It will also be useful to academic researchers at postgraduate or early career levels and anyone seeking knowledge on the topics specic to each chapter.
Reference
Biswas, A. K., E. Rached, and C. Tortajada, guest eds. 2007. Special issue: water as a human right for the Middle East and North Africa. Water Resources Development 23(2). Johanna Wadsley
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00374.x
The Open University What is water? The history of a modern abstraction by Jamie Linton, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2010, xviii + 333 pp., paper C$34.95 (ISBN 9780774817028)
Jamie Lintons What is water? begins with the claim that water is what we make of it. To defend this claim, Linton carefully unsettles the history of contemporary ideas about waters meaning, circulation, and the decision-making apparatuses used in waters management. Linton also introduces a new phrase, modern water, which he uses to highlight the particular way of knowing and understanding what water is (p. 14). For Linton, modern water is characterized by the employment of scientic categories that divorce water from its social and ecological relations and leave it cleaving only to its expression as an abstract quantity. The crux of Lintons arguments is therefore to be found in the theoretical and historical evidence that forges the link between modern water and the claim that water is what we make of it. Theoretically, Linton is concerned with situating our ideas about water, its circulation, and its use, within the social and historical contexts in which these ideas are produced. In this respect, he draws on the work of several theorists Bruno Latour, David Harvey, and Alfred Whitehead among othersto support a relationaldialectical account of water as a conceptual hybrid. Here the claim is that our ideas about what water is are not based on unassailable facts. Rather, propositions aecting what water is reect a hydrosocial cycle wherein our ideas about water shape its circulation such that it cannot be thought of either as wholly natural or social. In this hybrid space, the material interplay of knowledge, social structures, and physical resources x our denitions of water in time and space. Hence, the troubling feature of modern water is its exclusive reliance on abstract quanticationstypied by diagrams of the hydrological cycle found in many textbooksand similar claims to the discovery of waters circulation. Linton contends that such claims represent just one way of understanding and knowing what water is. Historically, Linton works to show how the evolution of modern water has had the dialectical eect of not only mismanaging our relationship to water, but also contributing to certain crises. For Linton, this problem is characterized by a reduction, which is more than semantic, of
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waters to water. As a pr ecis, he starts by outlining dierent historical beliefs about waters and attendant ideas that specic rivers, wells, and springs were suited to various social processes, such as those of healing, ritual, and so on. The variety of waters , argues Linton, was consolidated and/or replaced over time as accounts of modern water ascended in policy and popular discourse. Linton then situates the history of the hydrologic cycle of water and identies three versions of it. The rst is the most familiar, the scientic account of evaporation, transpiration, precipitation, and runo in global hydrology. Linton argues that, in this view, the reasoning and calculations of global water in abstract terms have become a constitutive part of concerns over scarcity and the world water crisis. The second cycle is that of Tuan (1968), who took questions of natural theology and Enlightenment rationality, not the circulation of abstract units of water, as basic. Although Linton does not probe the implications of Tuans account as thoroughly as he might have, Tuans view suggests a very dierent perspective of the place and value of waters circulation in the history of western science. The third cycle is Lintons own version of the hydrosocial cycle, which he defends as a hydrolectica conjunction in which a relational-dialectical account is united with a return to the production of many waters through participatory social processes. Lintons account seeks to pre-empt the abstraction of water by predicating accounts of its circulation on the process of tracing and narrating specic ows (p. 231). So, is water what we make of it? Certainly; but it is not only what we make of it. In this regard, Lintons claim that modern water severs water from its social and ecological relations is perhaps overstated. Rather, it would seem, modern water reorients us to a particular set of social and ecological relations, namely those appealed to under dierent guises of social and scientic positivism and the policy inferences that issue from them. Seen in this light, the novel and innovative aspects of Lintons work also open the door to a set of theoretical questions for the dialectical tradition itself. For instance, this tradition has been criticized for putting its objects of study on a homogeneous plane such that a unied account may be forthcoming (cf.
Foucault 2008). Applied to the case at hand, we may agree that certain ideas and material processes are contributing to particular (and problematic) circulations of water. However, this is not synonymous with the provision of sucient resources for telling which processesand they are many in waters caseare reconcilable (i.e., part of a coherent hydrosocial account) and which are not. This underlies the above concern regarding the treatment of Tuans (1968) account, because it implies that a broader theological/Enlightenment narrative has aected both material relationships to, and social ideas about, hydrological processes. Further, this narrative includes claims that are incommensurable with certain others. In this work, Linton oers a provocative historical and theoretical account. He situates much of our inherited ideas about water in terms relevant for understanding how they are a constitutive feature of many contemporary problems. And he thereby oers one path to critically receiving these ideas with a view to renewing our social relations to the many cycles of water(s) upon which we depend.
References
Foucault, M. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll` ege de France, 19781979. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1968. The hydrological cycle and the wisdom of God: A theme in geoteleology. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Jeremy J. Schmidt
University of Western Ontario Initiatives locales et d eveloppement socioterritorial by Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay, Juan-Luis Klein, and Jean-Marc Fontan, Presses Universit e du Qu ebec ` a Montr eal, Montr eal, 2009, xvi + 353 pp., broch e C$39.00 (ISBN 9782762422504)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00375.x
This is an important book. Not only for the content per se but also because it allows us to see the similarities and dierences between the work being done in the French-speaking and
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the English-speaking academic communities in Canada. The basic intellectual and practical question is the same; how can we conceptualize, make policy, and generally understand, in the current political, economic, and cultural situation, the position of local communities and local actors? It is a hugely interesting and hugely important question, and the two linguistically based communities have much to learn from each other. Quebec scholars have done very considerable amounts of empirical and theoretical work in this area, and it is unfortunately very little known in the Canadian English-speaking academic community. For those of us of my generation, it may be a bit late to become comfortable reading in another language, but the expansion of immersion French in English-speaking Canada probably means that one of your research assistants could be put to work digesting the relevant French-language literature. This book would be a good place to start. The authors focus on the concept of local development and a good part of the book is spent in discussing related concepts that have also generated considerable research in Quebec. The two that have produced particularly fruitful theoretical and empirical research are the social economy and the spaces of social innovation. Local development is seen as an approach that combines four dimensions: the local production system, bringing together rms and the associations and networks linking those rms; the political system, which incorporates growth coalition alliances between local elected representatives and business elites; the innovation system, which includes the ideas of tacit learning, social learning, and the networks of innovation; and, nally, the social system, which incorporates the insights of social movement theory through the understanding of the strength of spatially based identities to mobilize a wide variety of social actors for collective action. As can be seen, local development focuses on the interrelations of multiple actors within the local space, but it also takes account of the links these actors have to other actors at other scales. Municipal governments have a role in local development as does the federal government, and the Quebec governments role is probably the most signicant. The private sector members of the local growth coalition typically connect to elected ocials at all
levels, depending on the specic asks, political and/or ideological aliations, and personal contacts. One of the few areas of research in the Frenchspeaking academic community that has become somewhat known in English-speaking Canada is the work on the social economy. This is well described in the book, both the institutionalized socio-economic realities and the identity movements, including the womens movement and many neighbourhood or community place based movements. The advantages and limits of the social economy are also well described, as are the major challenges to creating a truly emancipatory social economy: socially, so that marginalized groups are treated as equal citizens with rights and dignity; nancially, so that the social economy can maintain an autonomous relation with the state; and, nally, institutionally, so as to ensure a presence within the local system with participation that is both cooperative and conictual, with the local system linked to a larger system so as to minimize interlocal competition that can only benet global actors. The social economy eld has also produced the largest and possibly the most interesting community-university research alliance in Canada, le Chantier de l economie sociale. As examples of these alliances multiply across Canada, with interesting experimentation and widely varying success, the Chantier is certainly a useful model that should be better known. Finally, francophone scholars, both in Europe and in Quebec, have done a lot of research on local development from an innovation perspective. This too is very useful given the current enthusiasm for social innovation in English-speaking Canada. The examples in the book describe a number of territorially based innovative projects in Montreal: the Angus technopole, the Multimedia sector, the Tohu (based on artists collectives and circus arts) and, nally, the LAB around the Montreal design industry. All of the examples combine elements of the social and the economic, have spatially based identities, and include major roles by all levels of government. They are, therefore, local innovation but importantly are impacted by Montreal, Quebec, and Canadian broader policies. I want to conclude this review by coming back to my original point; the similarities and
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dierences between the theoretical and empirical approaches used in the two linguistic research communities in Canada to understand the same questionhow to understand the current role of the local community and local actors in whatever kind of post neoliberalism we want to use to dene our current situation. In the English-speaking academic community, scalar analysis and placebased policy have been the two major theoretical and research approaches whereas in the Frenchspeaking academic community, as exemplied by this book, local development, the social economy, and territorial innovation have been central. There are many similarities and dierences: scalar analysis theorizes the dierent scales of intervention but often focuses less on the detailed process of intervention at the local level, whereas local development focuses on these local processes while sometimes only mentioning the extra-local scales of intervention. As the case studies on innovation in Montreal illustrate, both the local processes and the extra-local scales of intervention are central to our understanding and certainly to our ability to propose and design good public policy. This is simply one example of the usefulness, for English-speaking scholars, of better exploring the research traditions of the French-speaking academic community in Canada. This book is an excellent way to begin that exploration.
Caroline Andrew
University of Ottawa
La classe cr eative selon Richard Florida : Un paradigme urbain plausible? sous la direction de R emy Tremblay et DianeGabrielle Tremblay, Presses de luniversit e du Qu ebec, 2010, 258 pp., broch e C$28.00 (ISBN 9782-76052509-2)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00376.x
Cet ouvrage collectif ore diverses analyses portant sur la th` ese de Richard Florida qui d emontre l emergence dune classe professionnelle sp ecique dite cr eative de linnovation dans les economies urbaines et r egionales contempo-
raines. Th` ese qui se veut en r ealit e une th eorie du d eveloppement territorial dans la lign ee de la th eorie du capital humain, en proposant disoler le capital de cr eativit e par des mesures nes qui servent la composition dindices sophistiqu es. On sait a priori que cette th` ese elabor ee sur la base de valeurs et de nalit es culturalistes classiques, b en ecie actuellement dun large engouement politique mais aussi dune s ev` ere critique dans la communaut e scientique. Lobjectif avou e des editeurs concerne la diusion du d ebat oridien dans le monde francophone. La facture g en erale de louvrage nous semble ` a la hauteur de cette ambition. La collection darticles rassembl es sinscrit autour de deux enjeux principaux, soit la critique de la mesure du ph enom` ene cibl e ainsi que lanalyse des condia la cr eativit e, ` a linnovation et tions territoriales ` au d eveloppement. Dembl ee le texte de D. G. Tremblay et de S. Darchen met en evidence que Florida cherche ` a travers ses derniers ouvrages publi es, ` a identier les facteurs territoriaux attrayants du capital cr eatif en proposant divers indices autour de trois composantes, soit les talents, la tol erance et la technologie. Selon J. P. Augustin, cette approche oridienne sav` ere trop simpliste et r eductrice en isolant quune seule dimension ` a travers de multiples facteurs du d eveloppement urbain contemporain. Ce choix disoler une classe professionnelle sp ecique comme facteur de d eveloppement sav` ere incompatible, pour J. L. Klein, avec le n ecessaire objectif dinclusion sociale elargie. Aussi selon Elsa Vivant, la m ethode comme telle de cette mesure ne serait pas satisfaisante. R. Shearmur illustre ` a cet eet, certaines contradictions agrantes, notamment labsence d evidences empiriques en mati` ere de causes ` a eets entre la classe cr eatrice et le d eveloppement territorial. M. V. Levine pr ecise de son c ot e que les bonnes mesures du ph enom` ene de cr eativit e et dinnovation sont encore et toujours recherch ees par la communaut e scientique. En plus de ces importantes contributions ` a une solide anti-th` ese, louvrage collectif de Tremblay et Tremblay contient quelques textes qui sinscrivent dans la continuit e de la construction th eorique oridienne, notamment sous langle de lapplication en contexte urbain. M. RoyValex cherche ` a ouvrir des perspectives ` a cette
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imparfaite approche oerte par le capital cr eatif qui sav` ere n eanmoins potentiellement fertile en cette ` ere de d eveloppement territorial largement tir e par le savoir, les technologies et linnovation. En r ealit e, lanalyste ouvre des voies explicatives ` a propos de lobjet principal de Florida et de nombreux autres scientiques qui cherchent depuis trois d ecennies les conditions endog` enes de linnovation et du d eveloppement, soit la mise en synergie territoriale des activit es cr eatives ( ethos cr eatif) conduisant ` a de nouvelles initiatives et des actions novatrices. Un mod` ele op erationnel dexcellence territoriale orient ee vers des activit es culturelles sav` ere en ce sens une voie explor ee par T. Pilati et D. G. ` cet eet, la qualit Tremblay. A e du lieu, sa capacit e ` a sorganiser et la volont e dinnovation repr esentent les trois el ements compl ementaires ` a la base de leur proposition pour un processus daccumulation territoriale de nouvelles formes de capital intangible. An de donner forme ` a ce cumul collectif ` a gouverner, M. dOvidio consid` ere quil faut cibler sur le r ole des institutions. En somme, les apports livr es dans cet oueclairent consid erablement les tenvrage collectif ants et les aboutissants de la th` ese de Florida. Le d ebat sav` ere aliment e, certes. N eanmoins, nous demeurons insatisfaits ` a propos de la mod elisation desdites externalit es cr eatives connues depuis longtemps mais encore fort mal scrut ees et saisies dans le contexte contemporain. Et ce malgr e les tr` es nombreuses contributions g en er ees au sein de plusieurs ecoles de recherches (g eographie economique; proximit e; institutionnalistes; clustering ; etc.) bien cibl ees sur les conditions territoriales de linnovation endog` ene. Dans ce mouvement scientique f ebrile, la nouvelle ecole oridienne nous fait malheureusement que tr` es peu progresser en isolant et mesurant de mani` ere statique un echantillon pertinent dacteurs appel e la classe cr eative. Les principales questions demeurent toujours et encore largement ouvertes. Comme privil` ege de recenseur, soulignons que lune de celles-ci concerne limbrication de la classe professionnelle oridienne ` a travers les autres cat egories dacteurs territoriaux fragment es de linnovation, notamment les entreprises, les elus locaux, les gestionnaires de Etat ainsi que le nouvel appareil programmes de l
de soutien territorial au d eveloppement. Comment se construisent les externalit es cr eatives ` a travers la synergie territoriale ? Quels sont les m ecanismes dinteraction et de m ediation ` l de l ethos cr eatif ? A evidence, l ecole oridienne napporte pour le moment que peu d el ements pour comprendre et expliquer ce processus dynamique qui doit conduire ` a des actions innovatrices.
Marc-Urbain Proulx
` Chicoutimi Universit e du Qu ebec a The wealth and poverty of regions: Why cities matter by Mario Pol` ese, The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London, 2009, xiv + 254 pp., C$33.50 (ISBN13: 978-0-226-67315-8)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00377.x
In The wealth and poverty of regions: Why cities matter , Mario Pol` ese takes on the thorny question of how economic disparities between regions in the same country arise. The books accessible language and playful style make it a text on regional economics that those outside the discipline will understand and may even enjoy. Pol` ese presents a powerful argument for the renewed importance of geography in understanding regional patterns of wealth. While the world may be shrinking thanks to advances in telecommunications and travel, Pol` ese argues place matters more than ever before: the death of distance has been greatly exaggerated. This book is a gift to economics professors and students alike: the former will nd it a valuable teaching resource, the latter a welcome respite from the typically dry tone of academic works. While each of the six sections focuses on a distinct topic, two key themes run throughout the text. First, that certain place attributes almost always provide a competitive advantage to the favoured regions. Second, all successful cities result from a mix of unique events and general laws: what works for one city may work against another. Pol` ese provides colourful examples from around the globe to demonstrate how forces of geography may be overcome by what he terms accidents of history.
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Chapter one shows how the history of a regions economy to a large extent determines its present condition. Particularly useful is the concept of intrusive rentier syndrome, which describes a local work environment where one or more large rms and unions dictate employment expectations. Pol` ese employs this concept throughout the book to explain the development trajectories of diverse locales from Wallonia, Belgium to New Orleans. Having established the critical importance of each places unique history and geography, the author introduces the Four Golden Rules of regional growth: size, location, costs, and exceptions (the latter not so much a rule as a caveat), and the Seven Pillars of Agglomeration. The following sections explore in greater detail exactly how history and geography work together to determine regional economic prospects. In Chapter 3, The regional origins of wealth, Pol` ese explains how advantages such as location near waterways inuenced the positioning of todays global hubs, while pointing to exceptions where political or cultural factors played a larger role. Pol` ese no doubt drew upon years of student questions to so eectively anticipate the readers next question; just reading the text provides the sense of being caught up in a lively classroom debate. Chapter 4 considers the contemporary state of regional disparity and asks whether we can expect dierences within national boundaries to even out over time. (The short answer: Often, but not always, and generally only after things worsen signicantly). The fth chapter continues on this theme by looking at the uneven relationship between national wealth and the growth of particular urban areas. The nal chapter may be the most interesting to students familiar with contemporary trends in city planning and development. Pol` ese examines how rising numbers of green migrants (his term for Richard Floridas creative class) and grey migrants (nancially secure retirees) constitute new sources of regional wealth. Both these groups, but particularly the latter, have the freedom to follow what the author introduces as the hedonic imperative. The hedonic imperative draws people to places already blessed by geographical amenities such as a sunny climate. While Pol` ese sees these trends as important to the future of some economies, he cannot resist
closing the chapter by providing a few examples of cities that succeeded for reasons impossible to predict (Canadian readers may particularly enjoy the tale of how Toronto overcame Montreal to become Canadas premier city). The wealth and poverty of regions is not without its limitations. Pol` ese leaves out or only briey touches on certain facets of economic development such as the availability of higher education, and those better versed in political science may at times be left unsatised. I found the occasional statement questionable, such as the claim on page 82 that aside from French Canada, the US and Canada constitute a largely homogenous cultural space. Yet in the face of all the book does accomplish, these concerns seem mere quibbles. It should be obvious that there is no magic formula for prosperity, yet it takes a scholar of Pol` eses caliber to make clear the reasons why this is so. That he chose to present his insightful work in such an enjoyable and engaging style made it a pleasure to read.
Karin Kronstal
Dalhousie University
Terror and territory: The spatial extent of sovereignty by Stewart Elden, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2009, xxxii + 257 pp., paper C$28.95 (ISBN 9780-81665484-0)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00378.x
In the wake of the tragic spectacle of 11 September 2001, a veritable cornucopia of popular and academic texts emerged and continues to emerge oering myriad descriptions, explanations, and/or analyses of the modality of political violence codied as terrorism. Although there have been notable contributions made to the available literature on terrorism in general and the current war on terrorism in specic that oer a geographical perspective and interpretive lens, the corpus of geographical literature available is relatively small and remains comparatively underdeveloped. Therefore, Stuart Eldens text, Terror and territory , is important for not
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only further developing an understanding of the political geographical dimensions of the war on terror, but the political geographies that serve a catalytic function in both inuencing and shaping the current political moment on an international scale. Indeed, as Elden asserts, the political geographical examination he oers of the war on terror challenges the conventional political and academic wisdom on the topic (p. xxxvii). As the title of this text suggests, the concept of territory assumes a preeminent position in Eldens argument, and subsequently informs and animates the various perspectives he develops to excavate the territorial logic of the present, suggesting that this is a crucial ingredient of any examination of the tension between capitalist accumulation and state-territorial constraints around the distribution of resources and the accumulation of wealth (p. xxxxi). To excavate and elucidate the territorial logic of the present, Elden utilizes a particular politicaleconomic-military-legal-technical conguration of the late twentieth century (p. xxxviii) as an interpretive mechanism to analyze the problematic and provisional relationship between state, sovereignty, and territory that has manifested and congealed in the post-Cold War period, in general, and under the aegis of the American-led war on terror in particular. To bring his analysis into force, Elden organizes his text into ve chapters: Chapter 1, Geographies of fear, threat, and division; Chapter 2, Territorial strategies of Islamism; Chapter 3, Rubble reduced to dust: Targeting weak states; Chapter 4, Iraq: Destruction and reconstitution; and Chapter 5, Territorial integrity and contingent sovereignty. Although one could certainly read Terror and territory in a linear fashion and readily appreciate the perspectives Elden develops on the current condition of what he refers to as state territory and the state of territory, the architectonics of this text invites a nonlinear engagement. A salient theme throughout this text is territorial stability, which assumes a high degree of poignancy through a quotation Elden cites from a speech made by Tony Blair in April 2002: Governments and people know that any territorial ambition threatens stability, and instability threatens prosperity (p. 147). As Elden states; Territorial preservation and control is part of
a much larger concern with stability, now linked explicitly to prosperity and the successful working of the global market (p. 147). As explicitly stated by Blair, and implicitly by Elden, although the concern of an individual state and the international system of governance is with maintaining territorial stability, the fear is the threat of territorial instability. In eect, instability is the master signier around which Terror and territory is organized. In this sense, each chapter of the text forms an independent yet interconnected nonlinear point in a constellation with the threat of territorial instability and, by extension, the fear of political and economic instability at its centre. Moreover, each point in this constellation encompasses individual discursive and material strategies and/or tactics utilized by the United States and its related apparatuses to maintain and/or (re)establish territorial stability. Eldens examination of the intersectionality of terror, territory, and sovereignty, and its implications at various scales of global politics, is signicant as it demonstrates the current strategies and tactics being utilized to materially harden some nation-states while, where necessary, weakening other nation-states in order to achieve particular state-based objectives. These objectives include the strengthening of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of some nationstates through the simultaneous diminishment and violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other nation-states. As Elden successfully and convincingly demonstrates, territory is not a peripheral interest in the war on terror; territory is an integral component of the calculus of the war on terror. However, Eldens examination of state territory and the state of territory has analytical limitations. Eldens argument predominantly focuses on state/state relations of power on a global scale and how these power relations implicate territory and sovereignty. However, developing a comprehensive understanding of state territory and the state of territory in the war on terror requires not only an analysis of the complex cartographies and spatialities being shaped by processes and forces external to the state, but an analysis of the complex cartographies and spatialities being shaped by processes and forces internal to the state. For instance, what strategies and tactics are being utilized at varying
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scales by the state to reinforce territory and sovereignty within its own borders, rather than beyond its borders? To help answer this question, and to develop a more comprehensive understanding of state territory and the state of territory in the war on terror, a companion text to Terror and territory should be Stephen Grahams Cities , war, and terrorism: Towards an urban geopolitics (2004). These texts are mutually complementary and help enable one to identify and trace the complex cartographies and spatialities that inform, inuence, and shape the territorial logic of the present. The text Terror and territory is a timely text that helps to elucidate and bring into focus how current political geographies are both shaping and being shaped by the war on terror. This text should be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of students and scholars from a variety of disciplines who have an interest in international aairs, geopolitics, terrorism, and/or political violence.
References
Graham, S., ed. 2004 Cities, war, and terrorism: Towards an urban geopolitics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Jeremy Kowalski
York University
The place of play: Toys and digital cultures by Maaike Lauwaert, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009, 159 pp., paper C$34.50 (ISBN 97890-8964080-2)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00379.x
The place of play: Toys and digital cultures is Maaike Lauwaerts ambitious attempt at describing how internet culture and technology have aected geographies of play in the twentyrst century. Lauwaert examines the histories of LEGO building toys; Sim computer games; and the Face Your World childrens participatory planning program to explore the changing geographies of play from solitary to networked modes (p. 45). Drawing on French geographer
Jean Gottmanns notions about centre and periphery (1980), Lauwaert explores how forms of toy and game consumption have changed from a one-to-many to many-to-many model where the democratizing inuences of Web 2.0 are manifest. She foregrounds the companies that produce these toys and games and argues that the return of user feedback to the manufacturers shows how changing information ows make more democratized products. In Part I: New children, dierent toys, Lauwaert discusses the inuence of children as consumers of toys and argues that the domestication of play was inuenced by the increasing importance of middle-class childrens play. In Part II: From solitary to networked geographies of play, she details the shift in the design of construction toys from early models that were based on creativity and freedom to modern LEGO toys aimed at adult LEGO fans. The incorporation of the adult into the production cycle is indicative of Lauwaerts argument of the centripetal movement in the geography of play from the periphery to the centre. In Part III: Commercial geographies of play, Maxis Sims computer game franchise is examined in its shift from an urban planning game (SimCity ) to the dollhouse style game, The Sims , where characters interact as humans would. The nal segment in the evolution of the game is The Sims Online, where these characters can interact online in real time with other players of The Sims regardless of their geographies. In Part IV: Serious geographies of play, the Face Your World computer interface is discussed for its usefulness as a participatory design tool in bringing children into the planning process of a park in Slotervaart, a suburb of Amsterdam. Lauwaert describes how this tool brought children into the planning process of the redevelopment of a park, although their inuence on the nal design was always mediated by other stakeholders. Lauwaerts academic location in media studies is apparent in her discussions of the toys, the computer games, and the ways that the many-to-many model is portrayed as positive and democratizing; her descriptions are rich and detailed and point to a real engagement with the subject matter. Her centring of the commercial production of toys and games and the placement of users and children on the periphery of these
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powerful interests also seems to point to a normative conception of the study of toys, a model that most of the work in childrens geographies has tried to distance itself from. Despite the promising title of the book, it is hard to say that Lauwaert accurately describes the place of play but instead points to the locations of the relationships between toy producers and toy users in cyber-space: a networked placelessness that obscures many of the political problems of childrens current engagements in public life and space. The multifarious nature of play, let alone a working denition of the key term play, eludes the reader. Lauwaerts section on children and the city sadly leaves the early twentieth-century Playground Movement as an isolated artefact of history, not as a starting point to examine the relations between children and the city in a millennial context. The use of geography is also rather sloppily applied in this text, and I would urge a more textured approach than the mere centripetal and centrifugal movements from centre to periphery and vice versa be employed. While its contribution to geographical scholarship is limited, this book documents the shift to an emergent online world of play where children are increasingly spending their time. The challenge then becomes how to explore the political implications of childrens virtual geographies, and the apparent loss of their place in public.
References
Gottmann, J., ed. 1980. Centre and periphery: Spatial variation in politics . London, UK: Sage.
Ann Marie Murnaghan
The University of Manitoba Time-space compression: Historical geographies by Barney Warf, Routledge, Oxford, UK, 2008, 252 pp., cloth C$189 (ISBN 978-0-415-41803-4)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00380.x
Time-space compression is a term that is used in everyday geographical lingo. Much of the cur-
rent research related to international development, globalization, and economic geography is centred on this idea. However, to date there has not been a comprehensive volume that looks at the historical evolution of this important geographic conceptat least until now. In his book Time-space compression: Historical geographies , Warf takes on the ambitious task of summarizing the historical precedents of time-space compression. In particular, Warfs goal is to demonstrate how various societies have compressed time and space, shaped them towards their own ends, used them as sources of power, control, and resistance, experienced and gave them meaning symbolically and ideologically, and changed them historically and geographically (p. 1). This also includes how societies have stretched across time and space to interact with other societies and how relational geographies of space and time between these societies have been (re)constructed (p. 1). Warfs focus is on timespace compression from a historical perspective and he interweaves both the empirical and the theoretical perspective in examining time-space compression at a mainly global, albeit a Western and capitalist, scale. In Chapter 1, Warf begins by theoretically discussing how time and space are experienced, and then moves to dene time-space compression. In Chapter 2, Warf focuses on how dierent theorizations have informed the ways in which time-space compression is understood. Some of these theorizations include historical materialism, structuration theory, poststructuralist ideas (e.g., actor-network theory), and world systems theory. Chapters 35 take the reader through the stages of early modern, late modern, and postmodern time-space compression, and Chapter 6 forms the concluding chapter for the book. Early modern time-space compression, according to Warf, begins with the rise of European colonialism, through which time-space compression accelerated. Not only did this folding of time and space come about because of faster modes of transportation, but also through change in the ways in which time and space were conceptualized by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers (e.g., Cartesian views of space). Time and space were also compressed through the printing press, which led to the education and literary competency of the masses and in
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turn expanded peoples geographical imaginations and understandings about the world, and the standardization of time and space within nation states. Late modern time-space compression encompasses the period from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. During this time period, the Industrial Revolution began, and thus caused a rethinking of time and space in terms of shift work (i.e., Fordism and the reliance on the clock) and free market expansion through improved modes of transportation for manufactured goods (e.g., the expansion of the railway and steamship lines). Telegraphy (later the development of the telephone), the development of aviation, the bicycle, and the automobile, and World War II all occurred during this time frame and further folded time and distance and integrated the globe in ways hitherto unimaginable. Postmodern time-space compression encompasses the late twentieth century to the present. Warf explains that, in this era, postmodern capitalism has aected both major technological and political change on a global scale. Through globalized telecommunications, the television and the media, the Internet, satellites, hypermobile capital, virtual communities, and globalization overall, not only has time and space been in some cases obliterated, but also have led to discussions about transnational forms of governance which threatens to change the way human societies organize themselves as well as peoples daily lifestyles. Warf has taken an impossibly deep and broad topic and written an excellent historical outline of the evolution of time-space compression from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. The book is very well written, with a writing style that makes complex topics and ideas, such as structuration theory, accessible and easy to understand. Thus, this book is appropriate for a range of readers from undergraduates to full academics. Most of the criticisms this reviewer had, Warf anticipates in his book, in particular regarding the more general or simplied scope of the book which led to a lack of in-depth coverage on any one particular topic and the focus on Western societies and capitalism over non-Western societies and forms of economies. However, one subtle criticism could be made in that it was disappointing that more Canadian examples were
not utilized in the text. However, overall this book is highly recommended to anyone who is interested in any research relating to time-space compression.
Daniel H. Olsen
Brandon University Colonial proximities: Crossracial encounters and juridical truths in British Columbia, 1871 1921 by Renisa Mawani, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2009, 288 pp., paperback C$32.95 (ISBN 978-0-774-81634-2)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00381.x
Renisa Mawanis book, Colonial proximities , sets a provocative new research agenda for postcolonial scholarship, theorizing the multiplicity of encounters between white colonists, Aboriginal peoples, and racialized migrants. Calling into question governing dyads of white-Aboriginal and white-Chinese relations, Mawani seeks to unravel the many threads of race tangled within the skein of colonial law. Exploring the multiple points of the production and enactment of law, Mawanis study includes legislation and court cases, as well as colonial correspondence, government reports, and commissions. Through this, Mawani registers the expanded scope of legal geographies, including administrators and Indian agents, as well as legislators and judges, as vital nodes in both colonial knowledge production and governance. Throughout the book, Mawani looks to track how encounters between Chinese migrants, Aboriginal peoples, Europeans, and mixed-race populations in British Columbia prompted colonial agents, missionaries, and legal authorities to generate new forms of colonial knowledge and emergent practices of racial governance (p. 5). Following a Foucauldian method, Mawani constructs her argument thematically, developing episodic accounts of colonial anxieties regarding cross-racial encounters and mixing in salmon canneries, prostitution and bondage, and the illegal liquor trade. Since the period of her study overlaps with the emergence of responsible government in Canada, Mawani does not bracket
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colonialism to the period of formal British rule. Instead, she registers how the shifting geographies of empire forged new connections and intimacies between variegated colonial diasporas and Aboriginal communities, and crafted enduring legacies of colonial thought and governance. Mawani notes that analyzing the colonies demonstrates the falsity of Foucaults contrast between the modes of sovereign and biopolitical power. While Foucault articulated the shift from sovereign to biopolitical power as the transition from a regime controlling death to one governing life, Mawani demonstrates the simultaneity of these forms of power in early British Columbia. Rewriting Foucaults blinkered French theorizing through a study of colonial sites, Mawani demonstrates how in British Columbia only some populations were invested with life. Others, in the interests of national purity and state security, were thought to endanger the (white) masses, albeit in dierent ways, and thus needed to be expunged and eliminated (p. 29). Biopolitical control of processes of social interaction and reproduction sought to enact Aboriginal cultural death through racial improvement and discipline. Simultaneously but dierently, Chinese people were relegated to a political death through their segregation and exclusion. Colonial proximities extends Ann Laura Stolers analysis of the development of colonial biopolitics in Race and the education of desire (1995), recognizing the multiplicity of the taxonomic eld against which colonial ocials sought to negotiate and maintain notions of racial purity. Like Stoler, Mawani centres an analysis of the productive capacity of racial anxieties, inciting the creation of new racial truths and mobilizing new forms of governance. However, beyond Stolers emphasis on the constitutive role of colonial encounters in the construction of metropolitan identities, Mawani argues that the circuit of colonial knowledge production was not simply tied to the metropole but moved across multinodal colonial networks, as Richard Philips has argued in Sex, politics, and empire (2006). Through this, Mawani is able to resituate Mary Louise Pratts (2007) contact zone within a wider analytic and historical approach that recognizes the multiplicity of the cross-racial encounters between geographically and historically separated peoples (p. 5). Negotiating the racially
variegated topography of the contact zone, colonial agents did not simply focus on a singular other but rather sought to control the extent and terms of multiple cross-racial encounters. To do so, colonial administrators drew upon global repertoires, integrating knowledge circulating through the globe to construct local racial truths and practices of governance. Thus, Mawani seeks to chart both the conjunctive processes of colonial encounters and migrations in regional topography, and those global circuits of knowledge production and exchange that epistemically joined disparate lands and peoples within the eld of colonial knowledge (p. 207). Mawani eectively traces the transnational weave of colonial negotiations of racial dierence in British Columbia, but her account at times leaves elements of the Canadian national dynamics at play unstated. While the reader is readily apprised of the invocation of discourses of oriental despotism into local restrictions on members of the Chinese diaspora, the book provides slender details with which to understand British Columbias uneasy place in relation to Canadian Indian policy. For example, terms such as nontreaty Indians (p. 196), derived from national debates on policing liquor among non-Status Indian populations in areas where the government determined Indian Status based on treaty rolls, needed to be further contextualized to understand their uneasy t within British Columbia, where treaties were not signed throughout the majority of the province. Further while the study crucially expands postcolonial discussions to register the plurality of racial contestations in the contact zone, Mawani continues to repeat and work within established frames of postcolonial discourse. Mawani documents the heterogeneity of state racisms; however, her recitation of postcolonial mantras about the fractured, inchoate, and vulnerable nature of a white settler regime . . . fraught with inconsistent and competing colonial agendas (p. 207) remains problematic. While ssures of colonial discourses render them unstable, and colonial practices never x nal boundaries, they have eectively derived longevity through their capacity for reinvention. Further, in targeting colonial discourses and practices, Mawani reinscribes their centrality and constitutes non-white people not as subjects in their own right, but rather
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as limits to colonial discourses and practices. This fails to register how change is not simply a product of contradictory drives within colonial regimes but also the resistance and ungovernability of colonized populations. Thus, it remains crucial that scholars construct not only critical histories of colonial discourses and practices, but also recognize those resilient anities that remained beyond the scope of colonial governance. This trajectory is partially evident in Mawanis conclusions, which celebrates the anities and friendships that Chinese and Aboriginal peoples are forging today, but remains a necessary agenda for both future research and political work.
References
Philips, R. 2006. Sex , politics and empire: A postcolonial geography . Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Pratt, M. L. 2007. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Stoler, A. L. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Foucaults history of sexuality and the colonial order of things . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tyler McCreary
York University Changing Toronto: Governing urban neoliberalism by Julie-Anne Boudreau, Roger Keil, and Douglas Young, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2009, 247 pp., paper, C$29.95 (ISBN 9781-44260093-5)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00382.x
Changing Toronto focuses upon the period from 1995 to 2005 and establishes its point of departure early in an introductory chapter. Links between neoliberalism and globalization are claried and drawn together with metropolitanization since cities have become the political place where the dirty work of globalization is being done (p. 25). The result in Toronto after 1995 is seen to be the creation of the competitive city, run more as a business than a public institution, where ethnic diversity becomes a marketable commodity and in which the spaces of the socially disadvantaged are being
obliterated by the middle class (p. 20). Hence, the familiar spheres of entrepreneurship, dierence, and revanchism emerge, with neoliberalism skewing any consistent urban policy that might relate social cohesion, environmental sustainability, and economic stability. The authors argue, in line with both the regulationist tradition of neo-Marxism and of Foucauldian social theory of changing technologies of power, that the negative impact of neoliberalism can be discerned through examination of urban everyday life. In eect, neoliberalism, as intended by governments and corporations, is accomplished by reregulating the everyday lives of people in urban settings. The subsequent chapters of Changing Toronto then provide evidence of this reregulation. Political boundary realignment is an obvious target. Political pressure upon the once-lauded Metropolitan Toronto is elaborated in chapter two, The City that works (no more), followed by the emergence of Tory Toronto and Making megacity in chapters three and four. Chapter six specically examines how ocial planning has shifted under new political regimes. While the planning apparatus within the City of Toronto became much looser to accommodate the entrepreneurial city, the province appeared to tighten planning at the regional scale with the Greenbelt and Places to Grow Acts (Ontario 2005a, 2006b). The authors see both these sets of actions working together in a neoliberal agenda to build a competitive city region. Other chapters specically address social and environmental issues. The racialization of poverty and the concern that recent immigrants to Toronto are failing to share in the regions wealth are treated in chapter ve, Diverse city, while broad spatial social trends leading to The in-between city appear in chapter seven. This chapter, which discusses the Jane-Finch neighbourhood and housing policy, is based partly upon Youngs unpublished dissertation, and effectively demonstrates that inner city problems are no longer inner city. The intriguingly named chapter eight, Urinetown or Morianetown, and chapter nine, Transportation dilemmas, respectively examine provision of public water-sewage and movement systems. In both cases, there is an attempt to show how neoliberalist policy collides with local interests and concerns. Thus,
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investment occurs in airports and electronic toll highways while the Toronto Transit Commission remains underfunded. Schemes to privatize water are contrasted with evident failures, such as Walkerton, development on the Oak Ridges Moraine with environmental concerns. The Creative competitiveness (chapter 10) thrust of current urban economic development policy is also rejected as simply neoliberalism in another guise. Creativity becomes linked to culture and then to competitiveness, as highend cultural projects funded by the Ontario Superbuild Corporation become part of branding exercises. In the process of culture becoming valorized through commercialization, the authors argue artists are transformed into social workers on to whom costs are downloaded, while portions of Toronto, especially the In-between-city remain untouched by development. In Millermania (chapter 11), the authors turn their attention to David Miller, Torontos mayor from 20032010, who was elected to sweep away the old and usher in the new. The result, they argue, was a neoreformist consensus, which, notwithstanding Millers old reformist credentials, primarily favoured a neoliberal agenda, directed at Torontos global elite, to the detriment of homelessness and aordable housing policies. Changing Toronto tells old tales of the period 1995 to 2005, though cogently argued and worthy of repetition. It will nd favour amongst those who see the disintegrating eects of globalization upon urban neighbourhoods and urban form in general. Geographers might have preferred a more critical analysis of the cohesiveness of the spatial and social dimensions of the three city theory, while environmentalists could well challenge Boudreau, Keil, and Youngs criticism of Ontarios Places to Grow (2005b) strategy. Nevertheless, the book sets a whole series of case studies from the Toronto region in a consistent analytical framework and can be profitably read by anyone with an interest in urban transition.
. 2005b. Places to Grow Act . Last amendment: 2009, c. 12, Sched. L, s. 18. http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/ english/elaws statutes 05p13 e.htm.
Ian Lindsay
Ryerson University
Regional and urban GIS: A decision support approach by Timothy L. Nyerges and Piotr Jankowski, Guilford Press, New York, 2010, xvi + 299 pp., cloth $60.00 (ISBN 978-1606233368)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00391.x
References
Ontario. 2005a. Greenbelt Act . Last amendment: 2009, c. 12, Sched. L, s. 5. http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/ english/elaws statutes 05g01 e.htm.
Geographic information system(s) (GIS) as a technology have matured immensely. Today, GIS is at the forefront of nding solutions to the most challenging problems facing humanity such as climate change, global epidemics, and urban sustainability. However, despite the progress of GIS, systematic approaches to seamlessly embed the technology into complex planning and decision-making situations have lagged behind. In this new book, Nyerges and Jankowski draw on their considerable research and eld experience in land, water, and transportation issues to present practical approaches for using GIS in urban sustainability planning and decision making. These practical approaches add context to the core decision situation assessment framework named Enhanced Adaptive Structuration Theory (EAST2) previously developed by the authors. Regional and urban GIS: A decision support approach departs from previous books on the topic (e.g., Jankowski and Nyerges 2001; Balram and Dragi cevi c 2006; Ramasubramanian 2010) in that the target audience is not the GIScientist or citizen but more the urban planning practitioner who uses GIS as a decision support technology. Given this target audience, the 14 chapters of the book are logically structured to address the use of GIS for decision support (Part I, four chapters), relevant methods for GISbased decision analysis (Part II, three chapters), embedding decision analysis methods into planning and decision-making situations (Part III, four chapters), systematic integration across thematic
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and public participation. New York, NY: Springer Publishers. Suzana Dragi cevi c and Shivanand Balram
data and decision processes to incorporate tradeo and decision time frame analysis (Part IV, two chapters), and a concluding summary on the use of GIS for developing sustainable regional and urban communities (Part V, one chapter). Overall, the book does an excellent job of linking GIS and planning theory with practical case studies, and as such would be an invaluable reference book. The writing style is concise and the explanations supported with diagrams, maps, and colour plates. The chapter review questions add to its value as a suitable textbook for upper undergraduate and graduate students of GIS and urban planning. One of the challenges of GIS implementation in the real world is the issue of error propagation and uncertainty, and their unintended consequences such as project failure and litigation. The connection of these issues to the larger debate about the pros and cons of GIS certication would have made the book more complete. Also, all the case study examples in the book have been successfully implemented, and the analysis examined the factors leading to success. A useful counter approach, at least from the learning perspective, would have been to analyze an implementation that failed to achieve its objectives, with discussion focusing on what led to the failure and/or how to guide the implementation to success. In summary, Regional and urban GIS: A decision support approach represents a new milestone in the use of GIS for urban sustainability planning and decision making. The work is highly practical and embedded in a robust theoretical framework. Given the notorious conicting nature of urban sustainability issues, this book would serve as an invaluable guide to those seeking practical ways to use GIS for eective planning and decision making.
References
Balram, S., and S. Dragi cevi c, eds. 2006. Collaborative geographic information systems . Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishers. Jankowski, P., and T. Nyerges. 2001. Geographic information systems for group decision making: Towards a participatory geographic information science. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Ramasubramanian, L. 2010. Geographic information science
Simon Fraser University
Family geographies: The spatiality of families and family life edited by Bonnie C. Hallman, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2010, x + 246 pp., paper $61.95 (ISBN 978-0195431681)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00392.x
Bonnie C. Hallman and the contributors to Family geographies: The spatiality of families and family life have solidied a new sub-discipline, family geographies, which focuses on the spatial organization of family members, family relations, and family social practices constitutive of the social environments of everyday life. The signicance of Hallmans book to social and cultural geography is both topical and conceptual. Topically, Hallman has pulled together an assortment of rich descriptions of family spaces. The chapters, pitched at third year undergraduate students, unfold at a steady pace, ordered to simulate an individuals life course. Drawing primarily on Canadian data, the authors address various dimensions of the family, such as, for example, the organization of domestic space and family time in homes where children engage in competitive sports (Williams and Crumplin), where parents telecommute (Andrey and Johnson), and where women take care for dying family members (Crooks and Williams). Also, the authors consider the cultural eects of migration for families with close transnational ties socially and economically (Samuel), for parents who chose to migrate for professional reasons a generation ago (Huot and Dodson), and for children whose families moved to spatially isolated places with closed social networks (Marshall). Conceptually, these works explore many of the varied pathways through which families come to constitute the places they inhabit and the spaces they traverse. Throughout the volume, the notion of
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spatiality underpins the idea of family geographies and can be readily traced through the writings of leading geographers such as Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja. The clarity of the writing does not take away from the complexity of the arguments being presented. After reading this collection, one gets the idea that the family is a exible, ever-changing reality that is deeply spatialized. As a new eld of study, family geographies could develop in a number of ways. Hallman notes that queer, gay, and lesbian family geographies and minority family geographies, including indigenous family geographies, are glaring absences in the collection. Yes, these may be absent, but the framework sketched out by the authors does not preclude their inclusion. More troublesome would have been if such a collection closed o discussion of dierence, which could very well have been the case when talking about something as intimate as the family. It may be that family geographies develops into an overarching sub-discipline, bringing to the fore many insights from the interesting work, both past and present, about caring, responsibility, and love. Perhaps, research about the home, domestic labour, and womens spaces can be introduced into debates about the family, inspiring new interpretations of related ideas and permitting close relationships with other related geographies, such as adolescents, feminist, labour, and womens geographies. Hallman also claims that sub-disciplines with compatible intellectual terrains, such as emotional geographies and childrens geographies, could well inform debates within family geographies. This indeed may be the case. Theoretical framings prominent in related elds of study would be welcomed additions to understanding the family as a socio-spatial entity. The family as a concept has so much to oer spatial understandings of the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts of everyday life. Although Hallman does not identify these conceptual offerings as strengths of the collection, the authors do actually begin to challenge the mostly takenfor-granted understandings of the family. Family can be conceptualized variously as a scale of analysis in guring out place-based interactions (Hallman and Benbow), as an integral to the or-
ganization of the built environment (Cloutier), as the nexus where sets of social relations form and work themselves out (Summerby-Murray), and as an idealized understanding of relations in later life (Lucas and Sanders). In this vein, unravelling assumed denitional links about the family, such as the reliance on biology and the law as determining factors for family membership, might also be a place to explore spatial processes, especially as they relate to childrearing, caregiving, running a household, and even doing eldwork (Walton-Roberts). Family geographies is a nice read. Though written for a classroom setting, the book doubles as a general interest read. The nal chapter, entitled Not really a conclusion but a beginning poignantly describes the future of family geographies; this collection is only the start of worthy things to come.
Pamela Moss
University of Victoria
Transnational diaspora
migrations:
The
Indian
edited by William Safran, Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, and Brij V. Lal, Routledge, London, UK/New Delhi, India, 2009, xxxv + 174 pp., cloth $112.50 (ISBN 978-0415483223)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00393.x
Canadian poet Phinder Dulai provides an interesting perspective on notions of identity, transnationalism, belonging, and the politics of the everyday when he writes I never knew how brown I was/until I saw it in peoples faces (Dulai 2000, 36). In a similar vein, Transnational migrations: The Indian diaspora claims to chart a unique, middle path using articles featuring a variety of personal interviews to demonstrate that a consciousness of the homeland is ever-present in the formation of identity, and that transnationalism is implicit in the denition of a diaspora (p. vii). In particular, this transnationalism is dened in the present context by the predominance of networking across several countries (pp. xi and xiii). By concentrating on the transnational aspects of the Indian diaspora, the stated claim of the volume
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is to provide a snapshot of the history of Indian emigration around the world, in addition to background knowledge to both students and scholars (p. xvi). The book begins with an introduction by the editors that contextualizes the debate surrounding the use of the term diaspora in reference to Indian populations, and foregrounds the current debates surrounding theories of transnationalism. Next, it divides the history of Indian immigration into four distinct periods. While the sections on pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial movements are substantive and interesting, one wonders if the history of recent immigration to West Asia (which lls less than a page) is signicant enough to deserve its own section. This is followed by articles tackling identity related subjects such as the delicate constructions of gender by class-conscious women in Silicon Valley, an interdisciplinary look at acculturation and national anity after 9/11, and the selective articulation of local and transnational ties through secular and religious organizations by second-generation Americans. The text continues with chapters that discuss the prevalence of an Indian imported social stratication system in New York City, and a transnational look at the Fijian diaspora. The volume concludes with a chapter that moves beyond the traditional focus on remittances to India, to examine the ways in which uninformed, diasporic capital can have negative developmental impacts and lead to population displacement in the home country. While the editors maintain that perhaps no other group is as diverse as the Indian diaspora, from the selection of articles, one can see that there are degrees of silences in regards to who is and who is not included as a member of the Indian diaspora. The questions that arise are threefold: First, where is the Indian of the title situated in a study that focuses predominantly on North Indian immigration? Are Indians dened regionally, nationally, subcontinentally, or through anity networks, and how are stories from other states and nations different? Second, the volume is silent with regard to prominent issues of caste, religious diversity, and queer identities across national borders, and elides these issues beneath a substantial focus on Hinduism and heteronormativity. Third,
is a denition of transnationalismthat advocates networking across multiple siteseective if the text favours the examination of binary relationships? While the histories of immigration to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and Africa are touched upon in the introduction, the substantive analytical works (and half of the articles in this collection) are centred on the Indian experience within the United States. While work that acknowledges the existence of nuanced perspectives does exist (for example, Walton-Roberts 2003), generalizing the experiences of the Indian diaspora in the United States to other nations is problematic. One exception is Carmen Voigt-Grafs chapter on the Fijian diaspora, which undertakes an ambitious transnational analysis of this twice migrant community. Stepping away from previous work that treats transnationalism as a binary relationship between the United States and India, Voigt-Grafs article takes a truly multidimensional perspective that compares and contrasts the networks of communication, cultural contact, and experiences of Fijians in several countries. Another positive facet to this collection lies in the abundance of rst hand interviews that illuminate the lived realities of Indians living in diaspora communities. Somewhat contrary to the editors suggestions that these point to the tension between either adapting to a host country or maintaining a distinct collective identity (p. xxxi), these personal anecdotes and experiences add liminality and hesitancy to absolute claims, and infuse the chapters with vibrancy and resonance. When Sunil Bhatia cites specic examples of Indian Americans who could no longer see themselves as white Americans after 9/11, it reframes their previously ambivalent racialized identity as coming to terms with a ruptured self-identity; which is dened, to a large extent by (changing) external perceptions (p. xxxii). Likewise, Smitha Radhakrishnans interviews with professional female IT workers who legitimize cultural and economic changes by appealing to prescribed identities grounded in notions of the Indian family, demonstrate the uidity of these boundaries and how certain symbols can be reformulated according to space, place, and context (pp. xv and xvi).
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Overall, Transnational migrations: The Indian diaspora fullls its primary goal of providing background information on the Indian diaspora for interested students and scholars. Supplemented by personal anecdotes, the text is particularly benecial for researchers interested in the lived realities of the North Indian diaspora in the United States.
References
Dulai, P. 2000. Basmati brown: Paths, passages, cross and open. Vancouver, BC: Nightwood Editions. Walton-Roberts, M. 2003. Transnational geographies: Indian immigration to Canada. The Canadian Geographer 47(3): 235250. Naveen Girn
York University Environmental justice and racism in Canada: An introduction by Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksingh, Emond Montgomery, Toronto, 2008, 180 pp., paper $27.00 (ISBN 978-1552392843) Speaking for ourselves: Environmental justice in Canada edited by Julian Agyeman, Peter Cole, Randolph Haluza-Delay, and Pat ORiley, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2009, 292 pp., paper $32.95 (ISBN 978-0774816199)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00394.x
Is there such thing as an environmental justice movement in Canada? This question has weighed heavily on Canadian environmental scholars for some time. Two recent books represent distinct, yet related attempts to consolidate the existing, but fragmented, scholarly writing on the subject. Crucially, both books attempt to address an important missing feature from this literature by incorporating the perspectives of non-academic activist environmental justice writers whose expertise and experiences are normally excluded from the conventional literature. Published in 2008, Toronto-based Andil Gosine and Cheryl Teelucksinghs book, Environmental justice and racism in Canada, provides the shorter account of recent environmental justice
scholarship in Canada. The authors have drawn on their own experiences and frustrations as scholars with environmentalist, anti-racist, and social justice sentiments in championing environmental justice within a reluctant Canadian academy. Specically, their book brings key ideas from cultural studies, political economy, and post-colonialism together in a single introductory package targeted to the senior undergraduatelevel reader. Chapter 1 is the standard, perhaps well-worn, template that chronicles the lineage of environmental justice as an expanding but primarily US based movement that is centripetally anchored by the infamous 1980s case of PCB contamination in Warren County. Chapter 2 illustrates two famous Canadian case studies (Kashechewan and Africville) that attempt to provide a pathway for Warren County-like environmental justice experiences to be analysed within the Canadian context. Indeed, both cases are demonstrative that environmental injustice can be found in Canada, but is located less within the context of a civil rights frame than in our countrys long-running and exploitive Nation building agendafrom colonialist dispossession of First Nations lands, to post-Confederation immigration policies that have ghettoized and subordinated certain immigrant populations, to the facade of contemporary multiculturalism policy as a window dressing for reinforcing white (as non-ethnic) privilege. Chapters 3 and 4 provide complementary overviews for novice readers in GIS-based (Chapter 3) and institutional (Chapter 4) analyses taken up by recent environmental justice writers. Here, the authors take care, in the case of the former, to highlight the inherent limitations of technoscientic approaches and point to cultural mapping and web-based GIS as holding some potential in improving the inclusiveness of knowledge. Chapter 4 is perhaps the best chapter of the book, providing an incisive examination of the representational dimensions of environmental justice as an untangling of various forms of entrenched racializations that exist within discourses of nature, environmentalism, and sustainability. The most poignant, and certainly teachable, example they oer is First Nations artist Kent Monkman, whose satirical symbolic reconstructions powerfully interrogate the racist motifs embedded in the works of the
530
iconic Canadian Group of Seven artists. Finally, in order to re-emphasize earlier critiques of (exclusionary) mainstream environmentalism, the authors reserve the last thought in Chapter 5 for several non-white environmental justice advocates. These short testimonials are intended to provide rst-hand evidence that there is indeed a Canadian style environmental justice movement that is taking place at the grassroots level that should give hope to the aspiring student/activist of environmental justice. At nearly 300 pages, Agyeman et al.s edited volume, Speaking for ourselves: Environmental justice in Canada, provides a far more expansive, if not necessarily comprehensive, survey of environmental justice writing by another group of Canadian scholars and activists, again primarily Ontario based. In their own words, theirs is a polyvocal analysis that represents a wide range of academic and non-academic contributors, each of whom brings a particular perspective to their individual activism or traditional academic work. Most creative in this vein, the book begins and ends with two unorthodox, but compelling, accounts of environmental justice thought and action by non-academic writers. The prologue is a letter from retired chief and environmental activist Robert Lovelace, written during his own activism (i.e., imprisonment) against state-endorsed uranium industry encroachment on Algonquin lands in Ontario. The last chapter, by co-editors Peter Cole and Pat ORiley, is a damning free prose critique of colonialist (even post-colonialist) environmental thought, attitudes, and actions, including environmental justice itself, that is as frustrating as it is pessimistic about the possibility for a unied movement to achieve anything other than its own version of self-interest. The remainder of the book includes 11 more conventional contributions on subject matter that would be of interest to a wide range of students interested in environmental justice perspectives in political economy, climate change, urban studies, feminist environmentalism, population health, media analysis, and ecosystem management. While the authors are diverse and each chapter stands on its own as a worthy contribution, that there appears to have been no editorial eort to have the chapters speak to each other undermines the editorial aim of polyvocalism. Haluza-Delays detailed
introduction certainly mitigates this to some extent, and it is a noteworthy addition that should be read in conjunction with his introduction to the equally rigorous collection of articles on environmental justice in a 2007 issue of Local Environment (Haluza-Delay 2007). Overall, both books are highly readable introductory texts that leave the impression that, for better or worse, environmental justice is indeed a rising phenomenon in Canada. Both provide well-written accounts of recent environmental injustice scholarship, which tends to view Canadas version of environmental justice as predicated on our nations colonialist and anti-immigrant histories, both of which have exerted a strongly and unjustly ubiquitous inuence on the nations present-day social-environmental conditions. Both are overly Toronto/central Canada-centric in their geographic perspective, a limitation that is acknowledged by Gosine and Teelucksingh, and (not completely successfully) mitigated through the expanded geographical representation of contributors in Agyeman et al. Notably, perhaps crucially, both books put a great deal of eort into critiquing Canadian (mainstream) environmentalism, seeing it as rmly and persistently na ve toward, and exclusive of, minority perspectives and capacities, not just in terms of their environmental rights and experiences, but also their potential environmental contributions and achievements.
Reference
Haluza-Delay, R. 2007. Environmental justice in Canada. Local Environment 12(6): 557-563. Jerey R. Masuda
University of Manitoba Gated communities: Social sustainability in contemporary and historical gated communities edited by Samer Bagaeen and Ola Uduku, Earthscan, London, UK/Washington, DC, 2010, 208 pp., cloth $100.95 (ISBN 978-1844075195)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1541-0064.2011.00395.x
Gated communities: Social sustainability in contemporary and historical gated communities is a beautifully detailed journey in time and space.
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It provides a comparative narrative of the history of urban gating and its implications for contemporary urbanism. Within the growing body of literature on gated communities (i.e., self-segregated and managed residential neighbourhoods enclosed by walls and gates), the editors have been successful in shifting the focus from an American/Western-oriented discourse to a more geographically balanced discussion of the phenomenon. In doing so, they emphasize contemporary and historic developments and neoliberal and cultural contexts, and truly focus on gating processes across the globe. The book represents a wide range of disciplines including geography, planning, architecture, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and history. It provides a stimulating collection of case studies from the Middle East (Samer Bagaeen, Chapter 3), China (Luigi Tomba, Chapter 4), Africa (Ola Uduku, Chapter 5, and Karina Landman, Chapter 6), Latin America (Sonia Roitman and Monica Adriana Giglio, Chapter 7, and Diana Sheinbaum, Chapter 8), and the Western World (Renaud Le Goix and Delphine Callen, Chapter 9, and Ann Dupuis and Jennifer Dixon, Chapter 10). The collection further develops ideas discussed at the inspiring Paris 2007 4th International Conference of the Research Network: Private Urban Governance and Gated Communities. It is by now acknowledged that enclosed communities are culturally produced, reecting interactions of international and local processes. Further building upon this argument, the theme of the book is that gated communities are clear products of their time, place, and circumstance. To better understand the meaning, function, form, and impact of contemporary gated communities, it is imperative to study local historical and cultural contexts. With that goal in mind, most of the chapters examine the development of gated communities, their fortication, and conditions of gatedness over time, from historical and contemporary perspectives. This is the books most apparent strength. It also attempts to study gated communities under the scope of social sustainability. Thus far, few attempts have been made to do this, making this book unique. Two chapters in particular display an original approach to examining social sustainability and urban form.
Chapter 9 compares gated communities in France and the United States, and convincingly demonstrates how private communities may be pro-social sustainable tools (promoting social interaction within communities, making neighbourhoods safer, and guaranteeing property values), or might put urban equilibrium at risk (increasing political fragmentation and endangering social interactions). Chapter 10 suggests the need to incorporate perceptions of fearthreats to the body, to social order, and to ones identityto explain how gates may be the tools to deal with fears of modernity. I enjoyed several aspects of the book. First, the reader is taken on a fascinating journey in time and is presented with rich data that support the books central theme. Second, the range of case studies provides a wide platform for comparative analyses. For example, it is interesting to note that social and political control mechanisms have been and are used in both the Middle East (Chapter 3) and China (Chapter 4). Although very dierent in context, enclosed communities produce an ease to govern environment, reducing and possibly containing social conict. A most important observation in the case of China is that under conditions of rapid urbanization, gated communities also provide a control tool in case of environmental and health crisis (e.g., SARS and other epidemics). Although I found this book very stimulating, it does have a few drawbacks. First, the editors could have improved the concluding chapter by providing a comprehensive comparison of the other chapters, especially in relation to social sustainability. They could have better incorporated the various ideas into a wider scheme, while suggesting a new agenda for the eld. Second, Chapter 2, although challenging, seems to be isolated from other parts of this book. Despite these shortcomings, the book oers an excellent and important collection that I strongly recommend for students and scholars interested in gating processes, boundaries, and housing, and also for teaching about new spatial formations.
Gillad Rosen
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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