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The AAG Review OF BOOKS

VOLUME 6, ISSUE 1 WINTER, 2018

Book review forum examining Marc Doussard’s

Caitlin DeSilvey’s

Curated Decay:

Degraded Work:

Heritage Beyond Saving

The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market

Reviewed by Shannon Lee Dawdy

Duane W. Roller’s

Reviewed by David Wilson, Robert W. Lake, Kimberley Kinder, Virginia Parks, Kevin Ward, and Marc Doussard

Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome Reviewed by Philip Kaplan

Book review forum examining Christopher Sneddon’s

Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation Reviewed by Shannon O’Lear, Kathryn Furlong, Majed Akhter, Benjamin Forest, and Christopher Sneddon

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Kent Mathewson Louisiana State University Associate Editors Paul F. Starrs, University of Nevada Karen E. Till, National University of Ireland Maynooth Editorial Staff

Editorial Office

Jennifer Cassidento, Publications Director and Managing Editor, AAG Robert W. D. Perham, Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief

American Association of Geographers 1710 16th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009 phone: (202) 234-1450, fax: (202) 234-2744 [email protected], http://www.aag.org

Editorial Board John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles Stanley Brunn, University of Kentucky Judith Carney, University of California, Los Angeles Anne Chin, University of Colorado Denver Altha Cravey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Bill Crowley, Sonoma State University J. Michael Daniels, University of Denver Dydia DeLyser, California State University, Fullerton Mona Domosh, Dartmouth College Federico Ferretti, University College Dublin Ken Foote, University of Connecticut John Gillis, Rutgers University Anne Godlewska, Queen’s University Lesley Head, University of Wollongong Sally P. Horn, University of Tennessee Robert Kates, Independent Scholar Cindi Katz, CUNY Graduate Center Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s University David Ley, University of British Columbia David Lowenthal, University College London Charles Mann, Independent Scholar Katharyne Mitchell, University of Washington Mark Monmonier, Maxwell School of Syracuse University Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University

William Moseley, Macalester College Peter Muller, University of Miami Alec Murphy, University of Oregon Heidi J. Nast, DePaul University Bimal Paul, Kansas State University Richard Peet, Clark University John Pickles, University of North Carolina Marie Price, George Washington University Laura Pulido, University of Oregon Susan M. Roberts, University of Kentucky Joseph L. Scarpaci, Center for the Study of Cuban Culture + Economy Jörn Seemann, Ball State University Matthew Sparke, University of Washington Simon Springer, University of Victoria B. L. Turner II, Arizona State University James Tyner, Kent State University Bret Wallach, The University of Oklahoma Elizabeth A. Wentz, Arizona State University John P. Wilson, University of Southern California Jennifer Wolch, University of California, Berkeley Joseph Wood, University of Baltimore Dawn Wright, ESRI Leo Zonn, University of Texas at Austin

THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF GEOGRAPHERS President

Derek Alderman University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 Executive Director Douglas Richardson 1710 Sixteenth Street NW Washington, DC 20009 Vice President Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712

Secretary Cathleen McAnneny University of Maine Farmington Farmington, ME 04938 Treasurer Julie Cidell University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign Champaign, IL 61820

Publications Committee Chair Sriram Khé Western Oregon University Monmouth, OR 97361 Past President Glen MacDonald University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90095

The AAG Review of Books began publication in 2013 as a quarterly online journal of the American Association of Geographers. The AAG Review of Books (The AAG Review) was created to hold scholarly book reviews as formerly published in the AAG’s flagship journals, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and The Professional Geographer, along with reviews of significant current books related more broadly to geography and public policy and/or international affairs. Submissions. Book reviews should be written or submitted on invitation only from the editorial office. Contributors will be provided with complete review guidelines and submission instructions when their review is commissioned. Books for review. Please direct all books for review to Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, The AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 227 Howe-Russell, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. Contact. Please direct suggestions for content and any questions regarding The AAG Review of Books to Editor-in-Chief Kent Mathewson at [email protected]. The AAG Review of Books (Online ISSN: 2325-548X) is published online quarterly for a total of 4 issues per year by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Annual Subscription, Volume 6, 2018. Online ISSN – 2325-548X. Online subscription to The AAG Review of Books includes a subscription to six issues of Annals of the American Association of Geographers, four issues of The Professional Geographer, and two issues of GeoHumanities. For information and subscription rates please email [email protected] or visit www.tandfonline. com/pricing/journal/rrob This journal is available via a traditional institutional subscription (either print with online access, or online only at a discount) or as part of our libraries, subject collections or archives. For more information on our sales packages please visit www.tandfonline. com/page/librarians All current institutional subscriptions include online access for any number of concurrent users across a local area network to a selected backfile and articles posted online ahead of publication. Subscriptions purchased at the personal rate may not include online access and are strictly for personal, non-commercial use only. The reselling of personal subscriptions is prohibited. Personal subscriptions must be purchased with a personal check or credit card. Proof of personal status may be requested. Production and Advertising Office: 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel - 215-625-8900, Fax - 215-207-0047. Production Editor: Lea Cutler. Subscription offices: USA/North America: Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 215-625-8900, Fax: 215-207-0050. UK/Europe: Taylor & Francis Customer Service, Sheepen Place, Colchester, Essex Co3 3LP, UK. Tel.: +44 (0) 20 7017 5544; Fax: +44-(0)-20-7017-5198. For a complete guide to Taylor & Francis Group’s journal and book publishing programs, visit our website: www.taylorandfrancis.com. Copyright © 2018 American Association of Geographers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, transmitted, or disseminated in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. grants authorization for individuals to photocopy copyright material for private research use on the sole basis that requests for such use are referred directly to the requester’s local Reproduction Rights Organization (RRO), such as the Copyright Clearance Center (www.copyright.com) in the USA or the Copyright Licensing Agency (www.cla.co.uk) in the UK. This authorization does not extend to any other kind of copying by any means, in any form, and for any purpose other than private research use. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any statements of fact or opinion expressed in the published papers. The appearance of advertising in this journal does not constitute an endorsement or approval by the publisher, the editor, or the editorial board of the quality or value of the product advertised or of the claims made for it by its manufacturer. Disclaimer. The American Association of Geographers and the editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the American Association of Geographers and the editors. Permissions. For further information, please visit http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/permissions.html

The AAG Review OF BOOKS Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2018

Contents 1 4 6 9 12 15 18 20 22 25

Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome,by Duane W. Roller Philip Kaplan After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, by William Rankin Anne Kelly Knowles The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing William E. O’Brien Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving,by Caitlin DeSilvey Shannon Lee Dawdy Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp,by James Housefield Harriet Hawkins The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow,by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam Mark A. Blumler A Taste for Provence,by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Susan Kocher Ecuador’s Environmental Revolutions: Ecoimperialists, Ecodependents, and Ecoresisters,by Tammy L. Lewis Sarah A. Radcliffe Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics,by Jessica Dempsey Julie Guthman The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment,by Jesse LeCavalier Julie L. Cidell

Ecuador’s Environmental Revolutions by Tammy L. Lewis

p. 20

27 30 33

Playful Mapping in the Digital Age,by The Playful Mapping Collective Craig M. Dalton Cartographier l’Asie Mineure: L’orientalisme allemand à l’épreuve du terrain (1835–1895),by Ségolène Débarre Felix de Montety Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS,by Charles B. Travis David J. Nemeth

REVIEW ESSAY 37 A Way Across the Mountain: Joseph Walker’s 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite’s Discovery,by Scott Stine; Whither the Waters: Mapping the Great Basin from Bernardo de Miera to John C. Fremont,by John L. Kessell Thomas Frederick Howard BOOK REVIEW FORA 41 Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation,by Christopher Sneddon Shannon O’Lear, Kathryn Furlong, Majed Akhter, Benjamin Forest, and Christopher Sneddon 50 Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market,by Marc Doussard David Wilson, Robert W. Lake, Kimberley Kinder, Virginia Parks, Kevin Ward, and Marc Doussard 59 Cities in Global Capitalism,by Ugo Rossi Theresa Enright, Lisa Björkman, Pauline McGuirk, Jamie Peck, Mark Purcell, Allen J. Scott, and Ugo Rossi

O’Lear, Furlong, Akhter, Forest, and Sneddon on

Concrete Revolution p. 41


Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome Duane W. Roller. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. vii and 294 pp., $99.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-78453076-1). Reviewed by Philip Kaplan, Department of History, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL.

It has been many years since anyone has attempted a comprehensive survey of ancient geographical thought in English: One has to go back to Thomson’s (1948) History of Ancient Geography for such a text, although Dueck’s (2012) Geography in Classical Antiquity covers the same ground briefly in a thematic, rather than a chronological, manner. Duane W. Roller, Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, has taken up the challenge. Given his extensive scholarship on geography and exploration in the Greek and Roman world, culminating in an edition of Eratosthenes’ (Roller 2010) fragments and a translation of Strabo (Roller 2014), he is well suited for the task. Roller’s work, recently issued in paperback, is a tour de force, providing a chronological conspectus of geographical thought in the Greek and Roman world from the age of Homer to late antiquity. In covering this territory, Roller faces some daunting obstacles. For one, there are only a few extant texts from antiquity that discuss geography extensively as a primary focus: Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy are the main writers in this regard, along with a number of texts by minor or anonymous authors, collected in the nineteenth century Geographi Graeci Minores of Müller. To fill in the picture, one must reconstruct the many lost writers whose works exist only in fragments, such as Poseidonius and Eratosthenes, not to mention the enigmatic explorers such as Skylax, Pytheas, and Eudoxus, whose

feats are remembered only in offhand and skeptical references in later writers. Furthermore, reconstructing early geographical thought is a positivist project: Roller, like most other scholars in the field before him, assumes a basic validity to the observations made by explorers and scholars, no matter how distorted their conceptions of distant lands. This risks imposing an empirical significance on some of the more fanciful constructions of geographical thought in antiquity. Roller starts, in chapter 1, with “The Beginnings,” by which he means early Greek myth, and most significantly Homer. Here Roller inclines toward positivism: He notes the early association of Colchis, the Argonaut’s goal, with the eastern end of the Black Sea; and favors the setting of the central Mediterranean for Odysseus’ journey, putting aside an ancient and vigorous debate about its placement. He acknowledges the possible influence of the Phoenicians on Greek knowledge of the Mediterranean, a view supported by some Greek writers, despite the lack of Phoenician geographical texts. Roller has less to say about possible links between the Greek and other eastern cultural traditions, although in later chapters he evaluates the evidence for Persian and Carthaginian influence on Greek thought. For the earliest theoretical understanding of the shape and disposition of the Earth, Roller turns to the fragments of the Ionian presocratics, whose ideas, preserved haphazardly in later writers, are often enigmatic. In chapter 2, “The Expansion of the Greek Geographical Horizon,” Roller presents the expansion of Greek settlements in the Mediterranean and Black Seas as the background to the growth of Greek geographical knowledge in the Archaic period. He also digs out the references to early Greek explorers outside of the Mediterranean, fo-

The AAG Review of Books 6(1) 2018, pp. 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2018.1402263. ©2018 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

cusing on Kolaios of Samos, known from Herodotus for his fortuitous discovery and trade with Tartessos, and the far more dubious Midakritos, supposed explorer of the Kassiterides islands, whose sole reference in Pliny hardly warrants Roller’s extended discussion. More justifiably, he devotes several pages to the earliest Greek geographical writer, Hekataios of Miletos, whose Circuit of the Earth is preserved only in brief references in later sources such as Stephen of Byzantium’s Ethnika. Chapter 3 covers the Classical Age. After detailing the role of the Carthaginians in exploring the ocean beyond the Straits of Gibraltar—including the enigmatic text written by Hanno, which is usually dated to the fifth century—Roller turns to the references to places in some of the literature of the period. He then tackles the most prominent figure in geographical writing of the age, Herodotus the Halikarnassian. Here his discussion is strangely brief, despite the richness of Herodotus’ geographical information. Partly this is because Roller had used Herodotus so much previously for reconstructing earlier sources. It might also stem from Roller’s desire to give more attention to lesser known and more inaccessible figures, but it reflects, to my mind, a tendency by scholars of ancient geography to discount the original contributions of the extant sources in favor of the supposed brilliance of the lost sources. After Herodotus, Roller covers the greater prominence of geography and topography in the later Classical historians Thucydides and Xenophon, along with the enigmatic lost writers Antiochus of Syracuse and Ktesias of Knidos. He also discusses the growing significance of theory in understanding the shape of the world, with the emergence of the idea of zones dividing the planet, as well as early attempts to measure the oikoume– ne–, the inhabited part of the earth. He touches on the contributions of Aristotle, developments in the early fourth century (predating Aristotle), and the later Classical historian Ephorus, who devoted a book of his historical conspectus to geography. Roller’s treatment of the later Classical Age is disjointed, even given the incidental role geography plays in the surviving sources and the fragmentary nature of the more relevant sources. Chapter 4 focuses on two key figures in the expansion of Greek knowledge of the outer limits of the known world: Pytheas of Massilia in the west and Alexander the Great in the east. Pytheas is, of course, by far the more obscure of the two. Roller does an admirable job of reconstructing his journey and contributions to the knowledge of the Atlantic coast of Europe, as well as the problem of the tides, although he does not dwell on the long debate about the nature and reliability of his observations. Alexander’s

2

expedition, well documented in Roman-era texts that reworked earlier eyewitness accounts, is easier to reconstruct, and its impact on succeeding generations is much greater. So, in the following chapter on the legacy of the two explorers in the early Hellenistic period, the impact of the Macedonian on exploration and geographical conceptions of Africa and the East under the Ptolemies and the Seleucids is clear, whereas Pytheas’ impact on the Greek knowledge of Europe is limited; instead Roller discusses the development of theory in conceptions of the earth. In chapter 6, Roller turns to Eratosthenes, a pioneer in the study of geography, a term he used first as the title for one of his key works on the topic. Here Roller writes extensively and with great command of the ancient sources. He reports more briefly on Hipparchus and other more minor figures of the Hellenistic age. The remaining chapters explore geography in the Roman era, in which Roman imperial expansion drives changes to the conceptions of the oikoume– ne–, although most of the sources continue to be Greek. Chapter 7 deals with Polybius, whose interests in geography corresponded with his historical interest in the rise of Rome in the west. Of the other figures of the later Hellenistic age, some continue the tradition of Greek exploration at the margins of Alexander’s conquests—Roller’s account of Eudoxos of Kyzikos and Poseidonios of Apamea might have fit better in chapter 5, but are put here for reasons of chronology. The rest of the chapter, including his account of Caesar’s expansion of Roman power in Gaul and Britain, fit in better with the focus on the impact of Roman expansion. Chapter 8 explores Roman geography in the Augustan age, dwelling on Juba II, a ruler and scholar to whom Roller has devoted two books previously. This leads to another disparity in his attention: He devotes five pages to Juba, who is by no means a household name, while finishing the chapter with three-and-a-half pages on Strabo of Amaseia. Whatever one makes of Strabo’s lack of originality or sophistication in dealing with theory, he is undeniably the most important source on geography in the Roman world, and deserves a more extensive treatment. Similarly, the following chapter, which covers various aspects of the expansion of Roman power and knowledge in the later first century, devotes relatively brief space to Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder, the only substantial surviving treatments of geography in Latin. In the final chapter, Roller deals with various issues related to geography in the later empire, including contacts with China, the Peutinger Table, and the rise of Christian topography. His treatment of two late figures, Marinos and Ptolemy, seems a bit perfunctory, however, especially given the

THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

enormous influence the latter had on the revival of geographical thought in the Renaissance. Roller’s book is both a masterful synthesis of geographical thought in the Greek and Roman worlds, and a fitting capstone to a career-spanning interest in geography. It is an essential volume, particularly for readers who seek to learn more about the lesser known or poorly preserved writers and explorers who contributed to geographical understanding in the Classical world.

References Dueck, D. 2012. Geography in classical antiquity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Roller, D. W. 2010. Eratosthenes’ geography: Fragments collected and translated, with commentary and additional material. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2014. The geography of Strabo. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, J. O. 1948. A history of ancient geography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

WINTER 2018 3


After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

William Rankin. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. v and 416 pp., glossary and color gallery, figures, maps, notes, index. $55.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-266-33936-8), $10.00 to $55.00 e-book (ISBN 978158948-368-2). Reviewed by Anne Kelly Knowles, Department of History, University of Maine, Orono, ME.

After the Map is an ambitious, tightly focused, yet wide-ranging study of the transformation of mapping sciences, from the first international effort to create a unified map of the earth’s surface to today’s ubiquitous Global Positioning System (GPS). Rankin came to mapping history exceptionally well armed. As a former engineering student, he appreciates the unsung engineers, mathematicians, and geodesists who grasped the problems of global mapping and found solutions. Degrees in architecture honed his graphic and spatial sensibilities. A self-taught cartographer with considerable experience, Rankin made many figures in the book, including excellent maps and explanatory diagrams. After the Map springs from his doctorate in the history of science. He is therefore a practitioner and a user of maps who was intrigued (not at all put off) by map projections, ellipsoids, and other arcana of the mapping sciences. Rankin writes as gracefully about the parabolic curves used to calculate bombing runs as the geopolitics of the giant map of South America produced by the American Geographical Society. Most impressively, he dove deep into institutional archives in several countries and several languages to piece together

the genesis of the major mapping projects at the core of his study, how they developed, how the resulting maps and technologies were used, why they lost favor, and their impact on nations, international relations, aviation, surveying, war, and people’s conceptions of territory and space. As a history of mapping science, After the Map is a tour de force. Rankin reins in the enormous scope of his study by focusing on three infrastructure projects: the International Map of the World (IMW), the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection and UTM grid systems, and GPS. Rankin argues that the projects’ linked histories reveal a fundamental change from authoritative representational mapping of the bounded territory of nation-states to the unbound, nonrepresentational pointillism of GPS. In between the two, grid systems emerged as sturdy workhorses for regional mapping. Grids, Rankin argues, diminished the dominance of national territorial boundaries in spatial awareness and as political barriers to the sharing and acquisition of geographical knowledge. The gridded globe improved locational accuracy, and the consistency of grid coordinates met important needs during World War II, particularly for aerial navigation and more accurate targeting of ballistic missiles on fast-moving military fronts. Among his many insights, one of the best is that “[e]lectronic coordinates [born of radionavigation and refined with GPS] are not a way of locating oneself on a map . . . maps [now] are instead ‘interpretation systems’ for navigating a field of coordinates” (p. 286). The social relations of mapping science leaven the book’s sometimes difficult technical passages. Every chapter


begins with an overview of the broad significance of the next slice of his historical narrative. These sections provide valuable overviews for teachers and students of cartography who might not be up to reading every page. Then comes a rich mix of institutional history, explanation of emerging technologies (including failures and cul-de-sacs), and reflections on the politics, practices, and perceptual changes wrought by the particular set of innovations the chapter covers. Although Rankin is not the only historian of cartography who combines technical knowledge and an open, inquiring mind, he holds the many strands of his narrative together unusually well. His guiding awareness of historical context, based on exceptionally probing archival research, is key to that success. Although Rankin rarely addresses it directly, locational accuracy is a strong connecting thread running through After the Map. An alternate title for the book could be Maps, Grids, and Points: How the Quest for Locational Accuracy and Unified Geographic Knowledge Drove Mapping Science, 1891–2015. Problem after problem that European and U.S. scientists worked to solve was related to the inaccuracies of a given era’s mapping technologies. As Rankin makes clear, improving geodetic models of the irregular shape of the earth was fundamental to developing better (which invariably meant more accurate and globally applicable) projections and coordinate systems. Economic considerations also played a role. Less wealthy, non-Western countries adopted the IMW, for example, to spare themselves the cost of detailed national surveys, and the U.S. Army compromised the quality of its aerial surveys somewhat during World War II to quickly map as much of the earth as possible. Rankin argues that international agreements to support the IMW reflected universalist goals that broke down after 1945 and were gradually replaced by much more fragmented, locally intensive, commercial and governmental mapping initiatives. Yet GPS emerges in his telling as a powerfully unified system. Political rhetoric changed greatly from the 1910s to the 1990s, but the unification of geographic knowledge remained a primary goal. Rankin’s historical narrative is not an updated version of the declensionist narrative of progressive cartography epitomized by Thrower’s (1996) Maps and Civilizations. He is far more subtle and theoretically aware. He remains agnostic about whether scientific changes were “good or bad,” although he also disputes the assertion from some quarters that mapping technologies such as GPS are neutral. Because Rankin views politics as a product of particular historical periods and circumstances, he takes issue with geographers’ less historically grounded arguments about the nature of power, particularly the interpretation espoused

by a generation of self-proclaimed “critical” cartographers. Rankin’s empirical research showed that the people who created the IMW (Imageware Surfacer 3D CAD [computer-aided design] Surface Geometry), UTM, and GPS were not “unselfconscious tools of capital and nationalism,” nor were those who used these mapping systems unaware of “their maps’ lacunae” (p. 320). Like Rankin himself, the individuals in his stories are pragmatic, keenly aware of the systems’ flaws and the interests behind their development. His argument on this point is persuasive. I am less convinced by Rankin’s critique of the broader issues that Wood, Harley, Edney, and others have raised over the past thirty years. His otherwise limpid writing turns elliptical when he tries to explain why their interpretation has lost its salience. What Harley and his followers present as “a new way of analyzing maps,” he says, “is perhaps best understood as a solidification, even a popularization, of a broader historical shift . . . from representation as a mimetic practice to representation as a tool-making practice” (p. 114). In other words, the deconstructionist critique of cartography as a handmaid of power might have fit maps from the colonial and imperial eras, but post–World War II mapping science was not, and did not strive to be, hegemonic or to hide its real intentions. Furthermore, unlike the representational stratagems of early twentieth-century cartography, such as the IMW, GPS coordinates “are perfectly real,” embedded in the world, according to Rankin. GPS is part of our postrepresentational world, just as the GPS receivers in cars and phones and parole bracelets are part of the hybrid age. Surely, though, GPS coordinates are abstractions, as indexical numbers that refer to a model of the earth and human notions of position and direction. They become real when we see them in relation to a map, or through some other representational medium. The deeper issue is whether GPS is immune to, or removed from, the politics of power. Even if ordinary people have access to GPS coordinates as long as the satellites last, those satellites are owned and maintained by governments and elites. What carries more geographical authority today than where GPS tells us we are? It seems to me that After the Map as a whole confirms the view that over the long arc of cartographic history, those in power have sought to improve the science of mapping and put it to their own uses. If it benefits the rest of us, so much the better. Reference Thrower, N. 1996. Maps and civilizations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

WINTER 2018 5


The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. vii and 331 pp., photos, notes, index. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-69116275-1); $19.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-691-62751).

Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has written an outstanding book that speaks to core questions in contemporary geography. The book is a multispecies ethnography that aims to displace the human-centric perspective that ordinarily guides social science scholarship, which downplays the significance of nonhuman contributions to events and outcomes. Tsing’s focus is on the globalized trade of matsutake mushrooms, which emerged during the 1980s to supply Japanese consumers with an important cultural product that no longer grows there. Her detailed account connects this economic activity to the human cultural dimensions of mushroom foraging, exporting, and consumption. Most significant, however, is that Tsing provides a vital accounting of the actions of nonhumans, such as fungi, pine trees, and nematodes, that fundamentally shape the trade and the people who engage with it. This work on matsutake is a monumental addition to a productive interdisciplinary discourse that is heavily indebted to frameworks such as actor-network theory and feminist science studies, which assert the agency of nonhumans and demonstrate the illusion of a human–environment binary.

of Japanese identity. It no longer grows there, however, due to the encroachments of twentieth-century development as well as the impacts of an invasive nematode that destroys red pines. Matsutake and pines of various types live in a partnership that allows them to thrive together in disturbed, open areas and in poor soils, conditions that are available in various parts of the world and are often created by humaninduced degradation. The multispecies partnership is instrumental to the emergence of a global matsutake trade to supply the Japanese market. Visiting what she calls the “patches” of mushroom production activity in various places, Tsing’s account takes readers to the pine forests of northern Finland, peasant forests in China’s Yunnan Province, inside the gift culture of Japan, and into pine forest restoration attempts there. Of most interest, however, is the significant amount of time that she spends in Oregon, in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, assessing multispecies contributions to a multicultural economy of matsutake foraging, buying, and exporting. Tsing characterizes these economic patches as assemblages of human and nonhuman activity, which associate in “patterns of unintentional coordination” (p. 23). Working together to facilitate the matsutake trade, such assemblages are “open-ended gatherings,” as she asserts, that “allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them” (p. 23). This approach, which emphasizes coproductive relations among humans and nonhumans, redirects readers from economic concepts like rationalization, in which nonhumans are subordinated to human ends. As shapers of worlds, including human identity and practice, matsutake mushrooms, pine forests, and other nonhumans deserve much more credit.

At the center of her account is matsutake, an aromatic mushroom that is popular as a gift in Japan and is symbolic

Beyond their contributions to these assemblages, Tsing places matsutake at the center of a broader quest: to find

Reviewed by William E. O’Brien, Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL.


a way to maintain a sense of possibility and curiosity at a precarious time in world history. The modern global capitalist economy has undermined opportunities to find “good jobs,” even in wealthier countries, and global warming, also a product of capitalism, has perhaps permanently diminished hopes of a better future. Despite living in “a condition of trouble without end” (p. 2), however, and with concepts like “progress” no longer tenable, Tsing seeks ways to refrain from despair and unending critique, imploring readers to find ways to live in curiosity—to feel pleasure “amidst the terrors of indeterminacy” (p. 1). As a mushroom that emerges from degraded landscapes, matsutake symbolizes this possibility of renewal and offers a glimmer of hope amid precarity. She states, “To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence with environmental disturbance” (p. 4). Such possibilities are mitigated, however, by the precariousness that the mushrooms also symbolize. Matsutake productivity is uncertain, as it lives in complex ecological arrangements with its pine partners and is not scalable to plantation agriculture. Additionally, mushroom foraging is performed by a labor force that is marginalized socially and in the global economy, evident particularly in the Oregon case. Such foragers are not organized by a firm and among them are white American antifederalists and Vietnam War veterans seeking refuge in the forest, as well as Hmong, Mien, and Khmer immigrants from wartorn parts of Southeast Asia. According to Tsing, “the overlapping concerns of self-exiled whites and Southeast Asian refugees became the heartbeat of the trade” (p. 68). I would note that in addition to her own detailed discussion, Tsing refers to the film The Last Season, produced by Sara Dosa, which supplies a visual account of this multicultural foraging community and works well in the classroom as a supplement to the book. Despite such mitigating factors, a sense of possibility amidst the ruins is evident, for instance, in the circumstances of the matsutake trade’s emergence in a national forest in the eastern Cascade Mountains. In this setting, fire suppression policies of the U.S. Forest Service followed the dispossession of Klamath residents in the 1950s, and subsequent attempts at industrial forest management ultimately failed. The outcome produced both social injustice and a degraded pine forest. This problematic circumstance offers nothing to celebrate, but a productive relationship emerged between matsutake and lodgepole pine, resulting in a place that today is referred to as “‘ground zero’ of the American matsutake scene” (p. 195). Acknowledging this silver lining, Tsing declares, “Mistakes were made . . . but mushrooms popped up” (p. 202).

The most ethnographically rich sections of the book take place deep in this forest, in and around a location that Tsing dubs “Open Ticket,” named for a mushroom-buying practice. These chapters remind readers that the matsutake trade is about more than just money in a commodity exchange. She asserts that the value of matsutake in this forest assemblage is also defined by freedom: Mushroom foraging facilitates in a life in the woods. For some, the forest offers a refuge from the effects of posttraumatic stress or freedom from the rules of mainstream society. For the immigrant communities, foraging affords a way to embrace freedom in the United States while continuing to maintain key features of the hill community lifeways they had purportedly left behind in Southeast Asia. Tsing encapsulates both the cultural valuation of the mushrooms in the Oregon forest and the challenges in finding them by describing them as “freedom trophies,” rather than simply commodities. The important multispecies point is that matsutake, the pines, forest, landscape, and so on, are instrumental (not incidental) in coproducing the lifeways and identities of these foragers. Her discussion provides a profound reminder that existence is not self-contained and bounded but relational and entangled. As Tsing states, “Selves are already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration” (p. 29). Accepting relationality leaves no scope to maintain a hierarchal binary of humans over nature. Tsing connects foraging in Open Ticket to other links in the supply chain, including buyers, bulk agents, exporters, and importers, that ultimately deliver matsutake to Japan. The trade follows the inventory control approach to product supply that characterizes modern global capitalism in the twenty-first century. In this economy, firms do not exercise direct control over resources and labor, but instead source production to any producers who can deliver the goods cheaply. U.S. corporations like Apple and Nike have come to symbolize the arrangement, although she describes how the practice originated among Japanese firms. Contributing to contemporary precarity, getting the goods in this system is often achieved with little concern about where and how they are produced, leading to labor and environmental abuses. Tsing shows how the matsutake trade reflects this pattern, one in which the gift economy “patch” in Japan remains disconnected and unconcerned about the conditions of mushroom production in overseas patches like Open Ticket. These disparate patches of capitalist activity are linked in the supply chain through a process of translation through which, in the buying, bulking, and exporting process, the “freedom trophies” are translated into

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simple commodities. Once in Japan, the matsutake commodity form is translated once again, this time into the cultural economy of gift giving and receiving. The point is to show how global capitalism, although often producing “blasted landscapes” with ruinous results, is not a unitary and homogenizing system, and, as she discusses near the end of the book, the observation has implications for political mobilization. The book is written in what Tsing calls “a riot of short chapters” (p. viii), structured into four parts with twenty chapters in total, each of which averages around ten or eleven pages. She also includes several brief “interludes” that provide transitions between the parts of the book. All of the pieces work together to, as she puts it, “build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine; they gesture to the so-much-more out there” (p. viii). The organization is very effective, providing insightful glimpses into the varied facets of the human and nonhuman contribu-

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tors to the global matsutake trade while not attempting to confine the story to a strictly narrative format. In my view, one of Tsing’s most significant successes lies in her ability to translate esoteric concepts and expression into sophisticated but ordinary language. Written scholarship from this perspective, often termed posthuman studies, can be as challenging to read as it is compelling. Tsing avoids the use of much of its terminology and jargon, thereby bringing these important ideas closer to the mainstream of educated discourse. As such, the book will be useful in both graduate and undergraduate courses in addition to being accessible to a broader audience. It is successful on many levels, and I fully agree with Michael R. Dove’s declaration on the book’s jacket, that “this work is destined to be a classic.” The Mushroom at the End of the World abundantly deserves the praises and awards it has garnered since its publication, and I could not endorse it more strongly.



Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving Caitlin DeSilvey. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2017. 240 pp., notes, index, photos, references. $27.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-816694389), $108.00 cloth (ISBN 9780-8166-9436-5). Reviewed by Shannon Lee Dawdy, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Caitlin DeSilvey asks: “What to do when the world begins to fall apart around you?” (p. 68). Curated Decay is a peculiar study in heritage. It is unorthodox both in terms of method and by making a case against preservation. Instead, the author explores the possibilities of “postpreservation.” A key idea throughout the book (that perhaps the publisher should have allowed into the title) is not decay but entropy. Whereas a commonsense definition of entropy might be movement toward a state of chaos, DeSilvey cites physicists, biologists, and even the earth-artist Robert Smithson to clarify that entropy “is more accurately defined as a measure of the multiplicity of potential arrangements of matter within a given system” (p. 10). The author’s approach, like entropy itself, is multiple and open-ended, unsettled and unsettling. What is most striking about this work are the implications to be drawn about the political temporalities and posthuman ethics of heritage practices. For whom are we preserving sites and structures? What is the imagined future of the landscape–human relation? Outside the obvious nationalism of flagship sites, why do so many people in the Westernized world have the urge to “pickle” (p. 188) the materiality of the past? How long do we imagine this shelf life to be?

Weaving together her personal experiences with places and people, DeSilvey presents several case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, where classic archiving and preservation strategies have been challenged by nature, culture, or both. In the most affecting example appearing toward the end of this slim and elegant volume, DeSilvey sketches an arc from her dying grandmother to a dying lighthouse on the eroding Suffolk coast. The author’s tender literary handling of these aging beacons invokes an acceptance of loss and an effort to appreciate the indefinite time remaining, as well as creative strategies of memorialization. One of the most unique attributes of her style is the easy way in which she glides from poetry to ecology. Weedy ruderals and bryophyta play a role in both. She follows actors who are creatively reinventing preservation practice through planned decay, contemporary art installations, and ecological management, as well as those who are puzzled by or resist such efforts. With vibrant details that allow the reader to almost smell a distant site, she begins by describing the reclamation of a moldy and mouse-eaten homestead in Montana that was the site of her dissertation work—an aesthetic and affective experience that germinated the present work. Here is a passage typical of her gift for description: “Eventually the trees began to draw the snarl of iron and steel into their generous vegetal embrace. The edge of a studded wheel fused into gray bark, a branch thickened and lifted over the binder’s mass, carrying with it, and gradually consuming, a loose length of chain; roots twined around steel tines. . . . The hybrid tree-machine works away at a perennial chore, binding iron and cellulose, mineral and vegetable” (p. 34). This passage illustrates not only her prose but her attentiveness, evident in brief


but never heavy-handed conversations with posthuman theory exemplified by scholars such as Latour, Haraway, and Bennett. Throughout the text, DeSilvey also engages with the heritage studies literature, both new and old, from Ruskin and Riegl to Lowenthal and Holtorf. Her case studies highlight different problems and approaches to sites that present challenges to classic preservation schemes. In Montana, both the challenge and the fascination lay in how, during a period of abandonment, plants and animals had reworked the materials of the site such that it was no longer clear if they were artifacts or ecofacts. It is notable that all of her examples are sites of “weak” antiquity—with most features dating to the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, which might account for our willingness to let them go. We have more of such sites persisting on the landscape than remnants of earlier landscapes, and they might lack the uncanny quality of materials from a less familiar spacetime. Although this commonality across her experimental preservation sites is not enunciated, it might be worth reflecting on how on the preservation impulse entails multiple possible relations to different types of pastness. At Mullion Cove in Cornwall, another structure dating to the late nineteenth century consists of a revetted man-made harbor. Battered by recent storms and coastal erosion, Mullion Cove is an example of what will happen to coastal sites across the globe as sea waters rise and weather events intensify with global warming. At this site, Britain’s National Trust has attempted to accept some of the consequences of coastal erosion but it runs up against the fierce nostalgia and melancholy efforts of some local residents to keep the future at bay. The physical result is ambivalence—partial repair efforts that replace historic material with concrete that will eventually make the site lose its historic integrity, at which point it might fall out of the Trust’s responsibility, thus resolving the conflict. At Orford Ness in Suffolk, the National Trust is attempting a more openly experimental approach of “nonintervention” at a former Cold War facility called the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. There, the Trust is intentionally letting nature take its course, allowing birds to nest in the eaves of the structures and voluntary plants grow where they may. The quiet politics of this nonintervention could be read as a statement of regret for atomic proliferation, or even a “negative monument” (paraphrasing Merewether, p. 79). The site’s isolation from local communities likely abets the nonintervention strategy. Nevertheless, as this scattered hulk from the Cold War ages, some nationalist interests might push for it, and sites like it, to be treated with more “respect.”

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The designers of the Duisburg Nord Landschaftpark in Germany deploy a more playful experimental approach in which they explicitly embrace the possibilities of entropy. The temporality of the site thus does not reset the clock back to a prior moment via restoration, nor does it arrest time to fix a particular memory into space. Rather, they frame this site of industrial ruins through its future decay and eventual disappearance into a verdant biome of marginal species. In Scotland, a group of local activists called the Invisible College are emulating the German approach, which involves resighting the multilayered site of a Renaissance castle, Victorian estate, and abandoned modernist seminary through contemporary art installations. Their efforts strive to envision what the site was like prior to its points of historic reference (the Medieval, the Renaissance, the Modern), as well as what it might become in the uncertain future. Through this experiment, and DeSilvey’s narration, the ephemerality of anthropogenic landscapes emerges as a message of postpreservation. Still, the experimental management of these sites could be limited by the practicalities of public safety and accessibility, as well as counternarratives and competing investments in old things often charged with confounding emotional sparks. At mining and quarry sites in both Cornwall and Montana, the author witnessed the boundaries between nature and culture that conventional approaches attempt to maintain. Sites are often prioritized as either nature preserves or cultural resources, but such distinctions require continual effort in both discourse and physical maintenance. Although DeSilvey insists that her work offers more questions than answers, powerful implications emanate from this careful book. In particular, the global community faces impending loss—of species, of communities, of material histories—through the effects of climate change: “The Anthropocene epiphany reminds us that we are deeply implicated in earth processes all the way down—in soil layers, tree rings, rising tides, and swelling storm surges” (p. 166). Thus, DeSilvey gently advocates for a “post-humanist heritage paradigm” (p. 184) not only because it harmonizes a different kind of authenticity, but because we might have no other choice. Inherent in her observations lies the realization that the rise of preservation theology in the nineteenth century represented a variation of what Rosaldo called “imperialist nostalgia”— a nostalgia for that which the mourners were themselves destroying through political domination. Rather than the pastoral and unrepressed preindustrial world that anthropology worshipped, historic preservationists who


focus on early modern and industrial landscapes seem to be expressing a nostalgia for a world being eaten away by its own compulsions. Perhaps we could call this capitalist nostalgia. If there is one critique this reviewer would offer, it is that the politics of both traditional preservation and posthumanist preservation remain understated in Curated Decay. Who can afford to prioritize ecology over the human except those unthreatened by poverty, war, and endemic disease? Does preserving historic sites mean prioritizing the dead over the living? DeSilvey offers some gestures toward these forces (which feel even more charged since the 2016 U.S. election), but a little more overt engagement with the political seems necessary to advance an agenda that will inevitably provoke confrontations between competing interests.

By refusing to venerate ruins and over banal fragmentation, some complementary companionship exists between DeSilvey’s book and Gordillo’s (2014) Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Where the former falls heavily on the human and the political, Curated Decay evokes the nonhuman and the poetic. As such, it is a beautiful read that will vibrate with afterthoughts. Reference Gordillo, G. 2014. Rubble: The afterlife of destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp James Housefield. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016. xxiv and 312 pp., illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-61168957-00), $85.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-61168-956-3), $34.99 electronic (ISBN 978-1-61168958-7). Reviewed by Harriet Hawkins, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, London UK. A porcelain urinal turned on its back; a fragile glass teardrop, apparently empty; a galvanized iron bottle rack; a graffitied reproduction of the Mona Lisa; a bicycle wheel mounted on a bar stool; and a star shape shaved into the back of someone’s head. This list of some of the greatest art works by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists Marcel Duchamp does not at first glance appear to offer many analytic entry points for the geographer. Indeed, geographers have perhaps not been much taken with studies of the key figures of modern art. The masters of European landscape art—particularly the English nineteenth-century masters Turner and Constable—have naturally received attention, and some avant-garde figures such as Guy Debord and the Situationists have also captured geographers’ imaginations. So, too, have a host of contemporary sitespecific, community, and installation artists, whose work resonates with geographical themes of embodiment and practice, and concerns with participatory working and impact. Yet somehow, geographers have overlooked the influential work of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), that eccentric father figure of Dada, the early twentieth-century avant-garde arts movement that was to reshape the terms of the production and consumption of art (includ-

ing its geographies). Perhaps this is because until Playing with Earth and Sky there was little to build links between geography and Dada, either in terms of the critical geographies that the works created or those of their production and consumption. In this rich and engaging volume, Housefield offers us the tantalizing possibility that there might be much within the work of the high priest of conceptual art that can be understood as geographic. It is an exciting prospect. Duchamp has been lauded as one of the most influential artists of the last hundred years, best known for his ready-mades and performance art, not least Fountain (1917), his famous porcelain urinal that was signed R.Mutt (after the iron works from which it was purchased). Such art pieces are not obviously geographical in content, as they do not “picture” landscapes as such, nor are there clear themes of mapping or navigation, and although often using quintessentially urban “found objects,” they are not about urban space, as such. Yet, Housefield’s book explores these and other geographic themes that can be traced in Duchamp’s work, from links to enduring concerns with landscape representation, to explorations of technologies such as globes and planetaria, as well as wider questions of territories, terrestrial and cosmological. I want to begin this review by mapping some of the geographies in this text that sparked my imagination, before turning to some of the wider questions that this volume poses for the intellectual territories of geography and the broader geohumanities. “Landscape is a way of seeing,” so proclaims one of Housefield’s chosen epigraphs. This perspectives serves as a foundation for placing the volume within an important geographic lineage, namely that initiated with Cosgrove’s (1984) Social Formation of the Symbolic Landscape.


Cosgrove’s text, and those allied to it, opened out geography’s disciplinary discussions of landscape, representation, politics, and materiality, as well as its engagement with art and creative practices, in ways that have shaped current intellectual trajectories. It is an interesting choice, and one that when set in dialogue with Housefield’s other epigraphic choices—a longer quote from Duchamp about the relationship between art and science, and the challenging of science as inevitable truth, and a short quote from Schiller and Jung, “we are only fully human when we play”—set the scene well for what follows. What does follow? A text in which the earth and sky of the title come to stand in turn for the terrestrial and celestial sciences—geography and astronomy, respectively—are tracked through the creation of a Duchampian oeuvre. Such an account offers the artist source material and inspiration for his wider project to challenge early twentieth-century art with the creation of “experiences that existed on multisensory levels and persisted on intellectual levels” (p. 7). Across five chapters, Housefield offers us a vision of Duchamp as a designer of experiences, who seeks to simultaneously engage bodies and minds. This vision, he emphasizes, does not replace that of Duchamp as an artist, but rather offers a perspective that situates his work within evolving ideas of the knowledge and practices of modern sciences. Interestingly, this is not just about finding the facts of modern developments and events in geography and astronomy as the subject of the work, whether pictured or otherwise, but also about the intersection of artistic practices with the evolution of beguiling presentation devices from science and technology. As the book unfolds it includes grand globes you can walk within, as well as innovative educational forms of museums and planetaria. As becomes clear, there is much to delight, entertain, and inform the geographic reader here. “Official” geographies—of geopolitics, of French nationalism, and of the cultures of geography and astronomy in the nineteenth century—dominate the text, especially its early sections. Chapter 1 focuses on French national cultures and the framing of these modern sciences that Duchamp and his contemporaries would have encountered during their education and as they evolved as artists. Among the educational modes and media Housefield mentions are individual texts (e.g., Reclus 1898), but also tools such as maps and globes (from those book-sized or classroom teaching tools, to the vast Celestial Globe installed at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair), as well as scientific spectacles of the sort that encourage immersion on the part of their audiences, the kind of teaching where senses are engaged as part of an intellectual education.

The epigraphic conception of landscape really emerges in the second chapter. Here Housefield foregrounds relationships between terrestrial and cosmological in his delineating of the territories of Duchamp’s work. Much attention rightly is paid to Duchamp’s exploration of “‘landscapism,’ which melds modern artists’ interest in the subject of landscape with modern critics’ compulsive labelling of artistic movements or isms” (p. 61). Departing from Cosgrove’s sense of landscape as a “way of seeing,” Housefield offers us a Duchamp who is a landscape artist in a decidedly modern form: a Duchamp preoccupied with a series of conceptual experiments to evolve new landscape representations. For me the most compelling examples of this are offered in chapter 3, which takes Duchamp’s “ready-mades” as its focus. Here one of my favorites, Air De Paris (50cc of Paris Air), is offered up as an example. This “souvenir” takes the form of a 15-cm-long glass teardrop-shaped ampule, with a sculpted hook, filled with Paris air. Exploring this piece, Housefield observes “a possible interpretation of Duchamp’s readymades as portable substitutions for elements within the geography of Paris, from its monuments to its oxygen” (p. 87). Through such a lens, the ragbag collection of everyday objects that constitutes the material culture of Duchamp’s ready-mades might be recast as cardinal directions in the geography of Duchamp’s Paris, in the intersections of its celestial and territorial territories and in the recasting of its material and symbolic landscapes. Although Housefield does not discuss them as geographies as such, scale and mobility, integral parts of the geographical imagination, underpin the analytics of chapter 4. Here the body of Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Selavy, specifically her head, offers a site at which to explore the shifting scales and practices of Duchamp’s terrestrial and cosmological landscape practices; from the microscopic cartographies of the Large Glass with its dusty constellations, to Duchamp shaving the form of a comet on his/Rrose’s head during the summer of 1921. This astral haircut, an early piece of performance art, rendered on Duchamp’s body the mysterious astronomic visitor that preoccupied the world that summer. It is the theme of bodies and embodied experience that is the focus of the geographies of chapter 5. Here Housefield conducts an eloquent investigation of the immersive experience and experiential environments that Duchamp was creating during the 1930s. In the midst of his rich discussions of the production and consumption of these works, Housefield’s most engaging contribution comes in the interweaving of the forms of the art works with modern science as it is expressed in fashion and literature as well as in the politics and cultures of display of

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everything from the latest astronomy to the mechanics of electricity generation. Tracking the “geography” indicated in the title through the book’s various chapters should indicate the breadth of the scholarship on show here. It should also reveal the rich possibilities that Duchamp’s work along with other examples of modern art might offer to geographers willing to look carefully. Here geography is wonderfully plural, a mixture of references, practices, materials, and ideas, that stem both from the “discipline” and its teachings, but also from those broader, more “worldly” interpretations of geography and the geographical imaginary. This is a compelling vision of geography, and one that reinforces the possibilities of the intensification of interest in the geohumanities in recent years—witness the launch of a new journal, among other things. The iterations of geography and art offered in Housefield’s book are invigorating, and indeed offer a model for those interested in the possibilities of such scholarship. The book clearly exemplifies, not least in its scholarly focus on one artist, an art historical approach that is seldom found within geography (Cosgrove and Daniels being notable exceptions). Furthermore, the text models a range of ways we might think of the iterations of geography and art as going beyond the obvious intersections—of landscape, environment, urban space, or site specificity. Indeed, what Housefield’s book teaches us, among all the fascinating material on Duchamp, is the breadth of inspiration that geography, as a generalized practice and as a disciplinary framework, has offered artists. Yet even among the richness Housefield gives us, I am left wondering if there was one dimension to the discussions of geography and art that the book did less to explore than it perhaps might have done. For one of the notable features of geographical scholarship on art has been that it is not just concerned with the geographies found

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within the “frame” of art works (i.e., those geographies that were their influence and that they produce), but also the geographies of their production and consumption. In other words, what did Duchamp’s ready-mades do to the geographies of the production and consumption of art work? How did his selection of objects from everyday life rework the geographies of creative practices, and what about the ways those immersive experiences reconfigured the geographies of the consumption of art? These are all geographic questions, yet questions that were largely unengaged in the book. It might have been interesting, however, to reflect on these other artistic geographies that, after all, are as much a part of Duchamp’s legacy as the geographies that constitute the content of his work. These are geographies, too, that contribute much to understanding how it was that Duchamp’s experiments might evolve new landscape representations, and offer us the means by which to grasp the impacts of his engagements with modern science on the wider conditions of the production and consumption of art in the twentieth century. Alongside a fascinating account of Duchamp’s geographies, Housefield has created a rich example of a geohumanities text, a text that offers much to, in this case, art history and geography alike. There is much geographers can learn from this work, not least, in its offering of a series of more subtle and careful ways of thinking about how they might seek geographical themes and practices within art. This is no small disciplinary contribution in the midst of the artistic and creative turns that have moved geography in recent years. References Cosgrove, D. 1984. Social formation and symbolic landscape. London, UK: Croom Helm. Reclus, E. 1898. A great globe. Geographical Journal 12 (4):401–06.



The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow

B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013. xx and 256 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, biblography, index. $24.95 paper (ISBN 9780520286009), $45.00 cloth (ISBN 9780520268555), $24.95 electronic (ISBN 9780520954809). Reviewed by Mark A. Blumler, Departments of Geography and Biological Sciences, SUNYBinghamton, Binghamton, NY. This authoritative yet accessible overview of the accumulating paleo evidence concerning climate variability in the Western United States, especially over the past millennium or so, was published as California was undergoing a historic drought, so The West Without Water was timely, and continues to be. The dramatic series of storms that broke the drought during the 2016–2017 season provide an example of precisely the sort of rapid climate swings to which the paleo record attests, and that the authors predicted were likely to reoccur in the near future. The book was intended to serve as a warning that if the past is any guide, both megadroughts and megafloods far greater than any experienced in recent times are likely to be part of our near future. It also was an opportunity for Ingram and Malamud-Roam to describe and explain the results of their and others’ research into the paleoclimate of the U.S. West, as a means of informing the public and policymakers to hopefully influence water management in a sustainable direction.

The book is organized into three parts, the first describing the Western climate system and patterns of variability during the period of instrumental record, including dramatic recounting of the most severe historical droughts and floods. Part II, the meat of the book, presents the scientific evidence concerning climate and climate variability over the long term. Part III attempts to place this evidence into the modern context. The authors problematize the notion of “normal” climate. One of the takehome messages from the book is that next year, and subsequently, we might continue to see abundant rainfall, or a return to severe drought. Either can be considered normal. In a sense, a year of average (mean) conditions is not particularly normal, although neither is it completely atypical. Moreover, the paleorecord indicates that both droughts and floods have been far more severe and long-lasting in the past than anything experienced since the Spanish arrived in 1769. Because weather and climate have been unusually benign and predictable in the West over these past two-and-one-half centuries, a return to more extreme droughts and floods seems more likely than a continuation of recent tendencies. This is so even without considering that global warming might further add to the unpredictability of the Western weather and climate system. Ingram, in particular, is well connected within the paleoclimate community, so the authors are able to describe not only their own research and findings, but also the scientific evidence gathered by others clearly and well. The book is written primarily for the intelligent layman and


those likely to engage with Western water policy, so scientific evidence is presented in jargon-free terms. Organizationally, too, the book is solid, with clear segues from one chapter to the next. Despite this consideration for the nonspecialist reader, paleoclimatologists are likely to find the book a useful reference because it summarizes the findings of a diverse set of studies in one place. Although the coverage includes the entire West, the primary focus is California. I particularly enjoyed the section on the 1861–1862 flood, when the entire Central Valley turned into a lake, and the state government was forced to evacuate Sacramento and relocate to San Francisco for many months. In my experience, most Californians know nothing of this great flood, which, along with the subsequent severe, two-year drought, killed enormous numbers of cattle and transformed the livestock industry. In explaining the flood, Ingram and Malamud-Roam discuss “atmospheric rivers,” streams of moisture within the atmosphere that, if locked into a particular pattern, can bring one storm after another to (in this case) California and the West. This atmospheric river concept (sometimes called the Pineapple Express) began to appear in the media this past year, as a partial explanation for the drenching California received. I have one small quibble: The authors state (p. 3) that thousands of people died as a result of the flood, which certainly seems possible, but one cannot discern how this estimate was arrived at or how solidly it is attested. If correct, the 1861–1862 flood was as fatal as the Johnstown flood, and more so than any of the Mississippi floods. As the preceding example illustrates, footnotes are omitted, and the bibliography is presented as a list of references for each chapter. Given the intended audience, on the whole this is appropriate. It works well in Part II, because the individual researchers are named and described, and their methods as well as their findings are clearly presented. In Part III, though, as the authors attempt to move from science to policy, some assertions need better sourcing, especially considering how emotional and polarized environmental policy debates have become. At times, Ingram and Malamud-Roam give a standard environmentalist interpretation when there also exist legitimate alternative perspectives. In discussing the decline of the Pacific Coast salmon fishery, they stress the importance of dams, deemphasizing the other important factors: habitat destruction, hatcheries, and overharvesting. Global warming might also be a significant factor, because salmon move north when the ocean warms (Alaska’s salmon fishery on the whole is in good shape), and south when it cools. In describing the “water footprint of beef” (p. 214),

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the authors include a quote from Reisner’s (1993) Cadillac Desert to the effect that we should raise bison rather than cattle, because bison are more tolerant of unirrigated pasture. Although this might be so regarding modern cattle breeds, Spanish cattle thrived in California, successfully persisting through the long annual summer dry season, and also recovering rapidly when the rains returned after severe droughts. Given that bison were absent west of Utah and that Reisner is no livestock expert, the assertion seems dubious at best. One of the implications that flows from this book, although it might be only implicit, is that science is not about certainty, or “facts.” Rather it is about uncertainty, probability, contingency, and error bars. Over time, scientists in all fields of study have shifted from perceiving the universe as fixed, created, in equilibrium or balance, and factual, to recognizing that it is dynamic, probabilistic, and that there is no balance of nature, and that any equilibrium that might exist is likely to be temporary and contextual. Ingram and Malamud-Roam are true scientists for whom science is both about attempting to understand, yet also about sense of wonder, because even as we believe we do understand more, we discover so much more about which we remain in the dark. The public, in contrast, still perceives science as about facts, and this misunderstanding repeatedly penetrates science from without. An example from my own field of vegetation dynamics is the term disturbance, which inherently carries with it the implication that undisturbed conditions are normal, when in reality they are practically if not entirely nonexistent, and always have been. So even within science, and more so when attempts are made to transfer science to the policy sphere, equilibrium biases persist. At a policy and planning level, the tendency, therefore, is to manage as if systems are or should be in balance, as if there is a normal condition that usually pertains (in the absence of human impacts). Weather statistics such as annual rainfall are given in terms of the mean, but in reality a majority of years will be below the mean, because deviation below the mean cannot exceed 100 percent, whereas in wet years it can and sometimes is greater than this. In 2016–2017, many Sierra stations received more than 200 percent of mean rainfall. This tendency is more pronounced in drier and more variable regions. This equilibrium bias is prominent in modeling, too, in part because equilibrium-based modeling is relatively straightforward and gives greater apparent predictability. A good example is the “100-year flood,” which is


calculated based on very limited data—often far fewer than 100 years (100 years is not nearly enough if there is significant long-term variability in the system, as Ingram and Malamud-Roam have documented for the Western United States). Moreover, in the regression the highest level floods are considered as “outliers.” Thus the whole process misconstrues the flood regime as less variable, less prone to catastrophic floods, than it probably is. Similarly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming give confidence intervals (without calling them that) based on variation between the models, ignoring that the models all share certain assumptions, which inherently increases the uncertainty above what the IPCC claims. In this regard, Ingram and Malamud-Roam are somewhat disingenuous in stressing the Global Circulation Model (GCM) predictions that greenhouse warming will bring with it both greater droughts and greater floods. Although I agree that this seems likely, a recently published analysis found that “for most of the [conterminous United States], drought frequency appears to have decreased during the 1901 through 2014 period” (McCabe, Wolock, and Austin 2017, p. 1014). Of course, this

might be a meaningless random occurrence, or perhaps not. Regardless, it illustrates the uncertainty that is inherent in the scientific enterprise. To return to California and the West, the highly constructed and managed water system has on the one hand produced an incredible flourishing of agriculture and supported the growth of huge populations, but on the other hand is extremely vulnerable, as Ingram and MalamudRoam demonstrate, to climate swings of the magnitude that have occurred in the past. How do we plan for such circumstances? At the very least, as The West Without Water so comprehensively elucidates, we need to be aware that the future is likely to bring massive weather surprises. References McCabe, G. J., D. M. Wolock, and S. H. Austin. 2017. Variability of runoff-based drought conditions in coterminous United States. International Journal of Climatology 37:1014–21. Reisner, M. 1993. Cadillac desert: The American West and its disappearing water. New York, NY: Penguin.

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A Taste for Provence Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. x and 283 pp., maps, photos, notes, index. $30.00 cloth (ISBN 9780226322841), $18.00 e-book (ISBN 9780226322988). Reviewed by Susan Kocher, University of California Cooperative Extension—Central Sierra, South Lake Tahoe, CA.

In this book, American cultural historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz carefully documents the rise of Provence as a tourist destination in the AngloAmerican mind. Her goal is to explicate how we all came to view this region of France as a prime destination for exploring the good life, and especially, good food. The book is of interest to anyone who is a fan of Provence; Francophiles; serious to casual foodies; and observers of cultural trends in tourism, art, and style. A familiarity with the region and its places helps to enhance the reading, but is not necessary. In this careful and well-researched telling, Horowitz proves herself an able tour guide for the American understanding of Provence. She traces the development of the region from a backwater area with few tourist amenities known primarily for its Roman ruins, to its current status as premiere travel destination and cultural force. Along the way she presents the words and impressions of early English-speaking travelers. She shows how art lovers, photographers, and film makers developed, over time, a romance for the region. She provides interesting commentary on the history of portrayals of Provence by travel writers and tourism magazines, as well as how those visitors find a bed, a meal, a home for a short stay, or a second home to buy.

Horowitz devotes a significant portion of the book to telling the story of how Provençal cuisine was made accessible to Americans. Although French food was always highly regarded by the elites, according to Horowitz, a major barrier to comfort with the food of Provence was avoidance of garlic “as a key marker of middle class propriety from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1960s” (p. 102). She explains how this and other barriers were overcome as American food culture expanded and Provençal cuisine was interpreted and promoted by chefs like Alice Waters, food and cookbook writers like Julia Child, and purveyors of kitchen implements like WilliamsSonoma. She gives concrete examples of how the viewer changes the cultural object by showing how a Provençal dish, boeuf en daubière, was made more simple or more complicated according to cooking fashion of the time by tracing its recipe through iterations of cookbooks spanning more than 100 years. Her research on the Bandol to Berkeley connection in development of “the new American cuisine” shows the profound (and beneficial) influence that Provence has had on Americans’ evolving food tastes. Horowitz frames her subject as the cultural history of how Americans view Provence. The strength of this approach is that it allows for an exploration of the “touristic gaze” cast on the region by Americans, who have most recently seen it as a desirable counterpoint to a harried, disconnected, and overly industrial and food-processed American culture. She explains how Provence is marketed to English speakers as timeless—sunbaked, unhurried, peaceful, and with a regional and seasonal cuisine in harmony with the land. Of course, no region, no matter how picturesque, is unchanging.


I found Horowitz’s narrative to be its strongest when it meshed together this touristic gaze and described actual changes in conditions in Provence. Her narrative on Laurence Wylie, an American professor of French who made three extended visits to the Provençal village of Roussillon in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, is particularly illuminating. Horowitz uses Wylie’s writing to trace the evolution of a poor and downtrodden village still recovering from World War II in the 1950s to a ritzy upscale village catering to French city dwellers and foreigners with second homes by the 1970s. France does tourism really well. Horowitz’s exploration of how French government policies to expand tourism to stimulate recovery and rural development after World War II was also very helpful in understanding how France became the most visited country in the world. My only small discomfort with the book is the near absence of the broader forces of globalization from the narrative. Although the author does include some background on economic development in southern France and the role of immigration, you can read the text to imply that the primary factor leading to stronger identification between Anglophones and Provence is cultural—breakthroughs by cultural ambassadors from each side have led to our rapprochement. Yet this ignores broader economic forces at play since World War II. The year of publication of this book, 2016, saw strong reactions against globalization in both the U.S. presidential election and the British vote for Brexit. In Provence, support for the anti-immigrant National Front party was stronger than ever. Horowitz’s narrative would benefit from some inclusion of the broader framework in which all this cross-cultural gazing is occurring. In truth, cultural and structural approaches to history are two lenses that are hard to integrate in one work without vastly expanding the narrative. So perhaps I am actually wishing that the book was longer. I read this book less than a year after I returned from my sabbatical leave of eight months in Provence. I plead a small case of exceptionalism here. I actually didn’t want to go to Provence. I wanted to go to Grenoble, in the Isere instead, where I was born of American parents who were there working for a multinational corporation in the 1960s. I pictured looking up old family friends, rediscovering the places we used to go, experiencing the sights and sounds, and tasting the flavors that would help me relive my childhood. Why not Provence? In truth I was

afraid I would find it clogged up by an inescapable knot of ex-pats who had, in fact, come to see it as the ultimate vacation spot (yes, of course, Horowitz’s narrative includes a chapter on Peter Mayles’s books about Provence). An invitation from a hosting institution in Aix-en-Provence was persuasive, so that is, in fact, where I spent most of 2016. Of course I loved Provence! The landscape, people, and foodways are as charming as advertised. I did not find the area to be overwhelmed with ex-pats, despite the ongoing promotion by travel and literary authors like Mayles. Yet, France and Provence struck me as more seamlessly integrated into Europe and the world than ever. I had to work hard to keep French people speaking French to me, instead of English. Then there was that party I went to in Aix hosted by a French technology worker who had spent time in the United States. I was the one who brought the authentic cheeses from the local specialty cheese shop to the potluck. My cheeses sat uneaten while the young French crowd ate the Dominos pizza and Pringles they had brought. I humbly suggest that a great next book project could be on the American cultural influences on Provence. The book also redirected my “tourist gaze” to California where I live and the influence of Provence that can be seen here at home. In addition to similarities of landscape and climate, with Horowitz’s help, I can now more easily trace our shared culture. I read this book in summer 2017 during a few days’ stay at a resort in Napa County where garden fresh food was served on tables covered with Provencal tablecloths. We drank it with rosé wine. Wild poppies were growing along the roadsides that led to neighboring wineries. Landscaping between stucco cottages included rows and rows of lavender interspersed with tall, thin ornamental cypress. There was even a pétanque pitch for entertainment. Vive la France! I appreciate the author for illuminating without deconstructing our American taste for Provence. The book can function as either an apéritif (before) or a digestif (after) a trip to the region. For the homebound, it makes an excellent main course of French and American cultural history. I have added many of the original sources that Horowitz describes to my reading list and Netflix queue. If I save a bit of money, maybe I will go on down and eat at Chez Panisse in Berkeley again soon. In the meantime, it’s off to the farmer’s market to buy a locally made goat cheese to eat with my homemade salad niçoise. Bon appétit!

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Ecuador’s Environmental Revolutions: Ecoimperialists, Ecodependents, and Ecoresisters

Tammy L. Lewis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. viii and 282 pp., maps, diagrams, illustrations, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 paper (ISBN 9780262528771), $65.00 cloth (ISBN 9780262034296), $21.00 electronic (ISBN 9780262333375). Reviewed by Sarah A. Radcliffe, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. Ecuador is an extraordinarily biodiverse and culturally diverse country with a huge range of ecosystems for its size distributed across the country’s four main regions of the Pacific coastal plains, the Andean mountains and intermontane valleys, the eastern region comprising Ecuador’s Amazonian area, and the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific. Ecuador’s colonial and then republic history, however, has given rise to a political economy and political decision-making structure that have sought to extract value from the subsoil and land, at the cost of sustainability. Ecuador’s petroleum reserves began to be exploited from the early 1970s and provided unprecedented resources for socioeconomic development. The postcolonial economy of export production—of oil, and the agro-industrial production of bananas, coffee, flowers, and seafood—has reflected Ecuador’s skewed engagement with the global economy and the orientation of elite decision makers. In this context, does sustainable development stand a chance and what would it look like? In her well-written book, Tammy L. Lewis addresses this question by examining the environmental movement and its relationship with successive governments and publics. Tracing the environmental

movement from the 1970s through to 2015, Lewis pays particular attention to the ways in which relations of influence, power, and resourcing work out from—and then back into—Ecuador to shape what environmentalism means and what it achieves. Lewis’s concern is to explore the scope for shifting public opinion, governmental policy, and transnational opportunity structures toward sustainability. Although she recognizes the complexities of government change, she also highlights two unique features of Ecuador that might lead it to become a world leader: Its biodiversity makes it a visible and attractive arena for transnational environmentalist action, and its 2008 constitution made world history by recognizing the discrete and specific rights of nature to protection. Lewis brings a sociologist’s attention to the three core sets of actors who among them seek to influence the country’s “treadmill of production” away from or toward sustainability. These actors include the state, citizens (where she distinguishes between nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] and social movement actors [SMAs]), and transnational advocacy networks of environmental organizations. Drawing on environmental sociology, Lewis examines the strength, ideologies, and resources of each actor by analyzing key documents, interviewing actors at various points between the mid-1990s and 2013, surveying environmental NGOs, participating in meetings, and visiting key sites across the country. In her framework and approach, Lewis thus adopts a different analysis to those found in geography (and cognate work in anthropology) that uses political ecology, postcolonial critiques, Marxism, and poststructuralism to explore the situated dynamics around environments (viewed as socionatures),


diverse civil society actors, and diverse forms of governance. Whereas the latter reveals the open-ended and meaning-laden cross-cutting discourses, exclusions, and forms of neoliberal “environmentality,” Lewis’s goal is to be systematic and draw global conclusions around the cross-over outcomes among social movements, the sociology of development, and environmental sociology. In this she succeeds, demonstrating the changing presence of overseas conservationists and the uneven histories of state commitments, and of civil society action. Discerning key underlying dynamics across four decades, Lewis offers a chronology to highlight the key features of transnational environmentalism–state–citizen interaction to discern the following processes: the role of transnational funding on Ecuador’s environmental movement, how the movement changed over time, and the consequences for the state’s developmental and environmental trajectory (p. 195). As with geographers’ work around neoliberalism, Lewis documents the ways in which state attitudes to and solutions for environmental issues varied with neoliberalism, and the “post-neoliberal” government in power since 2006. From the origins of Ecuadorian environmentalism in the late 1970s through to the 2008 constitution with nature rights, Lewis focuses on the extent to which national environmental movements rely on transnational funding (the “ecodependents” of the title), or seek autonomy from the state and external funding (“ecoresisters,” whose presence really began to be felt from the turn of the twenty-first century). In summary, she traces the emergence of ecoresisters and ecodependents back to the 1970s and finds that their respective relation with transnational funding varies with neoliberalism’s boom and bust (1987–2006). Given Ecuador’s constitutional commitment to nature’s rights, the post-2006 period will perhaps garner the greatest attention from geographers. In the momentum of social movement mobilization from the late 1990s, environmental organizations increasingly coordinated to systematize and coordinate a response to rapidly growing mining and extraction economy (which was occurring across Latin America). The National Environmental Assembly’s declaration in 2005 represented a socially informed and anticolonial environmentalism that occupied the discursive and organizational space vacated by the withdrawal of large transnational actors, the crisis of the state, and neoliberal decentralization (pp. 152–155). During this period, too, Ecuador sustained multifaceted organized resistance by indigenous peoples, diverse women’s movements, and diverse action against accumulation by dispossession. After 2006 and the election of President Rafael Correa, civil society environmentalism both con-

tributed to constitutional change and continued to protest against rampant extractivism. As Lewis shows, environmental action focuses on the state rather than private corporations. Much current literature on Ecuador cites this central paradox of a path-breaking environmental constitution and rampant extractivism and infrastructure projects, citing ideological, political economic, and modern-developmental pressures. Lewis sidesteps this to examine how NGOs and SMAs reorient their action in light of increasing state centralization, sovereignty claims, and restrictions on civil society action. She discusses flagship policies including the shelved Yasuní-ITT initiative, the Socio Bosque forest protection program, and public support for social redistribution and infrastructure development. In this sense, Lewis’s attention is focused on the broad picture, reflecting a reliance on English-language literature and minimal engagement with the vibrant and diverse field of Latin American political ecology. Ecuadorian work shows how the environment is not a discrete area of concern, but reflects multifaceted interconnections between concerns about social-biological reproduction, livelihoods in contexts of discrimination and informal impoverishment, and disputes over territory and sovereignty. Research work undertaken by Ecuadorian critical, decolonial, and political ecological scholars into these issues reveals how environmental dilemmas are indissolubly entangled with questions about state territorialization, exclusionary hierarchies of knowledge, and humanity. Lewis’s language of trade-offs, policies, and win–win–win ecological synergies makes core lessons about Ecuador’s trajectory accessible to global policymakers, yet loses the context-dependent negotiations over meanings and practices that explain why Ecuador is at the same time world-leading and mired in sharp, seemingly intractable disputes. Overall, Lewis’s book offers a useful introduction to the complex scenario of political, social, and environmental change that has shaken Ecuador over the past four decades. The book’s clear text, explanatory diagrams, numerous photos, and tables summarizing the findings in almost every chapter make it an ideal resource for undergraduate students and interested publics. (That said, the minute size of footnote numbers in the text was an unfortunate exception to what is otherwise a well-produced book.) The case study material is coherently presented and the connections to global debates are well drawn. Its theoretical and epistemological starting points, however, do not engage with geographers’ vibrant and rich discussions around political ecology, socionatures, and governance (more likely to be found in journals).

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Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics

Jessica Dempsey. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2016. xv and 296 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 paper (ISBN 978-1118-64060-9), $94.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1-118-64055-5), $27.99 electronic (ISBN 978-1-11864053-1).

interviewing the very actors who have tried to attach pricing mechanisms to biodiversity. She follows her subjects closely, to meetings, conventions, and ECONOMICS, MARKETS, AND FINANCE other spaces where they discuss and try IN GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY POLITICS to implement various biodiversity conJESSICA ventions, financial instruments, and DEMPSEY insurance pools. She finds that despite the tremendous efforts of these actors, many with the “best of intentions,” bioReviewed by Julie Guthman, diversity is not so easily brought into Division of Social Science, the market. Indeed, as Dempsey shows, University of California, Santa creating markets to facilitate biodiverCruz, Santa Cruz, CA. sity conservation is much more difficult than creating markets in carbon emissions. In carbon trading, actors at least agree on a fungible unit of analyFor nearly two decades, geographers sis. The materiality of biodiversity is have been prodigiously researching not so easily singularized, especially and writing about programs and projects to neoliberalize nature. Such endeavors aim to attach when its magic is realized in situ. How, then, can data be the commodity form to things and processes not made gathered systematically and uniformly? Without uniform by humans so they can be sold and bought in markets. data, how does one measure a unit of biodiversity, a key Relying on the market rather than the state, proponents prerequisite for making it recognizable, comparable, and say, can efficiently capture the costs of replenishing natu- ultimately fungible? So, Dempsey concludes, enterprising ral resources so they are utilized sustainably. Critics from nature is more aspirational than achieved; it is “like a jageography and elsewhere have argued that these are lopy puttering along with flat tires and occasional backweakly shrouded attempts to open up new sites of capital fires, albeit with a professional crew working furiously to accumulation. McAfee (1999) pithily and now famously reassemble it” (p. 233). remarked that such efforts amount to selling nature to save it. Enterprising Nature is chock full of such insights about the setbacks and paradoxes of making nature economic. Whereas many have reported on social movement efforts Like others, Dempsey points to a central contradiction of to thwart these efforts, few have addressed the intrac- neoliberal nature: Projects to make nature fungible detability of nature to be made into financial instruments pend on all sorts of conventions, rules, and regulations. (cf. Robertson 2006). Enter Jessica Dempsey and her re- They take a tremendous amount of governance, and thus markable book, Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, are anything but a “freeing up” to allow the market to and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics. Enterprising take its putatively natural course. At the same time, she Nature reports on research that involved observing and takes the conversation about neoliberal nature in a some-

ENTERPRISING NATURE


what different direction than those who have focused on commodification and privatization of nature. For market-oriented biodiversity, the conversation is not about enclosure for sale; it is about ensuring that future plans for capitalist profiteering are not foiled by an absence of biodiversity or ecosystem services. Most of the efforts to make biodiversity economic, therefore, do not create new commodities out of nature per se, but attempt to create the conditions under which biodiversity will not be wasted. Drawing on logics of ecological economics, they might try to internalize the costs of biodiversity loss into market transactions, or they might develop instruments that insure against biodiversity loss. The intangibility of biodiversity loss, however, makes practical mechanisms elusive. For example, an assessment tool that was designed to help companies identify risks and dependencies on ecosystems did not even model biodiversity, nor did it provide any clarity about what individual firms might do with the information it provides. It is of little wonder that few such instruments have taken off. Dempsey also sheds light on contradictions that arise from the anthropocentrism of biodiversity discourses. She observes that promoters of biodiversity conservation assume that the public is disinterested in biodiversity, unless it can be made to count. The recent casting of biodiversity conservation in terms of ecosystem services reflects that assumption: Biodiversity must now be conserved because it produces conditions valuable to humans, be they clean water, waste recycling, pollinators, or recreational opportunities. As she shows in her discussion of ecological models such as the passenger hypothesis, which suggests that not all species are critical to ecosystem functioning, anthropocentric logic can all too easily slip into instrumental logic. In these kinds of models, certain species are key indicators, whereas others are redundant. That certain species count more than others shows that even biodiversity conservation can involve biopolitical sorting, reminiscent of the insights of Biermann and Mansfield (2014) on efforts to conserve the American chestnut tree. Yet in the case of biodiversity conservation, the irony of a triage approach looms particularly large: The very anthropocentric rationale of biodiversity conservation is to preserve the potential for as yet unknown uses and values. So how can ecologists justifiably decide what species ought to live while others are let to die? Of course such instrumental logic gives complete lie to the notion of saving biodiversity for its intrinsic value. What is perhaps one of the greatest insights of the book stems from the observation that biodiversity discourse takes scarcity as a primary problematic: the idea is that

what she calls “a diverse assemblages of non-humans” (p. 29) is diminishing. So, as Dempsey explains, one of the reasons that ecological discourses have proven to be so compatible with neoclassical economic discourses is that notions of scarcity underpin them both. The typical economic question is how to optimize under conditions of scarcity just as the typical ecological question is how to live within ecological limits. Ecological economics is thus a happy marriage of both fields, and, as already noted, calls for internalizing the costs of scarce resources in economic decision making as a means to ensure they are not wasted and are potentially even replenished. Because scarcity is at the heart of what Dempsey finds to be a fraught project, by way of antithesis, she calls for an ontology of abundance. I found this last point to be an intriguing provocation, although not an entirely satisfying escape from the dilemmas Dempsey lays out. The problem is that abundant life has also become a nature subject to enterprising, as Cooper (2008) so aptly showed. Indeed, in the growing bioeconomy, the value of living things, be they algae, bacteria, or cell lines, lies precisely in their abundance—their inherent ability to reproduce in the service of accumulation. In this economy, biodiversity exists not as a limit but as a source of endless possibility—in environmental remediation, medicine, food production, and much else. Yet, the bioeconomy is also hubristic, and the question might be whether this life can continue to be accessed if biodiversity is not conserved in situ. Dempsey says as much in her short discussion of the bioeconomy in which she suggests that the risks of biodiversity loss both animate and concern those who seek to capitalize on the potentialities of living things. Of course much depends on what she means by abundance, but I simply wish to note that abundance lends itself to enterprising, too. I am also struck that an ontology of abundance elides the problem of excess. Arguably, many of the world’s species exist in excess (more than abundance), the redundant ones to which Dempsey alludes. There are excess species that humans do not care for—mosquitoes, bed bugs, and many agricultural pests come to mind—although some undoubtedly have important ecological roles to play, as annoying as they are to human populations. More significant to my point might be those species that are in excess as a direct result of efforts to produce natures of great use to humans such as food, medicine, shelter, pets, and much else. Some excess species are simply overproduced (e.g., dairy cows), and some become excessive as externalities, as it were, of overproduction (e.g., virulent pathogens). Either way, not only are many excess species

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put to their death simply because of their excessiveness, some all too painfully in the case of would-be pets; their production is often the cause of diminished biodiversity. To be sure, the (over) production of some species, often in simplified environments, has rendered others, or the landscapes they inhabit, more scarce, just as efforts to rectify scarcity have created monstrous species in the sense that they (over) reproduce. What I am suggesting, in other words, is a dialectic of excess and scarcity that is at the heart of enterprising nature. This dialectic is reminiscent of O’Connor’s (1988) first and second contradictions of capitalism, and it somehow seems relevant that just as neoclassical economics takes scarcity as its core problem, Marxian economics takes excess as its core problem. Both have their points. Abundance might then be the sweet spot that resolves this contradiction, but it might be no less aspirational than biodiversity conservation itself.

References Biermann, C., and B. Mansfield. 2014. Biodiversity, purity, and death: Conservation biology as biopolitics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2):257–73. Cooper, M. 2008. Life as surplus: Biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. McAfee, K. 1999. Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and green developmentalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17 (2):133–54. O’Connor, J. 1988. Capitalism, nature, socialism: A theoretical introduction. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 1 (1):11–38. Robertson, M. 2006. The nature that capital can see: Science, state, and market in the commodification of ecosystem services. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (3):367–87.

Evidently, Enterprising Nature is a highly thought-provoking book! It is also a really good one, and thanks to Dempsey’s delightfully humorous prose, a pleasure to read. I highly recommend it.

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The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment Jesse LeCavalier. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 279 pp., maps, plates, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-81669332-0), $105.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8166-9331-3). Reviewed by Julie L. Cidell, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Over the past decade, more and more scholars from urban, economic, and political geography have been paying attention to transportation. Somewhat ironically, given the tendency within transportation studies to favor passenger over freight travel as an object of study, this new critical perspective has turned most noticeably toward freight, reserving much of the engagement with human travel to the burgeoning field of mobilities. Popular attention is being brought to freight and logistics as well through podcasts such as Containers and Cargoland, both of which explore the inner workings of an opaque system that undergirds our daily lives to an extent we rarely recognize. Academic work on infrastructure more broadly, especially urban infrastructure, emphasizes the importance of these systems in shaping political relationships and daily livelihoods whether in the Global North or South. The Rule of Logistics provides a wonderful complement to that growing literature on critical logistics and critical transport geography more broadly. At the same time, it will also be of interest to scholars of digital and communication geographies, urban and rural infrastructure, and urban, economic, transport, labor, and retail geographers. This variety of interests gives an indication of the range of areas that LeCavalier touches on as he brings together

architecture and geography in a study of not just Walmart, but his concept of “logistification.” I think it is this concept that explains why the transport of goods is rapidly being recognized by scholars as equally worthy of attention as the transport of people. In fact, LeCavalier argues that logistification represents a transformation in global economic activity on the scale of industrialization, mechanization, and automation. This is a bold claim, but a convincing one given the evidence he presents. The main creative tension in the book is between concreteness and abstraction. On the one hand, there is the exceedingly material nature of moving goods from place to place, as well as the local characteristics of the places where those goods are temporarily housed, the bodies of workers who move them around, and the steady velocities that have to be maintained to keep the system functioning. On the other hand, there is the increasing abstraction of objects themselves into bits of information, along with the resulting patterns that are only legible to machines and not humans (with the bar code being the earliest example). Together, concreteness and abstraction merge in the concept of logistification, which LeCavalier denotes as a new era of production characterized by the need to be constantly aware of where objects are in time and space, the goal of reducing friction, and a forward-looking orientation to anticipate problems. He argues that logistification is producing a new kind of built environment, which forms the main subject of the book. Despite the “architecture” in the title, geographers will find that this is not merely a study of buildings, but broader connections and spaces. The logistified built environment is broken down into various categories that serve as the chapter titles: logistics, buildings, locations, bodies, and


territory. The logistics chapter will not be innovative to anyone familiar with existing histories of containerization and warehousing (e.g., Levinson 2006; Cowen 2014), but for those approaching the book from an urban or digital geographies perspective, it serves as a good introduction to the processes at work. “Buildings and Locations” brings together interesting histories of Walmart’s operations with broader ideas about space and scale. The gradual, step-by-step growth of the company from a single location in northwest Arkansas to a global retailer is explained in terms of physical connections to distribution centers and Sam Walton’s love of flying, among other things. The section on workers focuses on the role of humans within the system and how at this point in time, human labor is still necessary, even if it is subordinate to the mechanized, computerized system. I was expecting to read more about the labor conditions of the pickers, but the author chose to remain more on the abstract than the concrete side in this regard. Throughout these sections, LeCavalier moves back and forth between specific schematic diagrams, broad spatial processes, and company operations, weaving together visual and textural evidence while telling an interesting story. That said, it was the section on territory that I found the least persuasive. The Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area is an unusual kind of “city,” a rare case where a global company is headquartered in a small enough town that the entire city-region orbits around it. This includes the business parks where suppliers locate their expatriates to negotiate directly with the heart of the organization, the art museum meant to draw tourists and establish the Walton family as philanthropists, and the data and distribution centers that keep the whole system running. At the same time that “world cities” dominate urbanization discourses, here is one of the largest companies in the world firmly rooted in a noncity, or at least a nontraditional city. LeCavalier makes a good case for this being a new kind of city, not quite suburban sprawl but nevertheless lacking an authentic urban core. I am not convinced, however, that this city type is likely to occur in many other places, which sits oddly among the broader argument on logistification and its effects on transportation, communications, and retail. Bentonville is likely to remain a unique kind of place, unlikely to serve as either a deliberate role model or an accidental template. That does not mean it is not worth studying, but it is not clear how it might be more broadly of interest to urban theorists. At the same time, a broader critique that could be offered of the book is that it focuses on a single retailer, so how can it claim to establish a new economic order? Yes, Ben-

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tonville is an unusual metropolitan area and an exception to the rule of global headquarters concentrating in world cities, but it’s just one case. The scale at which Walmart operates, though, is so vast that it is worth studying in and of itself (and as LeCavalier mentions, Walmart describes itself as a logistics operation, not a retailer). Furthermore, many of the innovations that Walmart has developed over the years, whether in communications or real estate or logistics, have been taken up by enough other organizations that they have truly reshaped global landscapes. This is where digital geographies come in, for LeCavalier also argues that satellite communications and data centers are as fundamental a part of Walmart as their big box stores and hardline negotiations with suppliers. The history of the bar code and self-service supermarkets comes in here, where attaching scannable information to products meant that customers could select their own items off the shelves. This obviously reduced labor costs under the cover of increasing consumer choice—but it also set in motion the abstraction of goods from material objects in stores to data points along a global network. Perhaps the self-service checkouts now present at most major U.S. grocery stores were not yet in place as LeCavalier was writing, but they certainly carry this idea one step farther (as does Amazon’s attempt to develop grocery stores that do away with checkouts entirely). The book concludes by hinting at the broader consequences of logistification, specifically enabling so many consumers to get what they want almost instantly or without leaving home, a play on words of the “fulfillment” of the title. LeCavalier argues that because logistics comes out of the military, it is bound to its current goals of efficiency and control above all else. At the same time, because infrastructure more broadly serves the function of shaping lives in ways we rarely see, the potential exists for a more just or equitable infrastructure, one focused on “fulfillment” of a different kind than consumption. How to get to that kind of infrastructure remains an open question, but if as simple a technology as the container could reshape the global economic system in a matter of a few decades—in concert with high-tech communications and good old-fashioned land development—who’s to say that another kind of infrastructure might not be possible? References Cowen, D. 2014. The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Levinson, M. 2006. The box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.



Playful Mapping in the Digital Age The Playful Mapping Collective. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Institute of Network Culture, 2016. 156 pp., maps, photos, screenshots, diagrams, tables, bibliography. Creative Commons License: Digital edition available at http://networkcultures.org/ blog/publication/playful-mappingin-the-digital-age/ (ISBN 978-9492302-13-7).

Play is important. Play is a key part of the everyday cultural coproduction of geographical knowledges and practices across all age groups. Play involving digital media opens new possibilities, not only in cartographic visualization and education, but in what mapping is and what we do with it. The importance of Playful Mapping in the Digital Age is twofold: First, it engages and evaluates these playful mapping processes in serious, unprecedented, and productive ways. Second, although the book is composed of conventionally edited chapters, those authors, all part of the Playful Mapping Collective, collaborate to make the volume as a whole an inspiring demonstration of what a collective can accomplish.

practice in which participants experience a combination of pleasure and ludic involvement during the process of mapping” (p. 17). This approach and the cases that the chapters engage illustrate how play is inherent not only to map use and practice, but to the foundational creative and design proTHE PLAYFUL cesses of making maps, and the role of MAPPING COLLECTIVE mapping practices in society. It is not that play is somehow opposed to serious mapping, but a “ludic” approach allows the imagination and realization of “an alternative conceptual framework for understanding mapping” (p. 16). Sensitivity to the playful, ludic aspects of all mapping opens previously overlooked possibilities in mapping and broader geographical social relations. The pieces in this book highlight the playful, hybridized mapping in many contexts, including critical thinking geographic education, tourist geographies, everyday life, mobile phones, motorist wayfinding, three-dimensional navigation, digitally hybridized sports, policing, and the cartographic imaginations of video games. The collective is also in the process of launching the Playfields App, a Situationist dérive-inspired smartphone game meant to stimulate critical thinking about geography and practice (Playful Mapping Collective 2017). The booklet and Web site for the Playfields App also includes the related “A Manifesto for Playful Methods” that takes these ideas from scholarly description to actual practice.

Across all the chapters, Playful Mapping thoroughly demonstrates how play is culturally important in that it can facilitate reflection and therein thoughtful, imaginative geographical engagement. This opens new, creative possibilities and mapping flows. The authors conceptualize play as situated and affective, “activities that give participants pleasure, but are not necessarily unserious or lighthearted” (p. 16), and playful mapping as “any mapping

In developing these ideas, the Playful Mapping Collective builds on nascent work in map studies and cartographic practice that combines critical cartography’s sensitivity to power and situated social relations with playful, ludic mapping. Previous works with playful elements emphasize mapping as situated practice (Kitchin and Dodge 2007) explore the Dionysian aspects of Google Earth (Kingsbury and Jones 2009), explore maps as art (Mogel and Bhagat

Reviewed by Craig M. Dalton, Department of Global Studies and Geography, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY.

PLAYFUL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

A SERIES OF READERS PUBLISHED BY THE INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES ISSUE NO.:

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2007; Clemans and Harmon 2010), and reinvent the atlas as everyday (Wood 2013). At the same time, mapping practice frequently uses elements of play, albeit with minimal reflection on the ludic aspects of the process. This is apparent in multiple settings including a wide variety of mapping collectives and research groups such as the Counter Cartographies Collective and Floating Sheep. I have also observed a playful productive atmosphere at cartographic design sessions and conferences, such as the meetings of the North American Cartographic Information Society, Open Street Map events, hackathons, and in the pedagogical design and practices of world-renowned university cartographic design programs. Playful Mapping is the first work to take the topics of mapping and play on directly, across multiple contexts and media, and successfully connect those ideas with actual practices and reports and reflections on those practices. It breaks new ground by self-consciously addressing play in combined mapping theory and practice, and carefully reflecting on the ludic aspects of the results. Beyond the content, the format and methods at work in Playful Mapping demonstrate a useful template for collective scholarly work of value to other research collectives and affinity groups. Given the focus of the book on play, frequently collaborative, collective authorship and reflection on it is perfectly in keeping with its themes. Although each chapter lists particular authors, authorship of the book as whole is listed only as “The Playful Mapping Collective” unless the reader digs into the front matter. Even there, the individual authors’ names are in small print, listed in reverse alphabetical order just above the publisher information. As they correctly note, this is a “necessary and radical” (p. 4) move in the attribution-obsessed world of scholarly publication. That choice is reaffirmed by the book’s Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives copyleft license and that the book is intentionally made available free of charge on the Internet. Most of the chapters have multiple authors from within the Playful Mapping Collective, setting up shifting sets of collaborations, the same voices in different duos and trios, all coming together as a chorus across the book as a whole. Furthermore, the authors describe and reflect on how the book was produced in the preface. As someone who has participated in and struggled with many collaborative research initiatives and writing projects, and as a founding member of another research collective, to me this book’s reflections on how to do collective work are incredibly valuable. It might be the most relevant and useful preface I have ever read. Significant pointers include relay-writing

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versus book[writing] sprints, and the importance of faceto-face meetings for the complex, subtle analyses that this sort of work requires. The authors also describe how universities are poor settings for writing, whereas other circumstances, especially getaways with other authors, can be very productive. Play is not only helpful in understanding mapping, but it helps facilitate scholarly creativity. In addition to the book’s overarching themes and the reflections of the preface, several chapters also offer particularly salient points about mapping and play. The most significant of these examines the role of geographic play in developing “critical and reflexive” thinking. This is most clear in a chapter about students in a summer program on the island of Gozo. Building from the Situationist dérive (drifting) method for engaging urban space, the authors split students into groups with self-selected themes and assigned them a broad set of objectives. The students themselves were prompted to develop their own methods, geographical destinations, and forms of encoding information by which to reach those objectives. Doing so, especially in the context of a summer program in the Mediterranean, required ludic creativity. The outcomes of the program focused more on the development of the methods than the results per se. The process of defining or redefining the objectives, developing creative ways to reach them, and learning from failure were quite effective in prompting critical thinking about geography. A second point that appears in several chapters is the hybridization of digital geographic practices that emphasize the combination body and digital media in action. There have been many attempts to problematize this binary, and few are as successful as Playful Mapping in demonstrating the situated, hybrid nature of current geographies. They are apparent throughout the book; the development of cartographic interfaces in video games over time, the connection between golfing video games and particular courses, the usage of playful locationbased services such as Waze, vertical wayfinding in Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider, and games used in police training all serve as powerful examples. The playful, imaginative connections that each of these cases require from its participants clearly demonstrate the confluence of hybrid practices in that respective situation. With the recent explosion in virtual and augmented realities, understanding the role of these processes will only become more important. In these chapters and throughout the book, Playful Mapping does an excellent job of theorizing and demonstrating ideas of ludic engagement in connection with geo-


graphic experiences and mapping practices. In building from those cases, however, the book could do more. Opening and exploring new possibilities is, as the authors note, inherently political, although the book does not always follow through on that count. For example, what are the political aspects and consequences of Waze and its cartoonish, playful interface for the associated neoliberalization of transportation? Or similar for video game wayfinding? Or golf? Such consequences are vitally important in assessing if the possibilities being explored through mapping play are realities and worlds we actually want to inhabit. Political and cultural cases such as white supremacists’ and the alt-right’s use of trolling and irony as cover, as well as the aggressive, misogynistic gender politics of “gamergate” point to a dark side of ludic possibilities. Playful Mapping ends with an opening. It has no formal conclusion, but instead leaves the field open to further exploration and scholarship. In a time of individualizing geographic technologies and persistently dark, negative current events and public confidence in science and media, highlighting the ludic aspects of knowledge produc-

tion, much less mapping, is a radical, hopeful act. Doing so with a reflexive eye and attention to the process and labor involved only makes it more so. References Clemans, G., and K. Harmon. 2010. The map as art: Contemporary artists explore cartography. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Kingsbury, P., and J. P. Jones. 2009. Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian adventures of Google Earth. Geoforum 40 (4):502–13. Kitchin, R., and M. Dodge. 2007. Rethinking maps. Progress in Human Geography 31 (3):331–44. Mogel, L., and A. Bhagat, eds. 2007. An atlas of radical cartography. Los Angeles, CA: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press. Playful Mapping Collective. 2017. Playfields: A proof of concept about playful research. Manifesto, website, and smartphone application. Warwick, UK: The University of Warwick. https://www.playfields.org/ (last accessed 25 July 2017). Wood, D. 2013. Everything sings: Maps for a narrative atlas. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Siglio.

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Cartographier l’Asie Mineure: L’orientalisme allemand à l’épreuve du terrain (1835–1895) Ségolène Débarre. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2016. xvii and 406 pp., illustrations, maps, glossary, index, bibliography. €78 paper (ISBN 978-90-4293185-5). Reviewed by Felix de Montety, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. Ségolène Débarre’s monograph is a welcome addition to recent attempts to reassess German orientalism as a set of geographical practices within crossed Imperial perspectives. Controversially left by Said (1978) out of the scope of his seminal study of British and French political uses of scholarship and art in the Middle East, German orientalism encompasses a wide array of discourses on various parts of Asia. It can be described as a rich and varied national tradition of scholarship focused on a vast, loosely defined Orient, spatialized as a place of both alterity and identity. Over the last two decades, new approaches have redefined orientalism as a set of practices, imaginaries, and strategies beyond the sole scope of Western imperialism and colonialism (e.g., Marchand 2009; Cannadine 2011). Recent works by other scholars have allowed a full revision of Said’s assertion by analyzing in detail the multifaceted German tradition of orientalism. In this well-designed revised dissertation, Ségolène Débarre, a researcher at the Centre for Balkanic, Ottoman and Turkic studies (CETOBAC) of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, focuses on German attempts at mapping Asia Minor in the nineteenth century, an undertaking at the center of the power–knowledge nexus so crucial to Said.

Building on the recent spatial turn (or the “return of space”) in German history and in the wake of recent developments in the European history of modern German geography, Débarre’s study contributes to the internationalization of the historical and epistemological project constructed since World War II by historians of German geography, from Hanno Beck to Ute Wardenga. Going even beyond the range of an expected and much-needed overview of the transfers of geographical methods from Germany to the Ottoman Empire, Débarre’s book shows how some of the characteristics of the German geographical canon in the nineteenth century, notably in cartography, were built on the negotiated experience of the field in the Ottoman Empire. As a result of Débarre’s practice-based approach, it is no surprise to see that field work constitutes the core of her study, prompting one central question: How could local knowledge be used within the realm of the European science of space? The issue at stake in the book’s appraisal of German cartography in Asia Minor is summarized: “To which extent did this cartographical undertaking contribute both to the transformation of Prussia’s point of view on the Ottoman Empire, land of Islam and Christianism, and to the Ottoman Empire’s view of its own territory?” (p. 16). The author offers a threefold answer to this crucial question: The book begins with a detailed narrative and explanation of Prussian field work and surveying in Anatolia, goes on with an analysis of German cartographical works in and on Anatolia as a political project, and concludes with a chapter analyzing cartography as an imperial tool shared by the Ottoman and Prussian empires at the service of their interests.


Before displaying the results of her examination of military and civil German cartographical projects in Anatolia, the author questions the way the specificities of the Ottoman Empire could have blurred the too evident symbolical fault lines between the imperial European powers and the oriental polities under their influence. She follows the Latourian approach to imperial cartography advanced by Raj (2007) in his work on Indo-British cartography to ask, “To which extent were Kiepert’s maps an example of co-construction of geographical knowledge?” (p. 13). This brings to mind Withers’s (2013) observations on the work of James Rennell in India and Afghanistan around the same time. The author’s answer is developed in six chapters that examine not only Kiepert’s maps but also the universal geographical project of Carl Ritter as well as military cartographic campaigns and some key elements of context in nineteenth-century Imperial history and the history of geography. The first chapter highlights the background of Helmuth von Moltke’s campaigns undertaken between 1835 and 1839 and shows how they mirrored Ottoman strategic needs before describing their cartographic results themselves. The first was initiated in 1835 but actually started in 1836. Moltke and his aides first mapped the Bosphorus, Constantinople, and, from March 1838 to the next summer, the eastern margins of the Ottoman Empire. This mission in Kurdistan corresponded with the Ottoman state’s strategic goals, namely to reassert governmental authority in remote areas where dissent was regular and to repel Egyptian troops looming in the south. It was not a matter of scientific research but of technical military expertise. This time again, geography “served, firstly to make war,” as French geographer Yves Lacoste (1976) famously declared. Moltke’s work consisted mainly in providing Hafız Pacha, commander of the Ottoman army in the Taurus, with sketches of itineraries (Wegcroquis). His military knowledge was not put to use in June 1839 during the battle of Nisibe against the Egyptian army, because Hafız Pacha refused to follow the Prussian officers’ advice and eventually led his troops to a disaster. Despite losing many of his sketches during the retreat, Moltke came home with maps that explained the development and the issue of the battle and described the territories in which the conflict had unfolded. Crucially, he remained in touch with Carl Ritter (1779–1859), who, as director of the Royal Cartographical Institute, tasked his pupil Heinrich Kiepert (1818–1899) with gathering maps produced by the Prussian mission and publishing them with a detailed memoir. The second chapter shows how, following this early work, Heinrich Kiepert was invited to join the mission to Ana-

tolia prepared by classicist August Schönborn (1801– 1857) and naturalist Friedrich Löw (1807–1878), backed by many leading academic and political figures and funded by Friedrich-Wilhelm IV. As Débarre notes, very few German scientific missions were organized during the first half of the nineteenth century and the one on which the young Kiepert had embarked in 1841 carried many hopes that were largely to be thwarted. Kiepert’s original role was to compensate for the lack of precise topographical maps of Asia Minor by using his skills learned with Ritter in combining earlier maps with sketches from the Moltke mission and his own observations. The group split in autumn 1841, though, and Kiepert took to surveying the Aegean coast by himself while his companions explored Lycia in search of archaeological riches. The third chapter departs from the narration of field work missions to delve further into the cartographical methods and publishing strategies at stake in the mapping of Asia Minor. It contextualizes the role played by classical philology in the training of all savants involved in human sciences (Geistwissenschaften) and shows how the new historical approaches developed by classicists emphasized the importance of spatializing ancient texts. In this regard, there was indeed a “geographical turn within classical philology” argues Débarre (p. 102). This evolution was instrumental in the development of Ritter’s geography, which was also strongly influenced by Pestalozzi (1724–1793) and his pedagogical methods promoting visual learning. The alliance of graphic semiology and rigorous philological examination of geographical names was therefore at the centre of the cartographical project designed by Ritter and pursued by Kiepert during his century-spanning career. To reach such an ideal of excellence, Kiepert calculated astronomical positions to build a reliable “skeleton of the map” (“Das Gerippe der Karte”) before filling the blanks with less solid data from—preferably military—itineraries. He then developed various graphic strategies to deal with abundance or lack of data without inventing. In chapter 4, the author focuses on the geographical work on Asia Minor constructed by Carl Ritter, which, Débarre acknowledges, “means to tackle a monument of geography” (p. 139), but a “neglected monument” (p. 140). Whereas the figure and scientific legacy of Alexander von Humboldt has been justifiably scrutinized in great detail in journal articles, impressive monographs, and even one recent best-selling novel (Kehlmann 2006) as well as its notoriously unfortunate feature film adaptation, the paucity of publications on Ritter’s immense oeuvre invites more attention to specific aspects of his

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geographical work, notably his Erdkunde. The relevance of this chapter within the book’s general argument about cartographical field work is made visible only in the last two chapters, as the author connects the only partly overlapping projects of military surveying, scientific field work, academic geography, and travel literature to the question of the mediated experience of the other. This part of the book carries out a very important— unfortunately too short—examination of key processes at the center of geographical field work, namely translingual communication and access to sources in local languages. Similarly, it must be noted that too few pages are devoted in the last part of this fourth chapter to the skills involved in surveying, sketching, and data collection. Although the book’s breadth and erudition makes it a very convincing and necessary account of German geography of Asia Minor in the nineteenth century, its very perceptive introductory passages on field work would have made particularly welcome a more substantial analysis of the knowledge-making practices at stake. Although Prussian imperialism in the nineteenth century has often been overshadowed by histories of British and French colonialism or been considered negligible, having preceded Germany’s colonial experiences in Africa, China, and the Pacific, its rooting in identity quests, political endeavors, industrial and scientific projects is yet to be studied, along with their connections with other European imperialisms. In the last chapter, the author shows convincingly that a plurality of imperialisms was actually involved in the encounter between Prussian cartography and Asia Minor, from the German economic penetration developed along the trail of the Baghdad-to-

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Berlin railroad to the Ottoman rulers’ projected usage of cartography to control the Empire’s territories and populations. Despite Heinrich Kiepert’s complaint that Ottoman cartography was too dependent on Western works and did not manage to create original productions in this field, the Prussian-Ottoman cartographical legacy was the result of a “symmetry of objectives” (p. 319). Far from being sole projections of Western knowledge and imperial interests to the East, the oriental cartographies of Moltke, Kiepert, and Ritter were complex and contested tools of power, emancipation, or scientific progress. Their history now masterfully reconstructed by Ségolène Débarre makes them appear as the largely imperfect artefacts resulting from decades of frictions between imperial ideals and geographical realities. References Cannadine, D. 2001. Ornamentalism: How the British saw their empire. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kehlmann, D. 2006. Measuring the world. New York, NY: Pantheon. Lacoste, Y. 1976. La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre [Geography serves, first and foremost, to make war]. Paris, France: Maspero. Marchand, S. 2009. German orientalism in the age of empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Raj, K. 2007. Relocating modern science: Circulation and the constitution of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon. Withers, C. 2013. On Enlightenment’s margins: Geography, imperialism and mapping in Central Asia, c.1798– c.1838. Journal of Historical Geography, 39 (1):3–18.



Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS Charles B. Travis. Redlands, CA: Esri Press, 2015. xiii and 136 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, illustrations, sources, index. $52.99 paper (ISBN 978-158948368-2), $39.99 electronic (ISBN 978-158948-398-9). Reviewed by David J. Nemeth, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH. Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS seems a most unusual academic publication. It is remarkably innovative; an interdisciplinary hybrid rarely encountered these days when academic presses still narrowly target their prospective readerships into sequestered categories denoting traditional named colleges, disciplines, and subject matters: pharmacy, paleontology, peccaries, and so on. The publication is bold and experimental, yet appears at a time when university research libraries are notoriously shedding dusty, old books at a rapid rate. Meanwhile academic presses once tasked with producing new books are fading and folding right and left. As a book reviewer reporting my findings during these turbulent times, it is impossible to predict this particular book’s success (however much I find it worthy of a high recommendation). I do wish it wide popularity in an unpredictable and volatile marketplace. Should it flop with its targeted academic audience, it will not be because its contents are boring, predictable, or poorly articulated. In view of this book’s title and the reputation of its publisher, I can understand why some prospective buyers within academia might infer that a hard science bias will infuse their reading experience. I can allay such speculation. This is not a technical book in logic programming or about computers; far from it.

The erudite, urbane, and witty author of Abstract Machine is Charles B. Travis. His father was a physician when, as a lad, he himself began to tackle premed studies at the University of Toledo. Occasional undergraduate course work in the liberal arts began to capture his curiosity, however, and ultimately diverted him toward graduating in 1987 with his BA in psychology. Although professional psychology yet remained an attractive career path, he nevertheless continued to gravitate toward the wide spectrum of course work offered within the University of Toledo Arts and Sciences College. Significantly, although born in New Hampshire and raised in the U.S. Midwest, Travis had inherited profound personal and academic passions for Ireland that he aggressively exploited while in graduate school at Toledo. He delved deeply into its authored literary landscapes, including those written by Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, and James Joyce. Ultimately, Travis earned his MA degree in 1999 at Toledo in the Geography and Planning Department. His thesis title was “Borderlands: A Poetic Hermeneutic on the Cultural Morphology of the Northern Irish Landscape.” Given his academic focus and momentum, it is hardly a surprise that Travis chose to journey “across the pond” to earn his PhD in historical-cultural geography in 2006 at Trinity College, Dublin. His dissertation title was “Lifeworlds: Literary Geographies in 1930s Ireland” (Travis 2006). He immediately accepted a postdoctoral research fellowship, during which time he prepared and published Literary Landscapes of Ireland (Travis 2009). At Trinity, Travis not only graduated proficiently trained in geographic information science (GIScience), but gained ample experience teaching it in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. His Trinity College doctoral and postdoctoral


learning experience thus not only required him to master the skills, technologies, and applications of mainstream GIScience, but also enabled and encouraged his rewarding experiments with its innovative applications across the humanities disciplines. Travis is now Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. It is clear to me from reading his Abstract Machine that Travis has efficiently mined his entire academic experience, reaching back to his undergraduate studies as a psychology major, to shape a satisfying career. While earning his advanced degrees he enriched and fortified his intellectual foundations by adding geographical and historical theories, methods, techniques, and technologies and thereby systematically forged the unique academic identity that he now reveals through the prism of his present humanities geographic information systems (GIS) activities and described in this book. In sum, notwithstanding his advanced GIScience training and experience, Travis is by self-design no rational-instrumentalist at heart. Travis claims to have experienced an epiphany during his early acquisition and applications of his GIScience skills: “Initially, the minimalist alliteration of point, polyline, and polygon-layer digital-mapping techniques employed in the abstract machine of a GIS did not captivate me” (p. xi). Yet he undertook on occasion several remunerative assignments teaching universitylevel GIScience classes both in Ireland and in the United States. His ultimate career goal, however, was to carve out career satisfaction in academia by discovering an employer that would encourage and reward his hard-earned erudition and demonstrated commitment to preserving and improving humanities disciplines; principally literature, history, and culture. This book also reveals that Travis is a talented musician, which is a further reminder that even though his technophilia is more than skin deep, its tendrils do not reach into his heart. Travis and his book thus remind me a lot of Pirsig (1974) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both Travis and Pirsig give voice in the humanities to the muse of their machines. Travis grew up experimenting with Fender Stratocasters and synthesizers. He identifies these as revolutionary machines designed by engineers and mathematicians—and not by musicians (p. xii). They are examples of compositional “abstract machines” capable of creating unique “sonic textures” to produce “distinct soundscapes.” The authors of these sonic landscapes are the inventive, pioneering musicians of blues, jazz, country music, and rock

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and roll who Travis has long admired. He claims that their creativity inspired “my own playful engagements and thoughts of employing GIS as a technology” (p. xii). Travis’s book demonstrates in unique ways (chapters 3–7) how (in his own words), “I follow a similarly idiosyncratic approach to historical, cultural, and literary GIS scholarship, in which I consult Esri tutorial manuals and then ‘critically play’ with the software’s digital suite of tools while keeping the tropes of the humanities firmly in mind” (italics added, p. xii). Travis speaks of the tropes of the humanities here without elaborating on the obvious; that “the machine in the garden” is both a traditional literary trope and nowadays an Internet meme. The machine in the garden, as both trope and meme, is a powerful critique of modern life. Readers of Abstract Machine will have to comprehend in their own minds how Travis can proselytize for a humanities GIS while yet claiming to respect tropes and striving to preserve the humanities disciplines. Is the advent of Travis’s humanities GIS an epistemological train wreck in the making (between the interpretive arts and the explanatory sciences)? Or is his book a credible harbinger of a progressive yet postmodern public higher education curriculum shaping up on the near horizon? Some humanities academics will no doubt misinterpret or mistrust Travis’s good intentions and the zeal with which he articulates them throughout his book. The most cynical among them might perceive Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS as totally out of place in their “garden” and that this machine’s mere presence—much less its active agency therein over time—threatens to deliberately desensitize and dehumanize humanities academics, and thereby erode the heart and soul of humanities colleges, departments, and disciplines in public higher education. Is Travis’s humanities GIS a siege machine—perhaps a Trojan horse sent by GIScience and STEMM ideologues and advocates—and Esri—to invade the humanities garden and to trim back the hopes, aspirations, and operating budgets of humanities academics? Is GIS humanities a war machine of creative destruction and close kin to the lawn mower? Is Charles B. Travis a fox in a chicken house? I posted these concerns to Travis, who reassured me in a personal e-mail correspondence (10 June 2017): I am actually working on a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics + arts and humanities) project right now [and] feel my work on Abstract Machine anticipated this—the book is STEAMPUNK in its ethos.


Travis’s method of organization in Abstract Machine is disarmingly straightforward and simple. In the preface, Travis presents his working definition of an “abstract machine” and introduces in the first two chapters of Part 1 some of the key thinkers who have inspired his humanities GIS project. Many of these are Continental philosophers, and most are familiar to faculty and graduate students engaged in critical thinking and literary critiques familiar to humanities and some social science academics; for example, Bakhtin and team Deleuze/Guattari. Chapter 1 expands the list to other postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers, including Lefebvre and Olson. Although all stand tall in the humanities pantheon of heroes, many GIScientists will not have learned of their contributions to knowledge, much less recognize their names. Travis, of course, knows them well and wants the prospective recruits for his humanities GIS to respect and validate his authority when proselytizing humanities academics on their own turf. Travis does not want them to perceive him as a threat; as a stranger come to town. Travis’s efforts to build credibility among his potential readers through page 22 of Abstract Machine is but a brief prelude to his launching into five chapters of experimental humanities GIS case studies. These demonstrations of his own humanities GIS endeavors comprise Part 1, chapter 3, and chapters 4 through 8 in Part 2. Taken as one, they are his visualization’s portfolio and instructional manual. Travis’s case studies are selective and appropriate to the task of seducing humanities academics, chapter after chapter, across a wide swath of their disciplines: Chapter 3 focuses on Travis’s mapping of conquest in seventeenthcentury Ireland, and he intends it to instruct and delight historians. Chapter 4 maps literary life experiences of the Irish poet Kavanagh. Chapter 5 maps into a single visualization (mashup) selected literary historical-geographies authored by Homer, Dante, and Joyce. Chapter 6 maps Travis’s interpretive psychogeography of Flann O’Brien, along with those of some of the characters O’Brien introduces in one of his most surreal book-length narratives. In chapter 7 Travis applies his GIS humanities abstract machine to geovisualizing lifeworld paths possibly experienced by the playwright Beckett. The concluding chapter 8 dangles the baited hook of the promise of Travis’s humanities GIS before humanities academics. Should they choose to adopt and adapt it into their respective disciplines, he assures them that their individual unique experimentations would always be their own “creative play” and that a humanities GIS would always privilege and empower their arts of storytelling. Travis is not inventing this truth claim. “We’re all storytellers now,” assures Allen Carroll (2014), a Program

Manager for ArcGIS community outreach in a recent issue of Esri’s ArcUser Newsletter. Until very recently Esri had focused almost exclusively on the publication of GIScience-related education and training manuals, atlases and map books, case studies and data models for industry, and similar technology and reference books. It is only within the past few years that Esri has published the beginnings of a “nontechnical” bookshelf, and Travis’s Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS is the third and most ambitious and aggressive purveyance in that effort, targeted primarily at humanities academics. Esri has deep pockets and seems to have invested heavily in the design and production of Abstract Machine. I predict it will win one or more national design awards from librarian organizations. It is that good! If its dimensions were larger and if available in hardback, it might well succeed as a coffee table book. All of Travis’s visual mappings are mesmerizing works of art. I would call them “fabulous” except they are not his floating fantasies. They are objects (visualizations, mashups) of a superb creative imagination aided by tools and rooted in reality. Two aspects of the book production disappoint me. The text’s typeface is too small for me to read without having to squint and strain to do so. Anything in italics is a real chore. The copyright page of Abstract Machine, which has essential information for all readers and especially reviewers, is impossible to read without my magnifying glass. I used it to search for and ferret out the title of the publication’s bedazzling fractal cover art, Steampunk Watch (by Keila Neokow). I am glad that I did because this image was a superb choice for a book with the enigmatic theme, title, and content of Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS. In addition, visualizations labeled Figures 3.11 and 3.12 in Abstract Machine suffer from poor color design and are hard to interpret. Travis thus writes of and vaunts his personal humanities GIS learning experiences and experimental discoveries (using Esri software products) with a hardly suppressed anarchic glee. He loves his abstract machine. Who could doubt it? Who knows but that his passion might well prove to be infectious to his potential readers in the humanities? He has convinced me that he is one of them, a rare bird—a griffin; a bringer of gold—bearing his humanities GIS proposition as a gift from the GISciences into the humanities disciplines. Travis as an anarchist can rejoice that he demonstrates through his art that he is a singular manifestation of his own person. The digital suite of tools he applies in his unique humanities GIS experiments and proselytizes to humanities academics (through his un-

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likely joint publication venture with Esri Press) exhibits, in this reviewer’s opinion, a fortuitous hybrid vigor. References Carroll, A. 2014. We’re all storytellers now. ArcUser Newsletter Summer. Accessed 11 June 2017. http://www.esri. com/esri-news/arcuser/summer-2014/were-all-storytell ers-now.

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Pirsig, R. M. 1974. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values. London, UK: The Bodley Head. Travis, C. B. 2006. Lifeworlds: Literary geographies in 1930s Ireland. Unpublished PhD diss. Dublin, Ireland: Trinity College Dublin. ———. 2009. Literary landscapes of Ireland: Geographies of Irish stories, 1929–1946. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen.



REVIEW ESSAY A Way Across the Mountain: Joseph Walker’s 1833 Trans-Sierran Passage and the Myth of Yosemite’s Discovery. Scott Stine. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. 317 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-87062-4322), $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-80615754-2). Whither the Waters: Mapping the Great Basin from Bernardo de Miera to John C. Fremont. John L. Kessell. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. xi and 102 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8263-5823-3). Reviewed by Thomas Frederick Howard, Department of History (Emeritus), Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, GA. Students of Sierra Nevada history usually learn that the first nonnative people to see Yosemite Valley were Joseph Walker and the other fifty-seven members of his 1833 expedition. Walker had signed on to lead an exploring party for Benjamin Bonneville’s ambitious fur trapping enterprise, and was sent to scout for beaver habitat in the territory west and southwest of Great Salt Lake as far as the California coast. Although two previous trapping parties had penetrated this region, its geography was still largely unknown. The Sierra Nevada had never been described or mapped. Yosemite Valley was known only to native inhabitants such as the Miwoks. The received tradition is that the Walker party traversed the Sierra between the Tuolumne and Merced rivers and by chance came out onto the north rim of the valley, which thereby entered into the written record for the first time. This narrative originated in some fragmentary material in Walker’s 1875 obituaries, references that were elaborated by a number of writers during the years when Yosemite was becoming nationally renowned as one of the wonders of the West. The scene of the Walker party looking down with astonishment into the vast chasm of Yosemite was recounted not only in campfire conversa-

tions, but also in scholarly works. The image of stalwart mountain men unexpectedly encountering the sublime was irresistible. The story was presented in seemingly authoritative detail by Farquhar (1965) in his History of the Sierra Nevada, which became a standard introduction to the range. Stine aims to debunk all this. He argues that the Walker party did cross the Sierra in 1833 but not via Yosemite. He criticizes the Yosemite story as shaky to begin with, one that has hardened into received fact by uncritical repetition, warping a correct understanding of the rest of the Walker route. Stine proposes a different route, based on detailed analysis of the only lengthy first-person narrative of the expedition—written not by Walker himself but by his clerk Zenas Leonard and published in 1839. Stine follows Leonard’s account day by day from Humboldt Sink in the Nevada desert, well east of the mountains, across the Sierra to the San Joaquin Valley, showing how it fails to support the Yosemite rim scenario and fits a different location much better. Stine has spent many years hiking in the Sierra and doing the field work for a University of California Berkeley geography dissertation on Mono Basin. His descriptions and reasoning are clear, supplemented by maps and photographs from the trail. This is historical geography in close detail. Stine was led to this project by doubts concerning Leonard’s ([1839] 1959) description of what has come to be taken as the moment of discovery:


Here we began to encounter in our path many small streams which would shoot out from under these high snow banks, and after running a short distance in deep chasms, which they have cut in the rocks, precipitate themselves from one lofty precipice to another, until they are exhausted in rain below. Some of these precipices appeared to us to be more than a mile high. (79)

Farquhar (1965) rested his case on the passage: “Search the whole Sierra and you can find but one spot that would inspire this description—the northern brink of Yosemite Valley” (36). Like Stine, the reader might wonder. Leonard’s grammar could be a bit shaky in places, but he was not lacking in descriptive ability. Somehow this does not seem like an unequivocal description of Yosemite Valley. Is there really no other place in this extensive and famously rugged mountain range that could have inspired his words? Stine says there is. Farquhar (1965) got in deeper a paragraph later: “Accepting the fact that Walker’s party saw Yosemite, we can make a reasonable interpretation of Leonard’s narrative of the preceding few weeks” (36). This compounds the original error with circular reasoning, in Stine’s view. To get the Walker party to Yosemite, Farquhar is obliged to bring them south from Humboldt Sink to Bridgeport Valley and move them up into the mountains from there. Stine takes the trouble to investigate how many miles a horse-mounted party could cover in a day. (The Walker party still had 200 horses as they approached the mountains.) Accounts left by other western exploration parties, plus a manual from the Cavalry School at Ft. Riley, Kansas, converge to something like twenty-four miles per day. This spells trouble for the Yosemite story. Moving the Walker party from Humboldt Sink to Bridgeport Valley would require movement of forty to fifty miles per day, if Leonard’s chronology is correct. Corollary lore has the Walker party visiting the Tuolumne Grove or Merced Grove of big trees and so being the first nonnatives to see Sequoiadendron giganteum, simply because those are the groves they would have encountered coming down from the north rim of Yosemite Valley. Give up that scenario and other big tree groves become candidates for the visit. For the uninitiated it might not be too much of a spoiler to say that Stine takes Walker not to Bridgeport Valley and Yosemite but through the upper parts of the Carson River watershed into the Mokelumne and Stanislaus river drainages. He asserts that Leonard’s supposed description of Yosemite Valley was in fact a description of the view from a promontory named Deadwood Highland between

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the Summit City Creek and Meadow Creek tributaries of the North Fork of the Mokelumne River, a place that probably has never graced the pages of a Sierra Club calendar, but does appear on the cover of Stine’s book. Stine’s minute analysis of Leonard’s description shows the ways in which it does not fit the north rim of Yosemite Valley but does fit Deadwood Highland quite well. Stine stays with Leonard’s text down into the San Joaquin Valley, via the Calaveras grove of big trees and the deeply incised valley of a river in the Sierra foothills zone that, following Leonard’s detailed description, closely fits the Stanislaus but not the Tuolumne or Merced, which would have been on the trail down from Yosemite. The accuracy of Stine’s reconstruction of the Walker route can be fully evaluated only by someone who has actually traversed these mountain landscapes. Maps and satellite images will probably not tell you that Sleeping Indian Ridge offers the first view of the Central Valley to a party working its way west from Deadwood Highland, thus making it a good match for Leonard’s “edge of the mountain.” (Stine documents the view with nighttime photos of distant city lights, from Roseville to Turlock, because Leonard’s daytime perspective is now usually obscured by the valley’s smog.) Replicability of experiments is an ideal even for the hard sciences, not always, perhaps not very often, actually carried out, and this reviewer will not hold geography to a higher standard; Stine’s reconstruction of the Walker route is well thought out, quite plausible, and in the absence of a rebuttal from the field, convincing. This might be unnerving to those of us in the teaching profession. How many legends have we perpetuated? Who has time to fact-check everything? Stine spent years in pursuit of the Walker route, and had the time to write this book only after retiring from full-time teaching at Cal State East Bay. Farquhar’s History has a generally good reputation (the Yosemite story occupying only three or four pages) and if subsequent writers, including—full disclosure—this reviewer, cite it with confidence and move on, how blameworthy are they? One unfortunate by-product of the Yosemite legend, in Stine’s view, is that it focuses on something that Walker never did, and never claimed that he did, and so diverts attention from his real achievement, which was being the first to apprehend the existence of that vast area of internal drainage between the Sierra and the Rockies that we now know as the Great Basin. The discovery has been credited to John C. Fremont, but Fremont only came


up with a catchy name. In his own official report of the 1843–1844 expedition Fremont credits Walker with the essential geographic perception. This brings up the interesting question of the role of geographic knowledge and geographic ignorance in public affairs. In that 1843–1844 expedition, Fremont led a party south from the Columbia River looking for a Buenaventura River, which was supposed to flow from the Rockies all the way to the central California coast. It’s obvious now that the Great Basin makes that river impossible; it would have to flow uphill. Did Fremont really think there was such a river, or was it a convenient excuse to gather more material for another hit book and, perhaps, get within striking distance of California (still Mexican territory)? His report on the expedition takes the form of a day-by-day journal, but it was polished up for publication after Fremont was back in Washington and was fully aware of the Great Basin, as a result of running into Walker on his return trip. His text makes allusions to internal drainage at moments during the expedition when ostensibly he was still looking for the Buenaventura. Thus Fremont’s report is not reliable on the question of what he knew and when he knew it. Leonard’s account was published five years before Fremont’s trip, and it is natural to ask whether Fremont was aware of it. Stine devotes several pages to this question and concludes that he probably was not. Leonard’s narrative first began to appear as installments in the newspapers of Clearfield, Pennsylvania, his hometown, to which he had returned as a celebrity after his adventures out west. Five years passed before it appeared as a book, also locally published. It is possible, even probable, that Leonard remained a purely local figure even after publication, but we cannot be sure. Newspapers reprinted each other’s material enthusiastically in those days before wire services, and material from out west was always popular. The fictitious Buenaventura River was more than a campfire tall tale. It had a seventy-year history in the maps and writings of a number of explorers of the U.S. West, and this is a subject of John H. Kessell’s Whither the Waters: Mapping the Great Basin from Bernardo de Miera to John C. Fremont. Kessell previously published a biography of Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, whom he describes as “Spanish colonial New Mexico’s most gifted citizen.” He has here focused on Miera’s activities as cartographer. At the advanced age of sixty-five, Miera was recruited by the Domínguez and Escalante party in 1776 to accompany their efforts to find

an overland route from Spanish settlements on the upper Rio Grande, in New Mexico, to the Spanish settlement at Monterey on the California coast. The Domínguez and Escalante party were unprepared for such a task and never got any closer to the coast than southwestern Utah before returning to Santa Fe. They did make a contribution to the geographic understanding of the interior west, though, and Miera’s resulting map long remained an authority on the region. Unfortunately that very authority became the source of a persisting error of topographical interpretation. Speculation about territory that the Domínguez and Escalante party had not actually traversed led Miera to conflate the Green River and the Sevier River into a single stream, which he called the Buenaventura. Only later did it become clear that the Green is a major tributary of the Colorado, flowing in a southerly direction east of the Wasatch Range and having no connection with the smaller Sevier, which flows from the west side of the Wasatch and makes its way in a southwesterly direction to end in the terminal Sevier Lake. Uncritical copying and eventual speculative expansion of the Miera map by a series of cartographers and writers who had never been in the region eventually extended the Buenaventura into a river flowing all the way to the Pacific. Kessell makes it clear that Miera himself did not map a river to the coast. His mistake was confined to what later became the state of Utah. He was noncommittal about what happened to the waters of Sevier Lake (which he named Laguna de Miera). He put its eastern shore on the western edge of his map, and left open the question of how much further west it extended and what possible outlet streams it might have. Alexander von Humboldt clearly drew on the Miera map in his 1810 Map of New Spain. Like Miera, though, he restrained himself. His Buenaventura too flows only as far as Sevier Lake, still a long way from the Pacific. So also did Zebulon Pike, who borrowed freely from Miera and Humboldt. A major river heading west from the Rockies to California, perhaps navigable, was too tempting to abandon, however. In addition to Sevier Lake, Lake Timpanogos (an early name for Great Salt Lake) was another possible source. Miera’s map suggests a river flowing out of it, and Humboldt follows him, although in both maps this is a tiny detail in the far upper left corner. Pike avoids the question by not extending his map quite so far north.

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A river from the Rockies to the coast was not unreasonable. If there was a single watershed boundary running along the crest of the Appalachians, with water flowing to the Atlantic Ocean on the southeast side and to the Mississippi or Great Lakes/St. Lawrence on the northwest side, it was reasonable to think that there must be an equivalent master ridgeline separating known rivers flowing east to the Mississippi—the Red, the Arkansas, the Platte—from unknown rivers flowing west to the Pacific. Furthermore, there was unfamiliarity with the concept of regions of internal drainage, or endorheic basins, as they are known and presented in every physical geography textbook today. Two hundred years ago endorheic basins were a novelty to cartographers who came from regions where all rivers did eventually run to the sea. Finally, there was wishful thinking in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. The prospect of a river route from the Rockies to the Pacific fed a geographical vision of the United States as the conduit of global commerce between Europe and Asia. This was an updated version of the old dream of a northwest passage through or around North America, a fulfillment of Columbus’s idea that you could get to the East by going west. One devotee of this theme was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, a powerful man in the U.S. Senate and John C. Fremont’s father-in-law. The most extravagant vision of rivers to the Pacific probably came from Henry Schenck Tanner, of Philadelphia. His 1822 map, reproduced by Kessell, shows no fewer than three rivers flowing west to the coast from the vicinity of Utah. Two issue from Great Salt Lake: the Los Mongos, which reaches the coast in what would be southern Oregon, the Timpanogos, which comes out at a point labeled San Francisco, although the cartography is unrecognizable, and finally the Buenaventura, reaching the coast somewhere around Big Sur. Kessell reproduces the Tanner map and tells us that it was popular and widely distributed. It is worth noting that

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in 1841 the Bidwell party, the first group of Californiabound overland emigrants, were advised to take along boat-making tools so they could float down one of the rivers to the Pacific that John Bidwell said he had seen on a map, doubtless the Tanner map. That this was all complete fantasy was probably well known in the trapper fraternity. Jedediah Smith in 1826 had found nothing to support the Tanner map, nor did Peter Skene Ogden’s travels in the late 1820s. Joe Walker and Zenas Leonard categorically eliminated the possibility of such rivers, in print, only seventeen years after the Tanner map appeared. The fact that Kessell says nothing about Walker and Leonard and goes straight to Fremont, as suggested by his title, is a surprising gap in his narrative. Fremont, as noted earlier, supplied the name, but Walker and Leonard established the fact. The compiler of such a splendid collection of maps can be forgiven this omission, however. Kessell has brought together in one volume not only Miera’s map but also others that were influenced by it. With its fiftyfive color illustrations, the book has excellent production values and will be a welcome addition to the cartographic history of the western United States. The only problem is the inevitable one that comes with reproducing maps that were meant to be hung on a wall within the limits of 9.5” × 11” pages. There are blow-ups of key portions, but the attentive reader will probably still have to resort to a magnifying glass. Both of these books belong in any serious collection dealing with the exploration history of the U.S. West. References Farquhar, F. P. 1965. History of the Sierra Nevada. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Leonard, Z. [1839] 1959. Adventures of Zenas Leonard, fur trader, ed. J. C. Ewers. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.



BOOK REVIEW FORUM

Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation Christopher Sneddon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xii and 270 pp., photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 9780226284316), $10.00 to $45.00 electronic (ISBN 9780226284453).

ing the Cold War are best understood as part of the U.S. political agenda to gain influence in strategic areas, establish resource management practices aimed at modernizing river basins for economic development, and create economic opportunities for U.S. business interests.

Commentary by Shannon O’Lear, Center for Global and International Studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.

Sneddon’s book demonstrates two particularly innovative and useful contributions to geopolitical study. First, his work exemplifies critical geopolitical analysis of material discourse, and second, it illustrates the importance of the selective production and use of knowledge.

Christopher Sneddon’s book is about large dams. More specifically, he examines how technical expertise in the construction of large dams during the Cold War was tied to ideas about river basin development as a pathway to economic and social change. More broadly, Sneddon examines how the U.S. international geopolitical agenda during the Cold War integrated certain forms of expertise, valuation of river basins, and ideas about societal development. The United States promoted the construction of large dams and ideas about water resource management as a way to extend its political influence in countries of strategic importance in the competition to outpower the Soviet Union. Large dams, he argues, cannot be fully understood as a geopolitical phenomenon when viewed individually. Through the book, he makes the case that the large dams built with U.S. support in economically developing countries dur-

Critical Geopolitics Political geographers understand geopolitics not as an objective reality, but as a way of explaining the world from a particular perspective at a particular time. Exemplary geopolitical narratives such as Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Theory or George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech promote a particular understanding of places or spatial relationships. Geopolitical narratives tend to justify some kind of response to a situation or trend. Theses narratives often promote a “view from nowhere”: obvious and universally acceptable. Geopolitical narratives tend to naturalize knowledge claims by drawing on current, scientific understanding. Alexander DeSeversky’s integration of advances in flight and jet propulsion in his geopolitical narrative about the significance of air power in the 1950s


is a good example. Applying concepts or understanding from the natural and physical sciences to social and political contexts, in an effort to naturalize knowledge, is another commonality among traditional forms of geopolitical narratives. Critical geopolitics, however, is a way to examine geopolitical narratives or discourses to understand whose interest they serve, how they are promoted and stabilized, and what kinds of outcomes they are intended to achieve. This approach has focused mostly on analyzing texts such as speeches, news media coverage, official documents, and cartoons. There is a growing interest in examining other forms of geopolitical discourse beyond texts to consider practices, identities, and materialities as modes of geopolitical discourse (Thrift 2000). If we take a critical geopolitics stance, we can look at the large dams in Sneddon’s book as examples of material discourse. They are tangible artifacts conceived and made possible through an intertwining of multiple things at a particular time. Large dams are a material product of technological capacity (e.g., dam construction, water diversion, energy generation), the valuation of certain forms of scientific expertise and environmental accounting (How do we measure and value a river basin?), and the political will of the United States as it sought to gain influence over certain countries within the larger context of the bipolar Cold War. The large dams that Sneddon examines are geopolitical discourses in that they represent an ideological move to communicate a particular understanding of spatial relationships and power. They are material representations of power in the ability to alter spatial relationships of ecosystems, relationships between people and environments, relationships of control over resource valuation and use within particular countries, and international dynamics of influence. This material network of dams also tells a story about absence. Some countries outside of this network were of less strategic importance in the bipolar struggle against the Soviet Union. They did not receive technical assistance. The United States did not support the modernization of their river basins for economic potential, so their landscapes and societies took different paths of progression or stability. The materiality of large dams that Sneddon details in his book goes beyond an analysis of speeches, policies, or even published, scientific work in resource management. In focusing on tangible, physical landscapes created by dam construction and the Bureau of Reclamation’s approach to resource management, Sneddon provides, literally, a deeper analysis of U.S. Cold War geopolitics and brings three-dimensional volume (Elden 2013) to our understanding of that particular era and technology.

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Knowledge as Constructed A second contribution that Sneddon demonstrates in his book is his approach to knowledge as something that is constructed rather than somehow preexisting and natural. This approach is one familiar to scholars of science and technology studies (STS). The interdisciplinary field STS does not consider science and technology as inevitable: “They do not provide a direct route from nature to ideas about nature; the products of science and technology are not themselves natural” (Sismondo 2008, 14). Instead, “science offers to tell us how nature is” (Yearley 2008, 921), and scientists use agreed-on practices to speak as proxies for plants, animals, and environmental systems. Knowing nature, then, has to do with ways in which scientific communities comprehend the physical world and what kinds of measures they agree to use to represent particular features. STS approaches provide a way to look at origins and consequences of science and technology with a focus on the interplay of science and technology with “places, practices, and things” (Hackett et al. 2008)—“things” such as large dams. In his examination of how a global network of dams was possible—even desirable—Sneddon considers how the selective prioritization of certain kinds of knowledge and expertise served to promote the U.S. Cold War era political and economic agendas. Technical and scientific expertise about river basin alteration, dam conversion, and economic accounting practices are not a form of objective “truth.” Instead, Sneddon shows through his case studies how the Bureau of Reclamation institutionalized technological expertise about dam construction and river basin development as it worked in target countries to promote U.S. political and economic agendas. Although each country and river basin location had unique physical characteristics, ecosystemic features, and socioeconomic dynamics, Sneddon shows how the application of technical expertise and established methods for assessing river basin potential brought these diverse landscapes into relative uniformity for ease of management. Sneddon refers to Scott’s (1998) work, Seeing Like a State, to explain the desirability of creating manageable landscapes and comparable socioeconomic contexts. This diffusion of certain forms of scientific knowledge and technical expertise aims to “make things the same” (MacKenzie 2009) to facilitate U.S. power consolidation. Sneddon demonstrates in his book how this selective knowledge, technology, and expertise resulted in the construction of dams and the alteration of entire ecosystems and local economies. He shows us how technical knowledge and technological capacity, put to service as part of a global political


agenda, led to new material realities in the form of dams and the artificial landscapes they create. In the conclusion of the book, Sneddon describes the construction of a technopolitical network of large dams: It received contributions every time a Bureau staff member recorded a flow rate, analyzed a soil sample, projected energy demand, or designed a dam, whether such an act was carried out in Chinese, Lebanese, Ethiopian, or Thai territory. It also occurred every time an official within the US State Department dictated a memorandum, offered geopolitical judgment, or made a decision about how to distribute American development assistance. (p. 150)

Here, Sneddon highlights the importance of particular kinds of knowledge, data, measures, and information in the promotion and creation of a global network of large dams, river basin development, U.S. political influence, and economic opportunity for U.S. business. Other forms of knowledge or ways of valuing environmental features were not granted the same influence. In the “Water for Peace” section at the end of the book, Sneddon steps back from the patterns he has examined to consider alternative ways of thinking about water systems. Instead of viewing water systems according to geopolitical calculations of political influence and territorial control, he looks at water systems in their capacity—potential or actual—to unify people rather than divide them. Dam removal, he argues, draws on other forms of scientific and technical knowledge in service of a different set of social and environmental values. He asks, “What if we were to take the potential relations—whether political, technical, cultural, or all of the above—between water and peace seriously?” (p. 155). This is not an abstract, feel-good question, but a plausible way to reconsider how we relate to water. Seminal research by Wolf (1998) could find only seven cases of minor conflict over transboundary water flows in the last century, whereas at least 145 treaties related to water were signed during the same time. Despite much current rhetoric about water conflict, Sneddon’s observation suggests a constructive path forward in rethinking and rebuilding material discourses about water through the development of alternative forms of knowledge.

Commentary by Kathryn Furlong, Department of Geography, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In Concrete Revolution, Christopher Sneddon seeks to make sense of the massive project of Cold War river re-

development involving “an estimated 50,000 large dams” worldwide. In particular, he provides a history of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s dam-building efforts in geopolitically strategic countries to demonstrate both the limits and the durability of the Bureau’s techno-political aspirations. The specific projects studied reveal damming, geopolitics, and development to always fall short of their stated goals, but in their apparent failures, to have other forms of durability—one being the continued obsession with damming itself. The work follows in a long line of environmental histories focused on damming and the reproduction of diverse waterscapes over the twentieth century. Sneddon’s contribution lies in bringing this literature into conversation with critical development studies and STS, examining dam building as a U.S. export to “developing” countries during the first decades of the Cold War as a basis for the dam building that followed and that continues today. He tells us that from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had “active missions” in more than fifty countries and provided technical assistance to more than 100 (p. 4). In a nearly forty-page appendix, he presents this range of activities by region and by country. Yet, the three cases of Bureau activity that he investigates in depth are all cases of delayed or aborted dam building. The Bureau is shown to conduct extensive studies, but to pour little—or at least less concrete than expected. This is often to the frustration of the governments with which they are engaged, these having their own domestic interests and regional geopolitical concerns. What emerges is the political and technical complexity of dam building in the post–World War II period. Halting dam building are technical challenges (and technical hubris), internal power struggles, and international conflicts. Reading these accounts, one would imagine that very few dams actually got built. Thus, although Concrete Revolution focuses on explaining the vast and continued proliferation of dam building, it is likewise a book that sheds light on often-yawning gap between rhetoric and reality, ambition and accomplishment. Indeed, this book helps readers to understand why against the power and interests of the United States and local elites, dams do not get built or at least not in the time or in the ways imagined. What comes out clearly is that although technical and development ideology might have led the Bureau to see itself as engaging in a single “third world,” each of the countries explored presented a distinct set of geographical, political, and economic complexities for which the Bureau was unprepared. The particular nature of dams, moreover, plays a role in the confusing and often contradictory forces

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that are awakened in the face of major redevelopments of land and waterscapes. As Mitchell (2002) showed in his study of Egypt, dams serve to concentrate power and knowledge that was once more diffuse. Sneddon, in turn, demonstrates that those affected by the projects are aware and leery of this power concentration and who will wield it. This can affect the timing, geography, and scope of proposed projects. In the case of Lebanon, for example, worries that the Israeli state would capture the economic, political, and technical power concentrated in the proposed river redevelopment were central in hampering the project. For Sneddon, although the projects never met their imagined potential, they laid the groundwork for dams as a hegemonic idea. He comes to this thinking through Ferguson (1990). For dams, like development projects in general, their real achievement might not lie in meeting their stated goals. Rather, they create assemblages that—although they might morph over time—serve to keep dams on the agenda. Here, Sneddon also has much in common with Escobar’s (1995) Encountering Development. For Escobar (1995), “[a]fter 1945, the task of governments was to make poverty useful by fixing it to the apparatus of production” (89), involving the creation of an enormous range of new “micropractices.” Here, the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was instrumental in serving to create “new practices concerning the everyday actions of an ever larger number of development technicians and institutions” through which “development is constituted and advanced” (Escobar 1995, 89). To previous studies, Sneddon also adds the sociotechnical perspective, drawing on STS and especially on the literature focused on assemblage. This is particularly helpful in getting at the complex challenges that limit dam building, and how these might yet create networks and alliances that are durable in time and across space. At the same time, however, one does feel—as is often the case with STS—that large processes do not find their full place. We hear about the Cold War but seemingly indirectly. Its influence never really feels present. This is the constant challenge facing STS scholars: how to think through proximate links and nodes in networks and assemblages while bringing wider processes to bear on them. Still, the assemblage approach sheds light on other lasting effects of dam development. Time and again, the United States paid for studies, but not dams. In Colombia, Escobar argues that the establishment of a TVA-like entity in the Valle del Cauca, “exemplifies well the interests and practices of the World Bank and other international lending organizations during the 1950s [whereby

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the] overall goal was dictated by development economics: to promote growth through certain types of investment projects, resorting to foreign financing when possible or necessary” (Escobar, 1995, 88). Thus another assemblage worth considering is that of damming, external debt, and the related debt crises that followed. Considering Hecht’s (2012) insight that countries like France were made “nuclear” and thus at the apex of development during the Cold War through the enrollment of spaces of so-called underdevelopment, a parallel can be made with the use of dam building in enhancing U.S. economic power over such spaces—increasing its own claim to development in turn. Indeed, Sneddon’s work provides us with many new answers and many new questions. Although many studies that examine international development address the importance of the TVA and touch briefly on certain flagship projects, Sneddon’s is among the few to examine its work on a broad scale. He finds that the widespread damming of the concrete revolution can be explained by the solidification of a dam-building rationale that is malleable enough to stand the test of time by incorporating new critiques and challenges such as climate change. Dams themselves play a role in stabilizing these networks and in keeping actors involved in the face of contention due to their promise of technical achievement, nationhood, and the economic opportunities involved. Hence, despite the widespread social costs, political challenges, and technical difficulties—the world is seeing a second concrete revolution, led by China and involving hundreds of new dams on virtually every continent. Stay tuned. Stay engaged.

Commentary by Majed Akhter, Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Political and historical geographers of water will find much to think about in Christopher Sneddon’s new book. Through an analysis of the foreign operations of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Asia and Africa during the Cold War, Sneddon compellingly traverses some of the most interesting theoretical terrain within water geography, and political ecology more broadly. This includes the ecological dimensions of state and nation formation, the critique of expert-led and technocentric development, and the unveiling of the geopolitical motivations and objectives of foreign aid and development. Sneddon makes valuable and empirically grounded contributions to all of these vital and long-standing areas of political ecological research. I focus my comments on the


book’s provocations regarding what Sneddon calls the “temporality” of large dams. Building a large dam, and the associated program of river basin development, is an extremely complicated operation that requires the mobilization of a diverse array of human and nonhuman components. These diverse elements for dam construction, brought together to form “assemblages of geopolitical and technological networks,” tend to outlast the purpose for which they were knit together (p. 101). Therefore, Sneddon argues, “[l]arge dams, perhaps more so than any other so-called development intervention, transform socioecological systems in ways that not only create novel geographies of development, but also produce novel temporalities of development” (p. 125). Sneddon suggests three factors to explain why networks that form around large dams are particularly resilient (p. 126). First, the preparation stages of large dam development entail the production and archiving of vast amounts of data collection, analysis, and synthesis regarding the engineering, hydrologic, ecological, social, and economic dimensions of the project. This creates a ready-made corpus of technically authoritative and alluring knowledge that planning authorities of the future could potentially pick up and run with. Second, large dams are themselves massive concrete objects that have operational lives that can be measured in human generations. The scale of the material intervention that large dams represent assures their presence in the social and physical landscape over long periods. Third, Sneddon remarks on the immense appeal and resilience of the developmental ideology around large dams. The central tenet of this ideology, still shared by many planning and technical elites around the world, is the belief that large dams are the primary tool for integrated river basin planning, which in turn is the most efficient and productive path for national development. Sneddon argues that this ideology was central to the near-hegemonic developmental common sense during the Cold War period, or roughly 1933 to 1975 (p. 3). After a quarter-century or so of flagging interest in dams, and indeed large infrastructures as tools for development more broadly, however, Sneddon argues that large dams are making a comeback in the form of another, China-led “concrete revolution.” Mirroring its export of capital, technology, and large infrastructures more broadly, the role of Chinese firms and banks in financing and constructing large dams in the Global South is significant and growing. Sneddon reports that as of mid-2012, “Chinese companies or financiers were engaged with at least 308 dam projects, nearly all for hydropower, in 70 countries located in Africa, South-

east Asia, South Asia, and Latin America” (p. 137). These investments are occurring in regions of the world that already served as the testing grounds for an earlier round of hydropower investments—regions in which technopolitical networks remain extant and potentially prone to reactivation. In the last substantive chapter of the book, Sneddon explores the temporality of large dams in the Litani, Blue Nile, and Mekong water basins—he examines how the networked remnants of the hydropolitical Cold War of the twentieth century interact with new China-led efforts at hydropower development. This chapter of the book rightly directs political ecologists and political geographers of water to consider more deeply the complex historiographical questions that arise from the multigenerational effects of large dams. This is a provocative theme. By way of conclusion, let me briefly elaborate on Sneddon’s valuable reflections and provocations on the temporality of large dams. As China becomes an ever larger player in global development, scholars of development and environment will do well to consider the methodological implications of the (Agnew 1994; O’Tuathail 1996) complex temporality of large dams, and indeed of many large-scale infrastructural interventions. For example, the role of personal and institutional memory becomes a vital area of inquiry. Although Sneddon does not dwell on intergenerational memory as one of his three sources of network hardiness, it is hard to underestimate the impact that the spectacular dam-building and basin-development schemes of the Cold War had on cadres of young developmentally minded engineers across the decolonizing Third World. A generation or two later, many of these engineers are in leadership positions in international and national development and planning agencies or in the private engineering sector. For example, in my own research into rivers and state formation in the Indus Basin of northwest South Asia (Akhter 2016), I have tried to show how massive infrastructural interventions like the British establishment of canal colonies of the late nineteenth century, or the Indus Basin Plan of the mid-twentieth century, created impressions and left traces not only on the physical geography of the basin, but also in the ideological formations and habits of generations of technocratic state personnel. Political ecologists have maintained an interest in the historical interactions of memory, professional ethos, biography, and developmental ideology in the formation of technocratic state personnel as political agents (Larner and Laurie 2010). Sneddon’s book, and especially the last chapter, develops this line of thinking by taking some initial steps in thinking through how the ongoing China-led

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hydropower boom across the Global South will intersect with the complex temporality of Cold War–era dam projects. To summarize, a fascinating aspect of the book is the discussions it provokes around historiographical methods in the geohistorical analysis of contemporary large-scale, state-led infrastructural interventions. The number of geographers working in this area will only increase in the years to come—especially in the context of thickening inter-Asian economic, political, cultural, and infrastructural connections and flows. Sneddon’s book promises to be a touchstone for these important and timely conversations.

Commentary by Benjamin Forest, Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Concrete Revolution strikes a difficult balance between the study of historical developments and contemporary social dynamics, and between theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. As such, it is a book that speaks to several scholarly concerns, and that can also challenge assumptions that subdisciplinary divisions sometimes shield. As the book notes in its penultimate chapter, the construction of large dams is an ongoing project, albeit one where the voices of critics and marginalized groups are increasingly heard, even if they are not heeded. For many scholars, this creates a strong and understandable temptation to focus on contemporary projects and current struggles. Indeed, a commitment to social justice seems to require a focus on communities that are displaced, dispossessed, and otherwise harmed by these undertakings. Similarly, our ongoing concern with global climate change, and especially limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases, makes it essential to examine both the virtues and shortcomings of hydropower. This includes, of course, both the material consequences of large dams and their reservoirs, and the rhetorical uses of hydropower in climate change debates. Yet such impulses bring the danger of presentism. A focus on current struggles too often means that scholars and critics treat the case they confront as the first instance of such a conflict, or that the means and motives for the project arise simply from contemporary political and economic forces. Among other things, Concrete Revolution’s careful historical analysis is a useful corrective to such impulses. The book documents the deep historical roots of large dam construction and the intertwining of institutional, political, and ecological structures. To use Sneddon’s preferred term, he examines the assemblages that make up large

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dams. Sneddon’s insistence that assemblages have a kind of inertia that carries relationships through time means that students of contemporary dam projects cannot—or rather should not—read the book simply as a history of what happened in the past. Rather the book lays out the structures, institutions, networks, and forces—the assemblage—that continue to shape current large dam projects. I would like to emphasize, however, that Concrete Revolution deserves an audience beyond those who study dams. In particular, scholars outside of geography and environmental studies—especially in political science—will find that the analysis effectively challenges the conventional distinction between domestic politics and international relations. Although Sneddon does not engage in this debate explicitly, his study demonstrates the imbrication of these two spheres. As geographers, we are familiar with critiques of the rigid distinction between international and intrastate politics. Indeed, political geographers have been reminding us since the mid-1990s not to mistake the political boundaries of states with political communities, or to assume that competition among states is a natural or unproblematic condition. Consequently, a conventional analysis would place the Bureau of Reclamation squarely within the realm of domestic politics. Indeed, it is an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The fundamental charge of such agencies is to improve and manage resources within the boundaries of U.S. territory. It is, of course, possible to produce fine scholarship analyzing such management agencies within a domestic context. These works, however, stay within the conventional international–domestic framework. Sneddon disrupts this distinction by documenting the role of the Bureau as an explicit player in geopolitics, and one that cultivated ties with the U.S. State Department. Indeed, simply documenting the creation by the Bureau of its overseas program in the 1940s and positioning itself as an “essential ingredient” of anti-Communist development projects provides a powerful corrective to the conventional division. Conversely, Concrete Revolution would have benefited from a closer engagement with some work in contemporary political science, particularly in the way that the book treats the assemblage of dams in relation to state interests. One of the rich histories the book documents is the effort by the Bureau of Reclamation to train engineers from across the developing world. Indeed, the title of chapter 2 is “Building a World-Wide Fraternity,” and the phrase is credited to the director of the Bureau’s For-


eign Affairs Office, George Pratt. In the early 1950s he wrote of developing a world-wide fraternity of those persons, institutions, and agencies, both governmental and nongovernmental, that are interested in the development of the world’s water resources through methods of control, conservation, and use to the end that those resources may bring a higher standard of living. (p. 47)

The book returns to this theme briefly in chapter 4, where the Bureau defends its involvement in dam development by pointing explicitly to programs for the “training of thousands of technical personnel in the United States” and points explicitly to the “‘fraternity’ of non-U.S. engineers who would benefit from American foreign policy aims” (p. 80). Broadly speaking, this cadre of engineers form part of dam assemblages, but I wonder if it would be more useful to think about the kind of international network that the Bureau created (or attempted to create) in relation to the idea of an epistemic community. In political science, this term describes “transnational groups of scientists, experts, or technocrats that came together in order to influence government policies through persuasion and activism, particularly in issue areas such as environmental politics, disarmament, and human rights” (Johnson 2016, 23). Particularly in the post–Cold War period, scholars have examined the way such epistemic communities act separately from and sometimes contrary to state and domestic interests. There is often a tension between membership in such a community and membership in a national political community. This is true for both individuals and institutions. In some cases, an epistemic community can exert enormous influence over policy within and between states, whereas in other cases, community members become isolated within their own state and lose influence. My concern is that framing of the Bureau as an instrument of U.S. Cold War geopolitics closes off an examination of the “world-wide fraternity” of dam engineers and consultants as an epistemic community. To what degree did—or could—the “world-wide fraternity” act independently of state interests? Did the engineers trained through Bureau programs actually adopt the outlook of their U.S. mentors? Did they generally work to advance the interests of their own states? Or was the story a messy combination of all these outcomes? This issue highlights a tension in the book that emerges strongly in the penultimate chapter that examines the contemporary involvement of China and other states in dam development. At some points, the book suggests that

Chinese involvement mirrors the geopolitical strategy of the United States during the Cold War, as an instrument to gain political leverage and power in the affairs of other states. (To be fair, however, Sneddon also points to the ways that such development projects are driven by many competing and sometimes conflicting interests within China.) Nonetheless, this instrumentalist interpretation sits awkwardly with the characteristics of dams and dam development as an assemblage that has its own dynamic logic and developmental inertia. None of these criticisms should diminish the substantial contribution of Concrete Revolution. Indeed, it is the kind of theoretically informed, empirically driven analysis that we should seek out for ourselves and our students.

Response by Christopher Sneddon, Departments of Geography and Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Dams are strange and complex objects, enmeshed in the joint historical trajectories of rivers and humanity. In taking on a book about the technopolitics of large dams, I knew from the outset that I was telling a story that would be partial, and that the silences and omissions would far outweigh any contributions to the emerging global histories of how specific humans in specific times and places have greatly altered our planet’s biophysical processes. Fortunately, astute readers have had no qualms about filling in these gaps, and I want to heartily thank Shannon O’Lear, Kathryn Furlong, Majed Akhter, and Benjamin Forest for their thoughtful comments on Concrete Revolution. If anything, I fear they are too generous in their praise and too merciful in their critique and dissatisfactions with the work. Benjamin Forest astutely poses questions regarding the extent to which the “world-wide fraternity” of engineering experts constituted by U.S. Bureau of Reclamation staff and their counterparts throughout the so-called developing world worked and thought independently of their foreign policy cohorts. He also asks if the Bureau’s overseas counterparts uncritically adopted the perspectives of their U.S. guides. Obviously, such questions imply a great deal more research, and as I discuss later, a great deal more archival work in places like Lebanon, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia, where Bureau experts were deeply involved. I can only offer a partial answer. In the case of the projects described in the book, the broad societal aims of the Bureau’s global “fraternity,” although certainly an epistemic community with their own perspec-

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tives on development objectives and professional ethos, frequently aligned quite well with both the explicit and implicit desires of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. In addition, the recorded words of Bureau administrators and field engineers, with rare exceptions, echoed the State Department’s grandiose claims of bettering humanity through the construction of large multipurpose dams and combatting communist incursions into the “free” world. Similarly, Bureau experts and their engineering protégés throughout Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and dozens of other locales generally perceived dams and river basin development as absolutely crucial engines of national economic growth and modernization. Still, Forest’s plea to flesh out the ideological dynamics and institutional staying power of epistemic communities dedicated to engineering is a laudable call for further scholarship. The interplay among individual psyches, developmental aspirations, and technical expertise is understated in many historical works on the geopolitics of development, and Majed Akhter points to the crucial dimension of memory, at both the individual and institutional level, as an area where the book might have spent more effort. At a methodological level, this presents significant challenges, and I attempted to use biographies—through the reflections and life stories of Bureau of Reclamation engineers—as a partial corrective to historical narratives of socioecological change where developmental interventions seem to take on a certain inevitability. Akhter’s own work on the Indus Basin reminds us as well that the ideas and practices of dam engineers and other experts of one era are constantly regenerated through the activities of new cadres, and that this transfer of knowledge is deeply temporal and spatial. Although partially covered in Concrete Revolution, many histories of the lasting impacts of this kind of transgenerational transference of “living memory” of dam and river basin development technologies remain to be written. With no small irony, a work with pretentions of adding to histories of the socioecological legacies of the Cold War somehow manages to underplay the ways the global Cold War exerted tremendous influence over the developmental interventions that characterized the political-economic landscapes of the places covered in the book. So Kathryn Furlong correctly reminds us, noting that scholars of both STS and political ecology can lose focus on the geopolitical forces that shape (and are shaped by) socioecological interventions when highlighting more specific and localized technopolitical assemblages. Indeed, Furlong’s commentary is a welcome challenge to all geog-

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raphers hoping to uncover the ways that technopolitical objects and networks are always not only local, national, or global in orientation, but often are active participants in generating their own scalar identities that transcend simple categorization. One of the risks of taking on historical research with interdisciplinary ambitions is that it is nigh impossible to treat the array of relevant concepts and ideas with complete coherence. I thus thank Shannon O’Lear for finding value in my efforts to employ key contributions from both critical geopolitics and the literature on knowledge production. She also signals what I hoped would be a central message of the book: Thinking carefully about human relations with rivers in a way that highlights the possible connections between peace and water—beyond the politically expedient Water for Peace program fostered by the U.S. government in the late 1960s—encourages a revamping of how society intervenes in river systems. This would demand decentering large dams and infrastructure from the technopolitical networks that have defined human dealings with rivers for nearly a century, and based on current trends will continue to dominate river–society relations for the next century. This might seem idealistic within the present political-economic climate, but there are enough modest signs of redefining these networks (e.g., the global antidam movement, dam removal initiatives) to be modestly hopeful. Let me conclude with some vital self-criticism of what I see as the book’s major lapses. My first set of complaints is decidedly geographical. I left enormously important swathes of the globe (e.g., Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa)—where dammed rivers have their own unique set of geopolitical and developmental trajectories—uncovered. Relatedly, my focus on the Bureau of Reclamation and its links to U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War mirrors the same kind of unequal power relations that gave rise to the spread of large hydroelectric projects throughout the tricontinental world in the first instance. Expanded and more engaging histories from the point of view of the peoples in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America—ranging from dam-affected communities to government planners—are still to be written. Second, although there is no question that the book is centrally about large dams, a more astute analysis would have given equal time to the rivers—in all their socioecological complexity—that weathered the brunt of these technopolitical assemblages and that preexisted their dramatically altered states by thousands of years. Finally, my commitment to parsing out the technopolitics of river basin development and dam construction sidesteps


the tremendously interesting location that dams occupy in the cultural imagination of different societies, and how this imagination has shifted over time. Perhaps because of their sheer materiality and size, large hydroelectric dams as cultural artifacts have performed a range of dissonant roles, from the “temples” of the modern, newly independent nation-state of India to more recent incarnations as a (pun intended) damnable technology. In Mozambique, the socially and ecologically disastrous Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River was transformed by the leaders of the nationalist independence movement from the scourge of the colonial state to a potent symbol of revolutionary modernization once they wrestled control of the government away from the Portuguese in the 1970s. Asked to reflect on the growing antidam sentiment in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century, former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall reflected on his own shifting attitude toward megaprojects, noting that during the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s, “dam building still had some magic” (quoted in Dean 1997), whereas in the United States at present removing dams is squarely on the agenda of a wide range of social actors. As the works just cited make clear, the history of large dams is replete with examples of such symbolic and ideological flexibility, and tracing these histories—which sit not outside but alongside geopolitical dynamics—is a worthwhile effort. My hope is that Concrete Revolution, at the least, has provoked and will continue to foment critical scholarship along these lines and many others. References Agnew, J. 1994. The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory. Review of International Political Economy 1 (1):53–80. Akhter, M. 2016. Desiring the data state in the Indus Basin. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42 (3):377–89. Dean, R. 1997. “Dam building still had some magic then”: Stewart Udall, the Central Arizona Project, and the evolution of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, 1963– 1968. Pacific Historical Review 66 (1):81–98. Elden, S. 2013. Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography 34:35–51.

Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, J. 1990. The anti-politics machine: “Development,” depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hackett, E. J., O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman. 2008. Introduction. In The handbook of science and technology studies. 3rd ed., ed. E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman, 1–7. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hecht, G. 2012. Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, J. 2016. Priests of prosperity: How central bankers transformed the postcommunist world. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Larner, W., and N. Laurie. 2010. Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: Globalising privatisation in telecoms and water. Geoforum 41 (2):218–26. MacKenzie, D. 2009. Making things the same: Gases, emission rights and the politics of carbon markets. Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (3):440–55. Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics and modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. O’Tuathail, G. 1996. Critical geopolitics: The politics of writing global space. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Scott, J. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sismondo, S. 2008. Science and technology studies and an engaged program. In The handbook of science and technology studies. 3rd ed., ed. E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman, 13–31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thrift, N. 2000. It’s the little things. In Geopolitical traditions: A century of geopolitical thought, ed. K. Dodds and D. Atkinson, 380–87. London, UK: Routledge. Wolf, A. 1998. Conflict and cooperation along international waterways. Water Policy 1 (2):251–65. Yearley, S. 2008. Nature and the environment in science and technology studies. In The handbook of science and technology studies. 3rd ed., ed. E. J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch, and J. Wajcman, 921–47. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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BOOK REVIEW FORUM

Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market Marc Doussard. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. vii and 276 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-8140-2), $75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-81668139-6).

Introduction by David Wilson, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. In current neoliberal plundering times, Marc Doussard’s Degraded Work is a timely foray into the complex and controversial reality of current workplace circumstances and conditions in urban America. A focus on two industries in Chicago, food retail and residential construction, shows a reality of profoundly degraded work conditions in desperate need of repair. In both industries, low wages, unhealthy work conditions, job insecurity, abysmal support for labor needs, and frequent employer violations of labor laws riddle the thousands of workers who propel these economic subsectors forward. As Doussard recounts, wages and the simplest of benefits here are far below the levels that would enable decent qualities of life to be attained. Drawing on richly textured interviews and informal discussions, Doussard excavates this reality, the concerted effort of workers to eke out livelihoods under these circumstances, and their often heroic struggles to organize and confront their oppressive conditions. At the analytic core, then, Doussard details the systematic drive of capital to re-entrepreneur-

ialize these microspaces of industrial work that are now being often adroitly contested by labor’s conflicting vision. From this work I extract two core insights that properly frame the panel discussion that follows. First, Doussard shows that this degradation is anything but natural and inevitable. This finding, of course, contradicts the assertions of conservative economists, policymakers, urban planners, and others who depict this as an inevitable outcome of a need to be hypercompetitive for profits that globalization has spawned. Revealed, instead, is a consciously built, meticulously choreographed (yet unstable) workplace where the hunger for uber profits drives a labor-punishing workplace restructuring. To Doussard, low wages and precarious work lie at the doorstep of willful human beings, not an abstract global force. Doussard here attacks something pervasive but powerfully informing, economic teleology, a seductive mode of thought that today colonizes the popular consciousness in the United States to explain away this reality as inevitable and irreversible. Second, Doussard shows us possible ways forward to reverse this current reality. Moving beyond the popular notion of simply increasing the minimum wage, Doussard deftly casts the dilemma as a multipronged degradation with wages only being one part of this. At the heart of this, Doussard suggests the need to forge a new political and institutional landscape across the United States that should build on the decades-long political project of repealing the Fordist political-economic settlement that produced better working realities for many Americans.


In the process, the call is to invent new institutions and new approaches that set their sights on one thing: forging new workplaces that improve the material, psychic, and social-political fabric of worker realities. Flexible, contingent responses, which could include the drive to create the likes of shared business ownership, co-ops, minimum wage stipulations, and Mondragon-like regulative practices, should be on the table as ideals and starting points for the political struggle. The essays in this forum provide clarity to the position that Doussard’s book is an important intervention into current labor studies. All agree that Doussard takes us down a crucial path to addressing the vexing issue of workplace social construction that can take a multiplicity of forms. Yet the journey has just begun with crucial questions still unresolved: What should the ideal workplace look like? What institutions need to be created to make this a reality? How are we to modify current institutions in this task of workplace reclaiming? How are the staunch barriers to national political action overcome? It is the task of us as critical geographers and urbanists to take Doussard’s lead to forward this political agenda. This forum begins to confront these questions, and the search for answers will undoubtedly persist. Finally, I add that the discussion on this panel in Boston that engaged this text proved provocative and stimulating, and I was glad to be part of it. That said, let the interrogation begin!

Commentary by Robert W. Lake, Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. If you are interested in the degradation of work “at the bottom of the labor market,” then this book will already be at the top of your reading list. There is a much larger audience for whom this book should be required reading, however. If you are searching for a model of research that is at once conceptually grounded, substantively rich, and politically engaged, you should read this book. If you are a faculty mentor of doctoral students looking for an example to show your students of research that is both analytically rigorous and useful in the real world, show them this book. If you scorn the possibility of finding academic writing that matters equally within and beyond academia, this book will relieve your skepticism and renew your belief. Other contributors to this review symposium will address the book’s substantive themes of degraded work and the struggles of worker centers and labor advocates in Chicago

to redress precarious conditions and organize an effective response. I have chosen to focus this review, instead, on a meta-analysis that highlights Doussard’s stance within the book with regard to four pivotal themes: his mobilization of theory, use of generalization, understanding of space, and approach to action. I focus on these themes because they form the armature on which the book is structured and because, as explicitly revealed in comments throughout the book, Doussard clearly thought carefully about his approach to these framing concepts even as he delved deeply into the empirical specificities of, inter alia, day labor, labor contracting, labor organizing, labor regulations, job shape-ups, job safety, chain stores, bigbox retail, wage theft, collective bargaining, food deserts, capital investment, and the failures of the National Labor Relations Board. Doussard’s treatment of these empirical specificities provides a rich and rewarding read, but it is in the broad conceptual framing that I believe the enduring value of this book truly lies. Doussard’s mobilization of theory to guide this work is as insightful as it is radical. His insight is that prevailing narratives of globalization and economic restructuring not only misstate but also obscure the causes of the degradation of work in the locally dependent service sector that constitutes a dominant share of contemporary urban economies. Because the growth of the service sector is less important than the degradation of work within the service economy, Doussard argues, dominant narratives of capital flight, economic restructuring, and globalization have little to say in explaining the precarity of work at the bottom of the wage distribution. Although he challenges the utility of these dominant explanations, what is radical about his approach is Doussard’s refusal to search for and deploy an alternative master narrative as an explanatory device. His solution instead is to turn from a reliance on theory to a laser-like focus on the employers and the workers on the giving and receiving ends of degraded work. The analysis is guided by unerring conceptual clarity but it is not the disembodied theory of the economics textbook or grand narratives of globalization or neoliberalism. The term neoliberalism is not in the index and appears nowhere in the book as best as I can determine. Concepts of dual cities, global cities, or splintered cities, Doussard observes, have “ascended to the status of conventional wisdom . . . that shapes the way urbanists . . . understand inequality” (p. 7), but these concepts, in the author’s view, describe but cannot explain the degradation of low-wage work that is the focus of the book. Rejecting a recourse to grand theory, Doussard looks elsewhere, to the specificities, complexities, and contingencies of the case itself. “Rather than pitching the exercise at the level

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of theory,” he says, “I start with the employment problems to be explained” (p. 20), and “in order to understand these industries, we have to understand the work itself” (p. 22). What follows is a rigorous, revealing, fine-grained account of degraded work as an economic strategy (for employers), a daily experience (for workers), and a political and organizational challenge for the labor advocates seeking to devise an effective response. This move from theory to practice can be both liberating and destabilizing for an author. It is liberating because it clears away the filter of theoretical presuppositions and allows the specificities of the case to reveal themselves on their own terms. It is unsettling, though, because abjuring theoretical presuppositions undermines the security of knowing in advance what the empirical analysis will reveal. Doussard employs the metaphor of driving without a map to describe the dilemma faced by staff at worker advocacy centers who attempt to address the particular situations of particular workers facing particular instances of degraded work. Reliance on a formulaic response would simplify the task of the advocates but would likely be inadequate when the issue to be addressed is different in each case. The same metaphor applies to the researcher who relinquishes the certainty of theoretical presuppositions for the tenuousness of what Hannah Arendt called thinking without a bannister; who adopts Bruno Latour’s maxim of following the actors; and who recognizes, with Timothy Mitchell, that the theory lies in the complexity of the case. As Doussard concludes, “theorizing these industries on their own terms will allow us to shine light on . . . the actual businesses . . . negotiating day-to-day . . . changes that remain poorly understood” (p. 17). The focus on the contingencies and complexities of the case undermines the commonplace ambition of generalization. In Doussard’s hands, however, this constitutes an analytical asset rather than a liability. The degradation of work draws from a repertoire of spatial, temporal, and material fixes and employers choose the response that best accords with the exigencies and requirements of the time, place, and circumstances in which those conditions unfold. This is a strategic choice for employers rather than a blind alignment with the unthinking determinism of structural imperatives and practices that differ from case to case. To generalize in this situation would be to lose information and “to reproduce the measurement error that results from applying global categories locally” (p. 79). Chicago, the paradigmatic exemplar of U.S. urbanism, plays a central role in Doussard’s analysis. As a particular ensemble of conditions, juxtapositions, historical trajectories, and path dependencies, the city is an actor in the

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story rather than merely the spatial setting or “black box” (p. 6) within which the story unfolds. The object of analysis is not merely the degradation of service-sector work in Chicago, but rather the degradation of work in Chicago’s service sector. “What emerges,” as a result, “is a specific, messy urbanity, not the highly stylized global city of the urban studies imagination” (p. 54). Finally, Doussard’s attention is squarely trained on the embodied practices of actors—employers, workers, labor advocates, and regulators—whose strategic choices materialize the degradation of work in specific instances. By foregrounding the performative decisions of strategic actors, Doussard expands the scope for political practice rather than ascribing outcomes to the irredeemable workings of a deterministic structure. “As ever,” Doussard observes, “the practical details matter” (p. 4), more so, it seems, than the quest for grand narratives and sweeping generalizations.

Commentary by Kimberley Kinder, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Marc Doussard’s Degraded Work shines a light on places and people often overlooked in the literature on urban political economy. The pages of scholarly journals and academic presses are awash with lively debates on global cities, creative class consumerism, and the technological enclosure of everyday life. Doussard stands in the center of these debates but turns his gaze in other directions. Instead of focusing on the dual city phenomenon of lowwage service workers providing food and entertainment for affluent globetrotters, Doussard analyzes the smallscale entrepreneurs selling cheap food to ethnic residents in low socioeconomic status neighborhoods—a practice that helps sustain the social reproduction of the lowwage labor pool. Similarly, instead of analyzing data on new luxury loft construction in downtown gentrification zones, the book highlights day laborers doing demolition work for decidedly unspecial middle-class home remodeling projects. This framing reveals not the intensification of globalism and technology, but rather the ratcheting up of manual labor in small-scale, locally oriented businesses. Far from constituting a dwindling way of life for a few marginalized people in out-of-the-way places, Degraded Work compellingly argues these cases are part of a broad reworking of the terms and conditions of labor in the post-Fordism world. Doussard chronicles the decadeslong project of state withdrawal from the labor market through repealed labor laws and budget cuts for labor law enforcement agencies. In this deregulated state, entrepre-


neurs quite logically experiment with new ways of managing employees, segmenting markets, and mitigating risks. Although these changes affect wages, the larger payoffs in Doussard’s analysis arise from the changes to nonwage expenses and work experiences associated with the labor process. For instance, the embrace of flexible scheduling in midsize grocery stores and the use of day laborers on construction sites increases employer profits and reduces customer prices. As Doussard explains, though, these gains come at the employees’ expense. As fully expendable and highly vulnerable workers, people are pressured to labor at unsafe paces without adequate health and retirement benefits, predictable work schedules, or sufficient job training and safety equipment, all of which degrade the labor experience even when the nominal hourly wage rate remains comparatively high.

ing sites despite full knowledge of employer abuses. For employees receiving the abuse, it is not just about wage rates. It is also about having enough hours at predictable enough schedules to be able to meet and manage basic needs without having to make life up from scratch everyday anew. For customers, even as people recognize their coethnics are bearing the cost of unethical or illegal labor practices, it is also coethnics who get the rewards of affordable food, small business ownership, and commodities on credit. As Degraded Work powerfully illustrates, people will put up with a lot to get those benefits. This does not mean coethnic exploitation does not need addressing, but it does underscore that, alongside wage rates, there are many aspects to consider when evaluating the benefits and mechanisms for obtaining life stability through participation in a labor market.

In eloquent and thought-provoking language, Doussard simultaneously situates this analysis within Chicago and in the context of national systemic change. Flexible hiring and scheduling in the predatory manner documented in Degraded Work is significant not only because vulnerable workers are exploited, but also because work is being restructured in ways that produce and augment the vulnerability that then enables intensified exploitation. This restructuring of the terms under which people labor affects hundreds of thousands of workers across Chicago, not to mention people working in similar sectors in other cities. Moreover, there are obvious parallels between the rise of contingent day laboring on construction sites and the rise of freelance contract labor in white-collar industries. In invoking these parallels, Degraded Work highlights the cutting edge of a broad remaking of labor practices under the vertically disintegrated, just-in-time capitalist system a large and growing group of people are increasingly laboring under in the current iteration of capitalism.

As a final note of praise, Degraded Work provides an exemplary model for how to do research well. One of the strengths of Doussard’s analysis is the deftness with which he moves back and forth between structural accounts of urban political economy and place-specific details of work and labor in Chicago’s underprivileged neighborhoods. Other scholars might have approached the subject matter exposé-style with sensationalized accounts of unsavory employers abusing workers and seeking out vulnerable people to hire precisely to facilitate those selfserving abuses. Degraded Work does not shy away from those examples, but as a scholar, Doussard does not appear satisfied with sensationalist styles of research journalism. Instead, Degraded Work presents a systematic analysis of the fundamental, structural remaking of the terms and conditions of employment in U.S. labor markets. Degraded Work combines interview data with statistical analysis grounded in a rich theoretical framework relevant to the national scale. This effective format links the particularities learned through interviews with somewhat marginalized people living in somewhat out-of-theway neighborhoods with a fundamental social change we are all living through: the remaking of the conditions under which many of us live and work. This nimble knitting together of lived experience with structural analysis will likely sustain the book’s readership and relevance for years to come.

In analyzing these trends, Doussard’s analysis demonstrates both what is gained and what is lost in this transformation. The same strategies that deny workers overtime pay and employee-funded health insurance also bring low-cost fruits and vegetables to low-income food deserts and specialty ethnic foodstuffs to multigenerational immigrant communities. The same hiring practices that injure day laborers on construction sites also reduce renovation expenses, incentivizing neighborhood revitalization and back-to-the-city investment. In drawing our attention to these conflicted outcomes, Doussard raises ethical questions about the social cost of these gains. In especially evocative passages, for instance, Degraded Work asks what it is these workers and consumers value that keeps them going back to grocery stores and day labor-

Commentary by Virginia Parks, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA. In Degraded Work we are introduced to Jaime, a day laborer in Chicago, who reflects on the contradictions of his precarious employment situation. He and another day

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laborer are hired to demolish a kitchen for a remodeling project. The other worker, Jaime explains, “starts working like a mule. He was tearing down the walls as fast as he could, really sweating. I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing? We’re only going to get paid for five or six hours this way!’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but if we finish the work fast, the contractor will hire us again’” (p. 192). Jaime and his coworker were not hired again, and they lost out on several hours of pay by completing the job in record time. Such are the conditions of degraded work that Marc Doussard describes and seeks to explain in his compelling account of work at the bottom of Chicago’s labor market in the brave new economy of the twenty-first century. Full of disquieting accounts of how the City that Works really works, Degraded Work sheds light on the multiple ways in which workers are systematically exploited, abused, ripped off, harmed, and pitted against one another in the service of maximizing profit. Whether it is the homeowner getting a “good” deal on their kitchen remodel or a supermarket chain squeezing its workers to lower prices for a competitive edge, Doussard documents the human toil and toll, the broken bodies, and the failures of contemporary civil society that fuel our current urban condition of inequality. Doussard defines degraded work as “low-wage employment in which employers intensify the pace of work and routinely violate basic labor laws” (p. 26). In his mixed methods study of two industries in Chicago—residential construction and food retail—Doussard reveals the many strategies employers use to degrade work. From piece rates to wage theft, Doussard documents myriad tactics used by employers to push workers harder and faster to keep labor costs dangerously, often illegally, low. Doussard’s ultimate aim is to focus on the actions of employers to show us that low wages are not a natural condition of labor-intensive industries. Rather, employers explicitly deploy a set of strategies to keep wages as low as possible to generate profits far above the razor-thin margins we have come to believe as a natural feature of these industries. Doussard deftly integrates quantitative industry data and field interviews—Zola-esque in their gritty detail—in an admirable work of social science that challenges our own misconceptions about the operation of fairness, legality, and basic human rights in our own backyards. Doussard proffers several critiques, conceptual and methodological, of the literature that addresses inequality and degraded work. First, Doussard challenges restructuring accounts that locate the growth of inequality in the shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy. The most familiar of these accounts to geographers is the

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global city hypothesis in which inequality is linked to growth, rather than decline (as with deindustrialization). Doussard questions the global city narrative’s underlying assumption that consumer-service industries are intrinsically low-wage environments. Rather, as Doussard’s evidence reveals, low wages are deployed as a strategy, not a necessity. This conceptual and empirical counterpoint to global city and restructuring narratives is one of the book’s most significant contributions and adds to a growing body of research that lodges similar challenges. Despite mounting contrary evidence, global city narratives remain stubbornly engrained in geographic accounts of urban economy and economic change. My plea is that Doussard’s work be taught alongside these accounts, especially in undergraduate geography courses, to shift our understanding away from more deterministic, and often unsupported, accounts of urban economy to explanations that reveal how urban political economies are created through a series of quotidian human decisions. Doussard’s work highlights the context of extreme power asymmetry that makes low wages possible, not because an industry’s bottom line demands them, but because employers simply can pay less when labor has no recourse to bargain or fight back. Politics—on the job, in the public sphere, within civil society—matters. Second, Doussard positions his focus on degraded work in opposition to a focus on low-wage work. He argues, “The concept of degraded work suggests a focus on profit maximization rather than just simple labor cost cutting. Profit making provides a bigger window into the workings of firms and industries and fashions a framework that places legal evasion and working conditions in the same conceptual space as simple low wages” (p. 29). This analytic move is an extension of his earlier argument and clearly matters in shifting our understanding of wage-setting practices away from pure market determinism and into the realm of human agency. I wholeheartedly agree that wages are only one measure of job quality. I am puzzled, however, at the vehemence of Doussard’s argument on two fronts: from a social problem perspective and from a conceptual approach. On the first, I wonder who Doussard’s audience is, as he repeatedly criticizes the frame of low-wage work. Is he criticizing policymakers who evoke the term? The public? Scholars? He seems to be addressing the academic community, yet nowhere does he situate specific work as the target of his criticism. The “problem” of an overly narrow and highly delimited focus on wages seems more an issue of parsimonious scholarly bites at the problem, albeit frustrating,


rather than an intellectual failure to understand wages in context. I situate the focus on low wages as part of a larger process of social problem definition that the social problem literature documents extensively. An etiology approach— counting a phenomenon, if you will—often initiates the process by which we identify and name a social problem. As we understand more about the problem, we add details and broaden the context. Thus, a focus on low wages— a relatively straightforward measurable phenomenon using publicly available data—leads to more in-depth and nuanced research, such as Doussard’s, that expands our understanding of the multiple practices in which low wages are embedded and produced. (Full disclosure: I am a scholar who documents rates of low-wage work.) From an empirical perspective, low wages and degraded work go hand-in-hand in the U.S. labor market. They are deeply intertwined. Identifying low-wage work helps us identify degraded work. (I have tried to think of exceptions, but none come to mind.) Extrapolating further, wages and working conditions have historically risen and fallen together in the U.S. labor market. Thus, low wages are our political canaries in the coal mine. As an indicator, low wages serve as a shared starting point for many different kinds of research, organizing campaigns, and policy efforts. Such indicators serve to quickly orient and target limited scholarly and political resources. On the political front, low wages have proven an effective and successful mobilizing frame. The Fight for 15 is the most emphatic example of this, but so are the many minimum wage victories across the United States at both the city and the state level. Workers want higher wages, and their campaigns for higher wages have resonated with the public. On the conceptual front, I wonder what Doussard’s argument might have looked like if he had more directly confronted the neoclassical argument that wages equal productivity. Doussard would have been in an enviable position of demonstrating how little skills and productivity matter in determining wages. Instead, Doussard could have turned the productivity framework on its head: Rather than a focus on the worker and how workers generate productivity—the usual approach—Doussard could have focused on employers and how they extract productivity from workers. Of course, this raises the well-worn economic geographer’s question: Why not surplus value as a framework? I will not quibble on this point, though, as I admire the data-driven nature of Doussard’s narrative, as well as its conceptual accessibility.

Finally, in a spirit of generative solidarity, I disagree with Doussard’s means to redress the problem of degraded work. He points to the need for locally crafted and specific responses. Doing so, he argues, requires that we look at “workplaces themselves” for “solutions.” Specifically, he calls for a focus on employers (p. 231). This fits Doussard’s research approach, but I do not agree that it yields a symmetric political response. We need to look at arrangements of power for solutions. These are instantiated locally but structured at multiple scales simultaneously. Thus, we need to understand labor and employment relations as a multiple scaled system that extends beyond the local labor market even if that extension connects to a federal system hostile to the needs of workers. So what is to be done? Doussard describes a federal labor relations system that might not be hostile, but certainly is neglectful of workers’ rights and the enforcement of workers’ legal protections. Workers and their advocates then focus their efforts locally. Doussard chronicles how different responses share a common focus on industries, thus his call to look at employers in an effort to which the industrial geographer can gainfully contribute. Yet each case he relates represents workers in different structural positions of power. How would an analytic framework focused on workers’ relative positions of power better yield an explanation of and solution to degraded work? If our goal is political, then a different question emerges: Do these strategies emerge from the locus of the problem they seek to redress or the vision of worker power they hope to attain? Do we seek to solve a problem or shift relations of power?

Commentary by Kevin Ward, School of Environment, Education, and Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. Degraded Work is an outstanding contribution to the fields of labor and urban geography. It speaks to the full gamut of ways in which the act of paid labor and the bodies involved are subject to abuse. It gets right at what elements of life are valued—graded—and which are not; not just tolerated but actively undermined and devalued. The abuse, the degradation, takes many forms of course: emotional, financial, physical, and psychological. It is both an intellectual and a political intervention. It is on the former that I wish to focus, and with this in mind, here I want to organize my contribution around the following A-B-C: A for agency, B for boundaries, and C for counting.

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Agency The A for agency, and one of the intellectual maneuvers Marc Doussard makes is to render a certain type of entity as the central character in his book. This is a particular type of occupation in a particular type of firm in a particular type of industry. This is the book’s “subject” if you like. The firms and industries are given a number of names in the book to capture their defining characteristics, including “dependent,” “locally oriented,” “local serving,” and “place-bound.” Through the book Doussard argues against some of the more established accounts of economic restructuring that tend to privilege certain firms over others, certain industries over others, certain occupations, and even certain places over others. As he puts it: In taking this approach, I echo critics who note that globalization theories’ underlying focus on transnational corporations and international business geographies effectively renders the world of local economies, policy and organizing as a secondary, remaindered category with little room to accommodate analytical innovation. (p. 9)

This is important because as Doussard argues, there is a “growing slippage between our ideas about urban labor markets and their actual organization” (p. 21). Instead he makes the case for a focus on certain occupations in certain firms in certain types of industries—whose “profitmaking strategies and day-to-day operations are built around locally specific end markets, regulation and labor markets” (p. 3), “insulated from international market competition” (p. 38). In doing this, Doussard makes not just an intellectual maneuver. He also makes a political one. By making an argument about why these firms do what they do he is able to render them active agents in the process of industrial restructuring and the production of degraded work; not making their futures under conditions of entirely their own making, of course. In rendering them with agency, however, Doussard identifies a target for interventions aimed at improving the lives of degraded workers. Boundaries Next comes B and boundaries, or more specifically, the boundaries that are at work in how Doussard uses the notion of “place” in Degraded Work. At the core of the book is a clear conceptual distinction between the global and the local. The global is what happens elsewhere and where what happens elsewhere matters, rendering the local as simply the space against which to

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assess the particular against the general; hence Doussard’s insistence on the local as site of legitimate study on its own terms as opposed to simply that from which wider—global—trends can be read. The contrast drawn between different types of industries, “locally oriented” and place-based and others, is stark, and perhaps is overdrawn just a little. A more relational sense of place would understand the global present in the local not as somewhere else, perhaps above the local, would it not? So, might there be scope to rethink the notion of “local serving industries,” which consist of the sorts of firms on which Doussard focuses, but that also contain representation by firms geographically organized rather differently? Perhaps these two or more elements of the two industries on which the author focuses might be coconstituted, the boundaries between them a little more porous than it at first appears? Counting For a period in my academic career I was an industrial geographer. This saw me working on a number of projects exploring the geographies of the temporary staffing industry in different cities and in different countries around the world. I was interested in some of the things that interested Doussard. Specifically, my focus was on the business strategies of the agencies in particular places, understanding them as active, institutional agents in the making and remaking of labor markets. In that way the category of temporary employment was opened up for analysis. It also drew attention to the work done by these agencies in the making of urban labor markets. It was, as Doussard notes about his own approach, “a process-based view of local economic restructuring” (p. 80). Doing this sort of research is not straightforward, though. It demands the researcher be creative—as Doussard explains. Degraded Work discusses the various aspects or bits of existing data sets, generated by government bodies and trade associations. Collectively, however, these come up short when it comes to studying food retail and residential construction in Chicago. Some of this is understandable. Some elements are simply not knowable in advance. The more certain industries and their associated activities and practices are positioned at the margins or as subterranean, the less likely they will be counted in any way. Temporary staffing is even harder to reach, so to speak. If anything, the situation is worse in the United Kingdom than in the United States due to the highly centralized legal and political system, even allowing for the various small devolutionary steps that are currently unfolding. All of this suggests Degraded Work should serve as a refer-


ence point for those wishing to study the harder to reach aspects of the economy. Overall, Degraded Work is a strong contribution to studies of labor from across the social sciences. It makes clear what is at stake as the lower ends of U.S. urban labor markets continue to be actively remade, and with it degraded work continues to be generated.

Response by Marc Doussard, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Degraded Work started with the idea that work in the United States was going badly wrong, and the insistence that we could in fact do something about this problem. I had no idea how ambitious the project was going to be: The deterioration of low-wage work remained invisible because of limitations to how we thought about it, how we measured it, where we looked for it, and how we fitted it into the bigger reality of economies in flux. Kimberley Kinder, Robert W. Lake, Virginia Parks, and Kevin Ward indicate that I did a pretty good job of tackling these knotted problems. They point to useful contributions on which to build and—more interestingly—to areas in which there is so much more work to be done. In all of their comments, we can see the continued problem of contingency—of the different ways in which work is organized across places, industries, and political economies. That’s where I try to focus my comments.

pursuit of profit. Kevin Ward notes that the conceptual move toward understanding low wages and labor degradation as choices doubles as a political move. The starting point here was to treat the question of why firms sweat labor as an open one. I found that degrading work served multiple and variant business needs—that raw cost-cutting was linked to maneuverability with contracts and labor process, that information asymmetries in construction had a lot to do with the pricing of labor, and so forth. The big point that labor sweating is a choice, rather than competitive necessity, really does seem to stand. This conceptual movement originated from my long-term engagement with industrial geography, and the obsession that manufacturing firms represented for a generation of extremely skilled scholars. Anchoring the analysis in firms and business models was essential to operationalizing the search for agency, decision making, and contingency in the production of very bad jobs. The approaches and obsessions of industrial geography underlie two of the other strengths my interlocutors find in Degraded Work. First, it made me a methodological obsessive. I am happy to hear that good scholars think the book had sound ideas, but I am thrilled to hear that they think the methods and empirics were up to the task. The methodological details of my study do not merit detailed discussion in this space, but the broader point does: Identifying where degraded work came from, how it operated, and what could be done to stop it would not have been possible without sustained and fussy work on the way industries, firms, and profitmaking strategies are structured.

I wrote Degraded Work to destabilize the constraining and baffling idea that there is little we can do to stop or slow the deterioration of work. Our narratives, theories, and measures of work all privilege the national scale. As long-running narratives of globalization and inequality note, the structure of work has been hollowed out, with a smattering of high-wage jobs and a mountain of lowwage jobs replacing midwage work. This bird’s-eye view on the changes we face has its uses, but it neglects and often obscures the question of agency: Who makes the decisions that cut wages and benefits, make scheduling a mess, eliminate job security, and raise the probability of injuries and other problems on the job?

Industrial geography also meant a full engagement with work—as a process, generator of value, and arena of contestation. The exhortation to look past wages led me to the book’s title and central idea: Low wages are just the most readily obvious component of a much broader degradation to menial jobs. By looking at the labor process, I found an enormous range of problems beyond low pay: early dismissal, threats, injuries, abuse, wage theft, and punishment for using the restroom. Reckoning with all the multifaceted advantages this broad degradation provides employers, and with our inability to produce meaningful politics or policy around scheduling, sick time, and other facets of job quality, stands as a central challenge in determining what work will look like.

The conventional answer here is something like “capital,” which is accurate enough, but not too useful. As Virginia Parks notes in her commentary, I wanted to establish the conditions under which low wages and labor sweating are “a strategy, not a necessity”—the most convenient and reliable of the many strategies businesses can use in their

This is the book’s central point and, inevitably, the place where its biggest problems manifest. Virginia Parks raises two important criticisms, which focus on choices that bothered me throughout the project. First, she points to the success of the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign, which has brought about enormous changes to pay,

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changes that were unimaginable even a decade ago. She notes, rightly, the practical value of low wages in defining a social problem on which people can act. I’ll put it directly: I agree with the criticism. The finely grained work of sifting through business models, work, and employer strategy makes the bigger point that labor-sweating is a choice. It does not, however, chart a viable path to doing something with the knowledge we have won. Cracking open an industry and anatomizing its profit-making models consumes huge amounts of resources and time—I needed a year and a half to pick apart the way particular segments of two industries work, in Chicago. Fighting for $15 is simpler and more intuitive. High minimum wages work as a political strategy precisely because advocates do not need to take industry structure, place contingency, and messy detail into account. They have a simple message, one with a bottom-line measurement far simpler than any effort to tally degradation would be. Put another way, industry matters, and maybe a lot. What does it do for us, practically, though? This leads directly to Parks’s question about whether shifting power to workers makes more sense than trying to solve (I paraphrase to make the point) millions of problems spread out over millions of jobs. The obvious answer is “yes.” Again, though, answering this question does little to move us toward a plan for action. The transfer of power from workers to capital and its representatives, both in the United States and globally, has been thorough and incredibly durable. I set out on Degraded Work in large part as a response to books that concluded with exhortations to bring back unions and the fondly remembered parts of Fordism. Those are nice ideas, but they are also nearly utopian under current political conditions. So, this returns us to the beginning: If my research tells us something new about industries and agency, how can we use that knowledge to right the power imbalance responsible for the proliferation of problems on the job? A useful clue, I think, comes from emphasizing the openendedness, messiness, and embeddedness of the laborsweating processes charted in the book. Within the logic of the decaying New Deal settlement in the United States, the solution to labor problems has been understood in structural terms—via the so-called air game of federal political action, as opposed to the ground game of com-

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munity organizing. The air game approach suggests that the answer to labor problems comes from federal agencies, laws that formalize a different settlement for workers, and electoral representation. I challenge the importance of none of those, but am struck by the kinds of questions, issues, and problems that Robert W. Lake and Kimberley Kinder found Degraded Work to raise. Lake suggests that rejecting grand narratives of change and focusing on everyday, embodied practices of work and (the contestation of work) in fact represents a significant intellectual move. Kinder points to the kinds of experiences, relationships, and nonwork social problems that a degraded work analysis begin to tie to labor and the workplace. A finely grained, localized understanding of degradation is not going to fashion building blocks for a problem-solving approach, but it will help us to see and act on the dozens of ways in which changes on the job ripple through the lives of individuals, households, neighborhoods, and regions. Seen as technical problems to solve, individual employment relationships amount to a sea of problems. Seen as a kind of connective tissue in places and in human experience, however, they suggest all kinds of ways in which organizing and nonelectoral politics can begin to right the power imbalances that make degraded work a foregone conclusion in most sectors of the economy. I lack the energy and extrovert’s gifts needed to be a good organizer. Kinder and Lake remind us, though, that locally constituted politics and relationships are powerful. The Fight for $15 is ultimately limited by the need to count: The elegance and accounting that make $15 a potent claim do not carry over to issues like sick time or flexible scheduling. Minimum-wage campaigns have tried to branch out into those issues, but the same apparatus that makes them skilled in conveying a simple message fails at making meaningful politics out of the (harrowing) experiences of workers who face perpetual uncertainty, conflicts, and underemployment as the result of employer rules that do away with fixed schedules. Complete lack of control over work schedules is a human problem in addition to a labor problem. It manifests in late rent checks, incomplete community-college courses, and workers who quit their jobs every time a child or parent falls ill. Workers, organizers, and communities can build power, and start to right wrongs in the workplace, by making their own local and lived politics around these problems.



BOOK REVIEW FORUM

Cities in Global Capitalism Ugo Rossi. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017. 213 pp., references, index. $64.95 cloth (ISBN 9780-7456-8966-1), $22.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-7456-8967-8); $18.99 electronic (ISBN 978-07456-8970-8).

Introduction by Theresa Enright, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Cities in Global Capitalism begins with a deceptively simple question: “Why have the fates of cities and capitalism become so inextricable in times of globalization” (p. 2). In response to this provocation, the book traces three essential “emergences” that define contemporary urbanization. These interlinked processes—the multiplication and intensification of financial activities; the entrepreneurialization of society and individuals; and the incorporation of information and affects into productive circuits—are not unique to the contemporary era, but come to the fore as hegemonic forces in the twenty-first century. It is from this triangulation that Rossi sets out on the path of “disentangling the city–capitalism nexus in the global age” (p. 2). As in his previous work, Rossi here theorizes urban economic development in post-Fordist cities and the diverse articulations of late neoliberalism. Crucially, Rossi puts biopolitical production—whereby capitalism does not aim primarily at the creation of commodities, but of subjectivities, knowledges, and social relations—at the

center of his inquiry. In so doing, he identifies how capitalism works beyond repression, through the making of populations that are productive in a capacious sense of the term. If ordering capabilities has been a long-standing element of capitalist organization, in the last three decades of prolonged and repeated crisis, and under the dynamics of real subsumption, this feature has become absolutely central. “[F]ollowing the ‘global recession,’” claims Rossi, “capitalism has shifted its focus from the incorporation of society within its value chain to the incorporation of life itself” (p. 11). What makes this book distinctive, then, is that it details the coevolution of cities and capitalism not only through the abstract logics of wage labor, exchange, and investment, but also through the prosaic practices of habit, custom, and selfhood. Combining “a strategic-relational political economy approach and a materialist ontology” (p. 145), Rossi clarifies that urban capitalism is not reducible to a narrow economistic relationship of surplus value extraction, but is also intrinsically an ideological, political, social, cultural, and ecological system. Notably, what he terms the “life oriented construction of contemporary capitalism” (p. 12) takes place in cities of the Global North and the Global South, albeit in uneven, stratified, and differentiated ways. Engaging a wide range of interlocutors, Rossi provides a complex, cosmopolitan, and conjunctural account of this dynamic. Cities in Global Capitalism is neither a bleak indictment of our precarious age nor a utopian celebration of an imminent revolution. Indeed, Rossi insists that a deep structural


ambivalence characterizes our political horizon. Urban capitalism is, he says, “at one and the same time a force of exploitation and invention” (p. 7). With global markets and geopolitics in upheaval, and with urban dwellers around the world mobilizing for more just life-sustaining environments, attending to the kinds of problems foregrounded by Rossi’s book is critically important. This forum—based on a conversation held at the 2017 American Association of Geographers annual meeting—aims to host a dialogue on this generative set of ideas and provocations.

Commentary by Lisa Björkman, School of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY. In the introductory pages of Cities in Global Capitalism, Ugo Rossi lays out the core proposition from which this engaging and ambitious book departs: “In the current urban age, cities are no longer viewed merely in relation to but within capitalism, as its constitutive element” (p. 2). This constitutive role of urbanism and urbanization that the book attributes to processes of capitalist accumulation and expansion underpins the central question animating the narrative: “Why have the fates of cities and capitalism become so inextricable in times of globalization?” (p. 2). Rossi’s answer to this question, which he lays out in five theoretically rich and intellectually engaged chapters, is that contemporary capitalism has “subsumed” (p. 150) urban life itself. Drawing on the formulations of Hardt and Negri, Rossi argues that contemporary processes of capitalist expansion proceed not through the subsumption (real or otherwise) of labor into the machinations of industrial capitalist production as in the past (or at least as certain theorizations of capitalism–city connections have argued); in the urban present, Rossi instead suggests, “there is no longer a rigid demarcation between the working place and the private sphere, as there was at the time of historical capitalism” (p. 9). In this context, it is argued, capitalist expansion proceeds through the “real subsumption [of] society and life itself” by means of the “capitalist valorization of knowledge, affects and relational abilities” (p. 47). Cities in Global Capitalism suggests that the urban character of this posited shift from industrial to “cognitive” capital relates to (and perhaps stems from) sociospatial dynamics and phenomena that are distinctive to cities. In chapter 1, Rossi lays out three “key forces” by means of which the sociospatiality of cities is enlisted in processes of capitalist expansion: real estate finance (commoditization of urban land through the mortgage sector), “en-

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trepreneurialization” (in forms and technologies of urban governance as well as entrepreneurialization “of the self”), and “knowledge-based capitalism” (i.e., the spread and intensive use of information and communication technologies in everyday urban life). This “technology-based economy,” Rossi sums up one of his book’s key claims, “throws light on capitalism’s tendency to commodify life as a whole, creating new forms of exploitation and selfexploitation” (p. 9). Neoliberalism, Rossi thus suggests, “has grown into the living tissue of the city” (p. 78). The ambition and scope of the theoretical explorations that drive Cities in Global Capitalism is impressive and Rossi is an exceptionally able and informed guide. To an ethnographer, Rossi’s book provides fuel for the research imagination, posing a number of important questions. First, though, I want to spend a moment thinking through some concerns I have about the book’s approach and line of argumentation. Cities in Global Capitalism’s central claim rests on two problematic moves: The first is methodological (having to do with the evidence marshaled in support of the book’s propositions and premises) and the second is theoretical (relating to the conclusions and generalizations drawn from this evidence). The first problem is that the proposition that the book sets out to explore—“the role of capitalism as the driving force behind global urbanism” (p. 13)—is asserted as the book’s point of analytical departure rather than proposed as a claim to be substantiated. The trouble with beginning with this presumption is twofold: First, there is much scholarly disagreement over what “neoliberal capitalism” is or means, as well as over whether or not “neoliberal capitalism” (however defined) is in fact “the driving force behind global urbanism.” The theoretical disagreements over the meaning of “neoliberalism” have both theoretical and empirical dimensions. Scholars have adopted the term neoliberalism to refer (on the one hand) to the idea that, when left to their own devices, markets are efficient, self-correcting, and fair in the way they allocate resources, as well as (on the other hand) to the multiplicity of policies and programs that evoke the efficient market idea as a legitimating rationale. Even if we were to bracket these debates over what neoliberal capitalism is, means, or does—even if we were to agree that perhaps, however defined, capitalism (“neoliberal” or otherwise) does indeed appear to loom large in cities these days—then we are still left with the question of where and how this posited relationship between capitalism and cities is borne out empirically. The narrative proceeds not by marshaling evidence in support of the book’s central claim, but instead by marshaling more


theory—in the three “emergences” outlined earlier. Any countervailing evidence falls by definition outside the ambit of what “counts” as evidence of the story about cities in capitalism that the book wants to tell. This means not only excluding cities that are illegible to these concepts and categories, but also excluding any alternative formulations or theories about the relationship between cities and capitalism that might emerge from consideration of such illegible cities. An example of this problem can be seen, for instance, in how Cities in Global Capitalism deals with the question of how globally mobile urban policy ideas travel. Cities in Global Capitalism critiques the scholarly literature on “policy mobility,” not on empirical but theoretical grounds: “The process of socialization in the policymobility thesis and related strands of research is limited essentially to the elite level, while neoliberalism is viewed as a somewhat external force moving across the globe” (p. 70). The book dismisses these formulations because they disagree with the book’s premise that neoliberal capitalism is not an external force but instead is productive in a biopolitical sense—a “constituent element of global capitalism” that has grown into “the living tissue of the global capitalist city” (p. 17). This problematic use of theory—that is, of basing an argument about the empirical validity of a theory by using more theory—has a second, related dimension: A theory about how neoliberal capitalism and market mechanisms work is not the same thing as the concrete policies that cite these ideas as their justification and motivation. The necessary divide between efficient market ideas, and the policies and practices animated by these ideas means as well that there is no necessary correspondence between the two as far as ends and goals are concerned. Indeed, ethnographers thus have shown how efficient market logics have been put to work in trying to address all manner of social and political problems, from environmental pollution to political deadlock. The question of how policy ideas travel, in other words, is not necessarily one of how globally hegemonic ideas and forces are imposed, translated, mediated, or resisted at the local level, but rather of how bits and fragments of often contradictory ideas are put to work by various urban actors having often widely divergent goals and with sometimes unanticipated effects. My own work in Mumbai, for instance, reveals how the “efficient market” idea found a receptive audience among an odd-bedfellows coalition of city development planners, international experts, populist politicians, slum activists, land owners, and developers who saw in the idea of “the market” mechanism a seemingly magical solution to

a long-standing and intractable urban problem: of how to reconcile sky-high urban land values with the need to acquire land for social purposes like infrastructure, public amenities, or social housing. Ethnographic evidence thus reveals the spuriousness of any “outside–inside” distinction when it comes to how and where neoliberalism works, and calls our attention instead to the contingent and creative ways that market ideas and ideologies are put to work by heterogeneous urban actors to diverse ends (Björkman 2015). The importance of attending to historical difference as “constituent of global urbanization” is a point that has been strongly asserted by postcolonial urban theorists. Taking postcolonial critiques seriously means moving away—in Roy’s (2016) words—from “a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation” (200), and instead building on insights from the specificities of any particular city (any city, that is—not necessarily one with a colonial past or one located in the geographical South) to formulate new concepts and ideas about the urban dimensions of global-level processes. Decolonializing urban studies thus means probing and unsettling (in Gregory’s evocative words, which Roy cites) “the stories the West most often tells itself about itself” (Roy 2016, 202). Although Cities in Global Capitalism is well aware of the postcolonial critique—asserting in its opening chapter that “the book largely accepts postcolonial criticism”—in practice the book forecloses multiple understandings of political economy and reasserts a “universal grammar of cityness.” A second area where the universalizing ambitions of Cities in Global Capitalism runs aground on difference is in its discussion of how urban agglomeration relates to what Rossi, drawing on Hardt and Negri (2001), calls “knowledge-intensive capitalism.” In locating capitalism in urban processes themselves (rather than in some external force acting on cities), Cities in Global Capitalism weighs in on scholarly debates over what we mean when we talk about “the city” in the first place. Cities in Global Capitalism embraces a conception of the urban that takes agglomeration as the defining characteristic of the urban. In Rossi’s formulation, knowledge-empowered urban elites are described to capture surplus values accruing from the positive “externalities” of spatial concentration (e.g., increased real estate values in centrally located, aesthetically pleasing, socially valued locations); by means of technologically enabled communications tools, the affective energies of the urban “common wealth” are thereby appropriated as capitalist surpluses. Chapter 5 looks at how in the context of “austerity and growth-

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driven politics” (p. 164), cities have become “engines of capitalism,” because urban areas play host to high-tech startups and to the technology-based “sharing economy.” The postindustrial city of Turin is given as an example of the former, where “university led processes of business incubation, politico-economic elites emphasize the need to modernize technologically oriented sectors and to open the doors to a new generation of [flexible and globally-oriented] high-tech firms” (p. 166). Brooklyn and London are given as examples of the latter, where “the idea of communal life” has inspired setting up of techenabled “co-living spaces” in sought-after neighborhoods. Meanwhile, as informationally empowered actors extract profit from the commonwealth, urban “undesirables” find themselves subject to a parallel “logic of expulsion” (p. 47) from those very same places. These observations from particular cities are richly suggestive and point to a compelling comparative urban research agenda. Indeed, as an ethnographer, I found Cities in Global Capitalism’s discussion of agglomeration extremely interesting for the questions it raises: What does spatial concentration do? What does the materiality and sensory experience of the urban fabric afford—when, how, for whom, and to what end? Yet instead of outlining what such a research agenda might look like, Cities in Global Capitalism moves directly to a generalizing formulation, asserting that “knowledge-intensive urbanism” is comprised of “hegemonic projects mobilized by politicoeconomic elites who are appropriating the socio-affective externalities of urban environments” (p. 74). Again, though, ethnographic evidence demurs. To take another example from my own work in Mumbai, although it is quite true that urban knowledge is a crucial component of the sociomaterial infrastructure facilitating access to valorized urban resources (land, water, markets, surpluses of various sorts), determinants of access to the “information technologies” by means of which this knowledge is produced, circulated, and deployed do not map neatly (or at all) onto received sociological categories—things like class or caste. I conclude with an example: In February 2007, voters in a low-income, so-called slum neighborhood of Mumbai that I call Nehru Nagar, elected a man named Sable, their local water department valve operator, to represent them in the Municipal Corporation. In doing so, area voters threw out the incumbent elected city councilor who had been in the seat for twenty-two years, a wealthy and high-caste man who was an established leader of a major political party. Sable—a formally uneducated, working-class, Dalit (formerly known as “untouchable” caste ) municipal la-

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borer—swept the election with a comfortable margin, campaigning on a promise to bring public resources to bear on the neighborhood’s deeply deficient infrastructures. The valve operator’s authority stemmed from his command of invaluable urban knowledge—both material knowledge about the locations and workings of belowground networks of pipes and valves and sociopolitical knowledge about how the lower level bureaucracy functions. This knowledge was not borne of class position or access to newfangled technologies, but rather stemmed from the intimate, embodied expertise acquired over many years of work with and on the city’s pipes and municipal offices. Over the following five years, the valve operator’s tenure as an elected city councilor would witness dramatic changes in Nehru Nagar: the inauguration of a new health dispensary (which was part of an effort to turn the tide on the neighborhood’s long-standing battle with tuberculosis), the dredging of the neighborhood’s gutters, the laying of a new below-ground water pipe, and the approval of a slew of new metered water connections. That is to say, the material, legal, financial, and infrastructural futures toward which valorized urban knowledge is directed can diverge drastically from elitedriven, world-class urban fantasies. Sable’s neighborhood, for instance, is not being brought under a builder-driven slum redevelopment scheme that would stack residents in crumbling tenement buildings while earning the developer lucrative development rights; rather, the neighborhood has seen the revitalization of its infrastructures and public life. All of which is to say that Cities in Global Capitalism calls attention to how the sociomaterial processes through which actually existing cities are being reconfigured both enlist and empower new sorts of configurations and scales of practical efficacy and expertise. In this context, the empirical question is this: For whom is this knowledge power?

Commentary by Pauline McGuirk, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia. Cities in Global Capitalism sets out to disentangle the mutually reinforcing nexus of cities and the contemporary globalized, neoliberalized capitalism, in its postcrisis, knowledge-intensive form. Theorizing the dynamic constitution of this nexus and bringing together the broad church of theorists that the book does—Harvey, Hardt and Negri, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben,


the new institutionalists and postcolonialists—is no mean feat. It requires a wide canvas, big ideas, and broad sweeps. Cities in Global Capitalism brings us all of these. The book’s analysis of the kaleidoscopic imbrication of globalized capitalism and urbanization is structured around a triad of “emergences” that, Rossi argues, characterize the current nexus: 1. Financialization, particularly of real estate and housing. 2. T he entrepreneurialization not just of urban governance, but of urban society, the self, and, ultimately, life itself. 3. The valorization of urban-based intellectual skills, affect, and relational abilities as they are incorporated into capitalist circuits of production. Crucially, Rossi suggests, this extends beyond the firm now to embrace “potentially all urban dwellers and their everyday lives” (p. 49) as the urban social fabric and human life are harnessed to capitalist ends. An overarching proposition of the book, then, is that these three emergences are distinctively urban vectors that are enabling neoliberal capitalism to subsume life itself, with neoliberalism having “grown in to the living tissue of the capitalist city” (p. 78). Central to this subsumption, Rossi argues, is the ambivalence of capitalism and neoliberalism. He does not deploy ambivalence, as Ferguson (2010) did, to suggest the potential to harness the techniques and practices of neoliberalism to unexpected or alternative ends. Rather he deploys it to highlight their ability to work in both negative or controlling ways and affirmative or productive ways to further incorporate life into capitalist accumulation structures. The book presents a second triad of overlapping city tropes to explore how these ambivalent capacities play out: 1. T he socialized city where affect and knowledge are valorized such that all workers need to have a capacity to be “loquacious and potentially inventive” (p. 154). 2. T he dispossessed city where austerity and its socially uneven impacts are normalized. 3. T he revenant city where experimental forms—the sharing economy, smart city, and creative city—are used to mobilize and extend societal entrepreneurialization and to produce entrepreneurialized urban subjects, allowing postcrisis capitalism to be reinvented and re-embedded, ever more deeply socialized into the city.

Across the book’s triads of emergences and city tropes, Rossi highlights the biopolitical production of compliant entrepreneurial subjectivities for a knowledge-intensive capitalism. Indeed some of the book’s most thought-provoking contributions, for me, arise from Rossi’s honing in on neoliberalism’s moral and biopolitical dimensions as opposed to its analysis as a “political-economic mode of regulation.” He pivots off a critique of the policy mobilities and planetary urbanization literatures for figuring neoliberalism too prominently as a force external to the city, to focus on its biopolitical production from “within”: within the city and within the self. Rossi then uses the book’s three emergences as heuristics through which to unpack the ways existing and emergent features of capitalist urbanization—consumption, home ownership, exchange, aspects of the urban commons—are transmuted from within, via neoliberalism, into more entrepreneurial, individualized forms. In one of the book’s most vibrant themes, he explores how other phenomena that were not previously profit-driven are now being absorbed into and valorized by capitalism via the share economy, creative city, and smart city. Indeed, his analysis of these as affirmative biopolitical economies is thoroughly engaging. The book’s argument is that neoliberal capitalism works biopolitically through these urban economies to produce new subjectivities and harness aspects of the urban commons to capitalist accumulation through the animating fantasy (J. Dean 2009) of collaboration, community, participation, and empowerment. It is both a provocative and pragmatic critique. Cities in Global Capitalism therefore offers a sophisticated analysis that presents us a distinctive way of unpacking the interwoven layers that connect contemporary globalization, capitalism, and urbanization, especially as they cohere through neoliberalization. Rossi’s treatment of urban neoliberalism’s biopolitical operations is illustrative of the kinds of tantalizing ideas and provocative flashes that the book is replete with and that prompt us particularly with new ways to “think” contemporary urban economies and to critique emergent strands of urban resurgent-ism. There are also some frustrations for me in the book, though, and these reflect my wider frustration with the finesse that neo-Marxian analyses achieve in diagnosing the degenerative condition of neoliberal capitalist urbanism, while struggling at times to articulate a more generative scholarship and urban politics. I should say that this is a frustration that confronts me in my own work; that is, how to connect the work of critical diagnosis—a vital task, to be sure—with generative knowledge production.

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Notwithstanding, first, Rossi’s insistence that the book’s three emergences are never linear but intricate, indeterminate, and situated and, second, his insistence that “one should not think of processes of social and life subsumption . . . in a mono-directional and totalising way” (pp. 170–71), a totalizing narrative lurks across the book wherein capitalism is—in every instance, place, and time—successfully constituted, as is neoliberalism, aided and abetted consistently and monodirectionally through the agency of the urban. Certainly capitalism and neoliberal show little weakness in the book. Neoliberalism is figured as an immanence in a city fully suffused by its sociospatial forms, entities, institutions, and subjectivities. Although I acknowledge that, as Rossi puts it, “neoliberalism has firmly retained its power as today’s hegemonic governmental rationality” (p. 80), I am less comfortable with asserting its complete colonization of the urban and its living tissue. To cede this seems to risk leading us to a political dead end: acutely aware of how we got there, but insufficiently armed with insights on (1) where multiplicity exists in and alongside the conjunctural encounters of urbanism, neoliberalism, and capitalism; or (2) on how to exploit the opportunities that reside within this multiplicity to generate other outcomes. To be fair, the political project of Cities in Global Capitalism is not to explore this multiplicity. Its absence was a source of frustration with the book’s style of analysis, but also a productive provocation. The analysis carefully characterizes the emergent scenarios where capitalism and neoliberalism’s seemingly endless adaptiveness and elasticity succeed. We do not get glimpses, however, of what Holloway (2010) called the “cracks” in capitalism, where neoliberal capitalist adaptive experimentation goes awry, does not quite absorb everything, does not come off as intended, or flat out misses it target. Or when neoliberal capitalist strategies are hybridized, infected with strains of welfarism, collective values, nonmarket technologies whereby the end result might no longer be recognized as simply neoliberal or purely capitalist? So as I became absorbed in the book—and it is an absorbing read—I wondered what kinds of politically effective, generative knowledges might result from exploring this underbelly of multiplicity, alongside building understandings of neoliberal capitalism’s colonizing successes? What would the book’s analysis yield were it more embracing of multiplicity and if the concept of ambivalence it deploys were more widely scoped? For instance, Rossi’s critique of the corporatized sharing economy is insightful, but what would happen if

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the sharing economy were not imagined as limited to its deeply problematic corporate iterations—the Ubers and AirBnBs; if its technologies were acknowledged as able to do more than provide the basis for reinventing and reembedding postcrisis capitalism and consumption; and if its potentials were not written off as “illusory” (p. 88)? Could we understand the sharing economy across the multiplicity of its realization and the multiple logics (Scaraboto 2015) that coexist within it: including its cooperative forms, it anticonsumerist forms, forms that are not inevitably productive of an individualized, entrepreneurialized self? Could we then reveal capacities that are not singularly embedded (paraphrasing) in neoliberalism’s political-moral engine for disseminating the totalizing life regime of consumerism? This would allow us to turn our attentions to figuring out ways to defend, promulgate, and institutionalize its other potentials. Rossi tantalizingly hints, for instance, at the tensions between the “prosumer” phenomenon of the sharing economy and corporate rationalization and control, but the analysis does not pause here to explore what productive, generative strategies might be leveraged from these tensions. Second, what if urban creativity and alternative food movements were not written off as “another facet of global homogenisation and capitalist commodification” (p. 121), inevitably “absorbed into the value system of capitalist urbanism” (p. 102) as their alternative subjectivities are seduced and normalized? Could we explore and amplify the multiplicity of their various forms and capacities, forewarned by the kinds of understanding of their vulnerability to neoliberal capitalism’s seductive capacities that Cities in Global Capitalism expertly provides. Of course, neoliberal capital is imbricated in these phenomena, and has demonstrated a potential to embrace them, but this is not the limit of what they are and might produce. To make my point, let me quote Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and the victim of outrageous misogyny from conservative opponents and the media. When asked if misogyny explained her political demise, she responded: “It doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing. It explains some things.” My suggestion is that there might be an advantage to be gained from dwelling longer on the aspects of these urban phenomena that neoliberal capitalism does not explain, and asking, what else, including what kinds of political potential and biopolitical productivities might be generated here. This, of course, requires explicit politicization and challenges urban scholarship to better resource and progress this. Of course history forewarns us that neoliberal capitalism is adept at undermining or obliterating alternatives


and Rossi sheds illuminating light on emergent modes of doing this in postcrisis global capitalism. To address this colonizing capacity, we need to understand how it does this, yes. Then, forewarned, we need also to consider (1) how to promulgate, protect, and amplify what exists within urban phenomena that is not explained by neoliberal capitalism and that might offer alternative possibilities; (2) how to render these alternatives adaptive and absorptive; and (3) in light of the understandings Cities in Global Capitalism offers us, how might scholarly analysis and theorization contribute to this? To conclude, Cities in Global Capitalism provides a careful exploration of the cross-fertilizing layers of the urbanization, globalization, and neoliberalization nexus and gives us effective heuristics to help characterize the weft and warp of the fabric being woven around us. The book’s polemical style, its leaning toward the metatheoretical in which capitalism is “no longer merely incorporating key aspects of society into its system, but encompassing everything, including life itself” (p. 7) is, I think, a knowing provocation for urban politics. Tantalizingly, Rossi comes to urban politics literally on the book’s final page. The book has whetted my appetite for a sequel, where I would look forward immensely to seeing Rossi’s thinking on the possibilities for urban politics that arise from the book’s claims.

Commentary by Jamie Peck, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The title of this well-crafted and provocative monograph, Cities in Global Capitalism, captures very well the explanatory scope and ambition of the book, as well as the essence of Ugo Rossi’s distinctive approach. The book cuts a bold and original path into (and through) the field of critical urban studies—one that on some accounts is more contested, and perhaps more conflicted, than ever before—with the benefit of both creative purpose and constructive intent. Rossi models an accommodating style of combinatorial theorizing that is quite effective in generating more than the sum of its parts; his inclusive and expansive approach is refreshingly free of ax-grinding or partisanship, but neither is it meekly eclectic. The book cuts its own path—between poststructuralism and political economy, and between postcolonial and EuroAmerican urbanism—to open up some different and novel horizons for theorizing around urbanization, urbanity, and cities. Rossi does not repeat the error of positioning cities “under” capitalism, but he makes the case

that they cannot be understood “outside” it, either. More particularly, he avers that, “Today, the study of the city– capitalism nexus cannot be separated from an analysis of globalization and neoliberalism, understood as pervasive forces exerting influence over potentially any aspect of economic life” (p. 5). The book persuasively conveys a sense of the “historical present,” focusing intently on present-day problematics but at the same time endeavoring to contextualize them in a nonstagist, nondiffusionist fashion. Its spatiotemporal imaginary is likewise attuned to multipolarity, to variegation, and to uneven development, while calling attention to the jumbling, tangling, and recombination of urban forms. In a productive way, the planetary and the particular are cohabiting here. So it is that neoliberal globalization and the “relentless expansion of urbanization” is linked to the complex (re)production of polycentric development and the “coexistence of different hegemonies across the planet,” in this case animated primarily by three historical “emergences,” those associated with financial power, with the entrepreneurialization of governance and subjectivities, and with the ascendancy of cognitive capitalism (pp. 24–25). Operating in complex conjunction, in what is invoked as an era or age (but not really a stage) of neoliberal globalism, this triadic schema frames the central arguments of the book. Financialization is read both in longue-durée terms, as an episodic process of capital switching into secondary (real estate) and tertiary (knowledge) circuits, and as an ambient condition of everyday life, from biopolitical governance to debt-bearing subjectivities. Entrepreneurialization is likewise read as a widely distributed subjectivity as well as a normalized mode of governance. Cognitivecultural capitalism is called on as an indexical matrix for a host of “creative,” “smart,” and “startup” city formulations. The arguments are clearly keyed into the restructuring present—the domain of critical urban studies—but they are also presented as intensifications of what are extended historical processes, as “long-term features of the urban phenomenon” (p. 50). From this perspective, cities are in capitalism in a Deleuzo–Guattarian sense; they are understood to be “in a relationship of immanence with global capitalism understood as an ‘ontological machine’ creating new subjectivities through relations of both subjection and enlivenment” (p. 17). This is a distinctive way to read the cities–capitalism nexus, in the context of a promiscuous array of neoliberal governmentalities, but it also presents some (new) challenges. The first of my general comments I make under the heading of post marks. There are post marks of many kinds

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in the book, which in both direct and indirect ways can be interpreted as indicators of its quite distinct position in the canon of contemporary urban studies. This critical reading of capitalist urbanization comes after Harvey but it does not go after Harvey. Instead, his various contributions on post-Fordist urban cultures, on circuits of capital, on accumulation by dispossession, and more, play something like a foundational role in the book, even as they are extensively leavened with, augmented by, and elaborated with Foucauldian formulations, as well as with insights from Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Benjamin, Debord, and so on. Courtesy of an expressly polyvocal analysis of capitalism’s urban nexus (p. 25), Rossi borrows liberally from neo-Marxism and from poststructuralist thought, in a complementary rather than a combative spirit, to explore the intersecting domains of capitalist restructuring and biopolitical transformation, striving not to privilege one over the other. He explicitly “accepts” the postcolonial critiques of urban studies that have been advanced by Robinson, Roy, and others, placing much greater emphasis, by way of what is articulated as a corrective of sorts, on “the role played by capitalism as the driving force behind global urbanization and urbanism” (pp. 13, 54). Acknowledging the need to look beyond the West (and the Western city), Rossi nevertheless insists on the fundamental (and fundamentally connective) role of globalizing capitalism on both sides of the North–South and East–West divides in actually existing urban conditions and in urban theory, going a step further to portray this as a specifically neoliberal mode of globalizing capitalism. The very fact that these might be read in some quarters as fighting words, of course, speaks to the extent to which some formulations of postcolonial urbanism have opted to hold capital-N Neoliberalism at arm’s length, or to insist on its provincialization to the territories of the North Atlantic, portraying as exotic, alien, or exceptional the diverse mobilizations and manifestations of market rule outside this supposed “heartland.” This said, the caution against the casual or complacent universalization of theory claims must surely be taken seriously (even if the question of how to contextualize such claims remains an open and challenging one), especially in light of the long and sorry history of models developed in privileged sites being taken as diagnostic indicators of the supposed deficits and disorders of others. Hence the need for critical theories of “globalizing” phenomena, practices, forces, and formulas—such as those associated with so-called neoliberal urbanism—to recognize uneven geographical development at the “front end,” in a (pre)constitutive way, and for such theories to be constructed, and reconstructed,

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through multisited investigations, through conceptually positioned stress tests, and through ongoing interrogation across conjunctures, articulations, localized contexts, and so forth. It is just as important to do this work of conjunctural theorizing in the Global North as in the Global South, of course—maybe even more so (Peck 2017). Rossi aligns his own project with attempts to reconcile, or at least straddle, what are portrayed as “two distinct . . . projects” in urban-studies research (p. 83), first, politicaleconomy arguments concerning regulatory transformation and the hegemony of market-oriented development, and second, work in the governmentality tradition that has emphasized entrepreneurializing subjectivities and migrating technologies of rule, which have been marled by a “larger refusal of economistic understandings of neoliberalism and globalization” (p. 84). Himself refusing to elide political economy with economism, Rossi boldly addresses the claims of the book to the global realm and to what Robinson (2011) called the “world of cities,” including those of the postcolonies. It must be said, however, that in this light, there are some lingering tensions in the architecture of the book’s argument, which positions as truly pivotal the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing “Great Recession [as] the first structural and global crisis since the advent of neoliberal globalization” (p. 11), which makes frequent recourse to a formulation of post-Fordism at least somewhat predicated on a geographically specific cluster of Fordist-Keynesian forebears, and that draws disproportionately (although not exclusively) on European and North American illustrations. One need not have confused neoliberalism with a strictly Euro-American category of analysis to recognize that there could be questions about issuing putatively “global” claims from this conjuncturally specific pivot point. One would not necessarily be denying the global reach of the post-2008 crisis to insist that both the moment itself, and the socioeconomic and governmental histories that preceded it, looked quite different from, say, China or Brazil or India. In other words, the transition imaginary is perhaps not as global as it might appear. My other observations I gather under the heading of life itself. A complaint that is often heard about accounts that afford centrality to neoliberal hegemony or generalized processes of neoliberalization is that they are “inflationist”; that is, that they make something large and promiscuous and indiscriminate and omnipresent out of something that could (or should) be understood to be small(er), more particular, more specific, and more localized (see Collier 2012; M. Dean 2012). From a politicaleconomy perspective, it can be countered that neoliber-


alization need not—in fact should not—be conceived as an all-saturating, complete, or “total” phenomenon, that it is constitutively variegated and not just variable in a contingent manner (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010; Peck 2017). This perspective is characterized rather differently in Cities in Global Capitalism, however, where is it equated with a somewhat flat-footed conception of neoliberalism as “an elite-led external force, circulating across the globe, originating from ‘somewhere’ and being exported ‘elsewhere,’” with geography exerting “determinant” effects on revealed variegation (pp. 17, 144). Setting aside the veracity of this portrayal, which I question from the preceding perspective, the (alternative) conception of neoliberalism offered in the book is more of a biopolitical one: positioned “in a relation of immanence with global capitalism,” and therefore baked into the cake or otherwise rendered in solution, neoliberalism is said to have been metabolized “into the living tissue of the capitalist city,” where it exists as “the political-moral engine for the adoption and dissemination of a totalizing life regime in cities across the world” (pp. 17, 78, 90). Read as a different kind of total condition, evidently, Rossi’s absorptive and more ambient reading of neoliberalism finds expression in the lived proliferation of a (now familiar) cabal of overindulged model subjects, such as hipster gentrifiers, tech entrepreneurs, and creative types (p. 181), which in a sense become the cultural carriers of the thing that on this telling is neoliberalization. As more-than-mere-cogs in that ontological machine, these precociously occupied subject positions are where neoliberalism is held to live, rather than (say) in the corridors of power, in the high offices of corporate control, or in the dull compulsion of competitive relations. The conspicuous ubiquity of such figures (even though their social worlds have a distinctive geography, too) has become a veritable cliché of urban life in many parts of the world, and one of the images that today’s ever-more narcissistic cities prefer to see when they admire themselves in the mirror. To theorize with (and from) such subject positions, however, risks a certain affirmative circularity, in its own way validating an actual social significance (and explanatory priority), even while properly refusing presumptuous claims to a monopoly of creativity, reason, innovation, and progress. Perhaps the “worldwide success of [Richard] Florida’s theory of the creative class and its transmutation into subsequent theorizations of smart and start-up urbanism” (p. 109) do indeed need to be taken seriously, although it is arguably the case that they are less credible as urban-sociological prognoses than they are as proxy evidence for the exhaustion of several generations of bootstrapping growth-machine strategies, the dimin-

ished and elusive returns to which have become (necessary?) objects of symbolical mystification. There is no doubt that neoliberalization is manifest in (diverse) urban lifestyles and (nonsingular) economic cultures, as well as in governing programs, policy paradigms, and regulatory orders, but there is also a price to be paid for declaring that neoliberalism is rather amorphously everywhere (and that it does not, in fact, come from somewhere, in class, gender, social, historical, or spatial terms). Specifying the historical geographies of neoliberalization (complex, multilayered, and polycentric as they are) is arguably necessary, not least as a counter to simplified stories of top-down imposition or radial diffusion, or as a rejoinder to those purveyors of alternative facts. The creative class surely have a lot to answer for, but even I would hesitate before giving them star billing in the (re)production of neoliberalism, or implicating them too directly in the poisonous politics of Berlusconi and Trump—which is where the book ends with its discussion of “the city–capitalism nexus as the realm of the ambivalent” (p. 178). True, it might be to oversimplify things to indict the bankers, the political elites, and the 1 percent for all the dysfunctions of late neoliberalism, in its sprawling and variegated form. Although it might be tempting to round up (or round on) the hipsters, this is hardly sufficient either. The everydayness of neoliberalism is, for my money, a question of the complex and commonsensical hegemony of market rule, a condition that spans the structural and the subjective, the consenting and the contested, the big and the small, while being neither tendentially uniform nor potentially complete. It is not simply “up there,” for sure. Here, Rossi makes the case that neoliberalism now lives in the city itself. In us.

Commentary by Mark Purcell, Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) opened A Thousand Plateaus with the words, “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (3). Like Deleuze and Guattari, Ugo Rossi is several. I think that in this book there are at least two Ugos: a good Ugo and a bad Ugo. The bad Ugo tells us that everything that is still free is being ineluctably captured by global capitalism. The good Ugo wants to find a way out of this mess, and he understands that we are already capable of doing so. In the book, the bad Ugo is stronger, and the text usually speaks in his voice. The good Ugo is weaker, but he is there. In what follows I want

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to urge us, and Ugo, to let the bad Ugo go, and learn to recognize, and to listen to, the good Ugo.

and scholars like us are reduced to merely discovering the new ways it does so.

The bad Ugo roots himself in the tradition of critical urban studies, in concepts such as urban entrepreneurialism, growth machines, flexible specialization, postFordist industrialization, city regions, producer services, creative cities, global cities, neoliberalism, entrepreneurialization, policy mobility, McDonaldization, primitive accumulation through dispossession, financialization, and planetary urbanization. This tradition is a tradition of sadness in the Spinozan sense. It tells us, relentlessly, that global capitalism is ineluctably or inevitably or unavoidably incorporating more and more areas of human existence into its logic. There is nothing we can do. Let me give you an idea of the bad Ugo’s voice: Global capitalism is

The only thing people get to do in this story is be entrepreneurialized, colonized, financialized, and commodified. We are all of us merely healthy cells, waiting around to be metastasized. There is no good air to breathe, no room for resistance, or alternatives, or flight, or escape, or autonomy in this story. There is no room for an examination of our own power. In this story, the spread of capitalism appears ineluctable.

constantly deepening the commodification and entrepreneurialization of society. (p. 13) The phenomenon of financialization . . . has expanded socially, permeating every aspect of social life and, ultimately, life itself. (p. 25) A key effect of the deep neoliberalization of the urban environment is that the capitalist logic has widened its reach by subsuming the lives of urban residents within the intrinsic mechanisms of financial capitalism. (p. 32) In a context already characterized by the entrepreneurialization and commodification of everything . . . the sharing economy quickly gets subsumed. (p. 88) He accepts and offers evidence for Debord’s “integrated society of the spectacle” in which “the spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.” (p. 102) An entrepreneurial approach . . . is the new orthodoxy defining today’s urban condition among policymakers. . . . This approach to contemporary urbanism cannot be questioned by public policy, which has to prioritize marketing campaigns, partnership building and pro-business urban regeneration initiatives. (p. 55)

Some hope emerges when Ugo says that the book will offer “an ambivalent picture of capitalist urbanism” (p. 79, italics added). We anticipate that there might be some hesitancy, or contradiction, or indecision within capitalist urbanism, some crack, some opportunity for resistance and for alternatives. This ambivalence, however, turns out to mean merely that capitalist urbanism oppresses us in two ways: through the “negative subjection” of austerity and through the “affirmative mobilization” of our communicative and cognitive potential in ways that advance a capitalist agenda (p. 79). Capitalism always wins,

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To be clear, the problem with the bad Ugo is not that he talks about unpleasant topics. The problem is that he is telling the story badly. It is a story that only makes things worse. As I said before, it is a story of sadness in Spinoza’s sense. That means it is a story that diminishes our capacity to act, because it makes it seem as though evil things are on the horizon, they are coming toward us, and there is nothing we can do to prevent them from taking over everything. Having told us this, over and over, the bad Ugo (and the sad tradition he roots himself in) do not really have a next move. One gets the impression we are just supposed to concur ruefully and call it a day. The good Ugo is there, lurking, however. Near the end of the book, he raises his hand to say that “it is important to avoid conveying an essentializing, metaphysical understanding of capitalism as an impersonal force somehow naturally or mechanically [or ineluctably] expanding across space and society” (p. 145). Clearly the bad Ugo wasn’t listening, as we saw earlier. Even if the bad Ugo might not affirm, if pressed, this essentializing understanding of capitalism as inevitable, he definitely conveys it, unmistakably. The good Ugo keeps his hand in, though. He writes sentences like the one on p. 145. He tentatively embraces postcolonial and Global South critiques. He writes the glorious pages 170 and 171, where we get some account of what we are capable of, of how we might resist and imagine alternatives to the spread of capitalism. He declares that he is inspired by Hardt and Negri’s commonwealth, Virno’s forms of life, and Agamben’s use of bodies. Unhappily, though, the bad Ugo intervenes to miss the gist of what Hardt and Negri and Virno and Agamben are trying to say. They are searching for that which is inappropriable, unaxiomatizeable—that which is unalterably ours and can never be capital’s. Hardt and Negri don’t find commonwealth in the city just so they can ruefully report that capital has appropriated and controlled it, as the bad Ugo does several times (e.g., pp. 47, 48, 110, 140).


That is telling the story badly. Hardt and Negri find commonwealth to tell the story well: It is the multitude that has the capacity to produce wealth in the world, that has produced the wealth that exists in the world. Capital is nothing more than a parasitical entity that only survives through its desperate, lurching attempts to capture the wealth that the multitude has produced. The multitude holds the cards. So, they argue, it needs to realize itself as a body and appropriate to itself its own wealth, that which properly belongs to it. Hardt and Negri are telling a story about our own capacities, our own ability to make a future for ourselves on our own terms. They are not telling a story about the ineluctable process by which capitalism captures and controls all elements of our lives. Not at all. Similarly, if more abstractly, Agamben is searching for that which is inappropriable, unexchangeable, unmonetizeable, and uncommodifiable. In his ontology, use, habit, and practice are conceptualized as necessarily the lived activity of bodies. They cannot be separated or abstracted from those bodies, and so they can never be commodified. They can never be sold to a capitalist. He is trying to tell us that capitalism’s attempt to commodify all of us, all of our bodies, and all of life isn’t an ineluctable process; it’s an impossible project. The bad Ugo misses Agamben’s overriding message, and he trains his attention only on how capitalism does sometimes capture or subsume some of the forms of life we produce. The good Ugo sees what Agamben is trying to do, though, and Hardt and Negri. He wants to bring it to the surface. On pages 170–71, when the clouds part and we see what the alternative might be like, we can see that the good Ugo wants to turn his gaze away from capitalism, and toward us. He wants to learn what we are capable of. I imagine that the good Ugo agrees with me, that we should stop telling this story, “cease pouring it out like a sewer,” as Deleuze and Guattari would say (via Henry Miller). That’s what he is trying to say on page 145. Still, most of the book tells the sad story nevertheless. In closing, I want to express my hope, and my suspicion, that although the bad Ugo, the one who reads and speaks in a tradition of sadness, is predominant in this book, he is nevertheless the older Ugo, the one that is part of Ugo’s past, the Ugo that is withering away. The good Ugo, although his voice is weaker, is the Ugo who is emerging, the Ugo who is growing stronger, the Ugo that is to come. In my hope I can see the daybreak on the horizon, the coming into his own of the good Ugo. His voice is growing louder, and I can’t wait to hear more of what he has to say.

Commentary by Allen J. Scott, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. This is a book of considerable learning and intellectual subtlety. It is focused on an attempt to disentangle some of the foremost social and political currents that appear at points of intersection between urbanization, globalization, and the dynamics of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Rossi begins his analysis by affirming the central—and entirely appropriate—idea that we can only understand contemporary cities by reference to capitalism, and conversely that capitalism itself is shaped in essential ways by the phenomenon of urbanization. From this point of departure, Rossi goes on to expatiate at length on what he sees as the fundamental issues that lie at the city– capitalism nexus in the current conjuncture, namely, financial power, entrepreneurialism, and cognitive capital. Financial power resides in institutions that control the massive amounts of money and investment capital that circulate through world capitalism. As recent events have dramatically demonstrated, the incautious exercise of this power can exert deeply malignant effects on cities. Entrepreneurialism is manifest in the rise and spread of the individual stakeholder as an active force in neoliberal society, and by extension, it can be linked to the Foucauldian notion of the “entrepreneurialization of the self,” as revealed by the intensifying breakdown of corporatist or communal social arrangements and the biopolitical subsumption of human consciousness into the ideological priorities of the capitalist project. Cognitive capital, for its part, refers to the circumstance that in the digital age, the mental (and I would add cultural) faculties of workers have become crucial elements of the forces of production. Among other things, the intensifying role of cognitive and cultural capital in contemporary society is leading to a broad aestheticization of the commodity system and the symbolic elaboration of life in general. These overarching concepts frame a narrative that moves smoothly through four substantive chapters. The argument sets out by reviewing concepts of world cities and global city regions, with passing gestures to recent debates around planetary urbanism and postcolonial theory. Rossi then proceeds to examine neoliberalism as a basic complement of cognitive capitalism and globalization, with special reference to its reinforcing influence on individualism and consumptionist ideologies. There follows on from this an account of the “one-dimensional city” and its symptomatic expression in McDonaldization, Disneyfication, and Guggenheimization, which Rossi presents as important symptoms of the homogenization of consum-

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ers’ tastes and preferences in the age of neoliberal globalization. Finally, he comes back to the question of cognitive capitalism, with an emphasis on the city as a locus of biopower and on the deepening entrepreneurialization of society and the self in capitalist cities. There is much else in the rich intellectual mosaic presented by Rossi, but this brief summary will suffice to give an indication of the book’s theoretical engagements and its broad discursive strategy. In the remainder of this commentary I want to address what I see as a major point of contention raised by Rossi’s argument as a whole. In fact, the particular point I want to make is pertinent to a critical examination of much of the current literature on urban studies generally, and so although I use Rossi’s work as a launching platform for my discussion, my remarks are actually addressed to a far wider field of urban research. My essential line of commentary here can be summed up in this question: What is it that constitutes the urban in contemporary society and how can we subject it to meaningful analysis? This question is prompted by a growing sense as I read Rossi’s book that the urban is never quite present in the text except as a receptacle of more widely ranging social forces. Rossi’s method proceeds by picking up on major concerns in capitalism broadly conceived and then seeking to apply these to an understanding of the city. So far, so good. This method, however, essentially boils down to thinking of the city as a site of social condensation rather than an active force of social development in its own right. In particular, various social, cultural, and political processes can be observed to operate at this site, but in Rossi’s account, their systematically urban content (if any) remains largely undefined. For example, financial power is certainly concentrated in cities, but in precisely what ways and to what extent (if at all) can it be considered to be an urban phenomenon? In the absence of a clear problematization of the urban as such, the overall result is analogous to the view that Saunders (1981) articulated long ago to the effect that the city is no more than a container of “modern society.” Saunders then proposed that the city in practice is just an incoherent and essentially meaningless amalgam of social phenomena, and when we consider much that passes for urban studies today, he might be taken to have been not far wrong. In opposition to this view of the city as a mingle-mangle, I submit that a coherent problematization of the urban process is indeed possible, and that it is essential to keep this problematization firmly in view if we wish to account in any meaningful way for the role of the city in society in general and capitalism in particular. Moreover, like many

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contemporary urban theorists, Rossi relies on persistent appeals to philosophers (Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Lazzarato, Lukács, and Virno, among others) for basic guidance in ontological and epistemological matters, with the perhaps (dare I say it) naive faith that the work of these authorities enables us to penetrate directly into the mysteries of the city. Obviously, Agamben, Deleuze, and others, are major thinkers, with much to say about the human condition and hence about many aspects of contemporary life. Most of them, however, provide commentaries that at best have a rather oblique relationship to the city in any significant sense of the term. Hence, mediating all of this complex intellectual material in a disciplined manner through an urban problematic requires a series of decisive additional maneuvers if we are to assess the due significance of the city, or better yet, urbanization, in contemporary capitalism. Let me affirm at once that Rossi’s broad approach works reasonably well in terms of a general narrative about some of the more perplexing problems of existence in contemporary capitalism, even if the city never quite comes into focus in his account. We learn a great deal about things like the financial crisis, the homeownership society, policy mobilities, the rise of a cognitariat (or what Rossi, following Florida, calls the creative class), Disneyfication, austerity, the sharing economy, and much more. To rephrase my basic question, though, where precisely does the urban intersect with these matters, and what recomposition effects, if any, does it have on their substance and modes of operation? Or, to reiterate a very old question, does it follow that if something occurs in the city then it is automatically a component of the urbanization process? I make these remarks because I want to argue that a noneclectic analysis of urban issues must be anchored firmly in a concept of the city that enables us to come to a defensible assessment of the essential as opposed to the merely contingent dimensions of urban life (cf. Storper and Scott 2016). I do not have the space to present the argument in the fullness it deserves, and so I shall take a few analytical shortcuts. At the outset, if we want to make sense of the genesis and dynamics of urbanization in capitalism we must start, as Rossi does, with the basic logic of capitalism, but we need to push much harder on the urban consequences of this logic. In short, we need to concentrate from the beginning on core mechanisms concerning the competitive and profit-seeking proclivities of units of economic activity that bring capital and labor together in the act of production. This does not yet identify an urban process, but it now leads on to the initiation of a specifically


city-centric analysis by prompting us to inquire as to why it is that capital and labor cluster together to form protourban concentrations of human activity and what the sociospatial consequences of this tendency might be. Consideration of this question leads further to the proposition that these concentrations occur in the first instance because the profit-oriented imperatives of production in capitalism induce a search for efficiency and competitive advantage on the part of individual producers. Among their other repercussions, these imperatives encourage complex divisions of labor to form in the guise of powerful functional interdependencies between selected individual producers. These interdependencies are highly conducive to spatial concentration, which, moreover, is self-reinforcing because it generates multiple external economies and commons effects that not only boost the efficiency and competitiveness of producers, but are also critical to the social reproduction of the labor force via the dynamics of residential space. At the same time, and in the second instance, the piling up of multiple units of capital and labor within a narrowly constrained geographic area results in complex land-allocation processes as individual land users strive to appropriate locations that provide suitable mixes of interlocational proximity to and avoidance of other land users. As these cross-currents begin to stabilize, the internal geography of the city crystallizes out into a variegated but mutually cohesive mosaic of production spaces, social spaces, and circulation spaces. In these ways, the mechanisms of capitalist society not only work their way into and through the urbanization process, but are themselves—and this point is fundamental—critically dependent on the city for their own social reproduction. Of course, these two principal moments of the urbanization process, namely spatial concentration and the dependent intraurban distribution of production space, social space, and circulation space refer only to what I characterized earlier as a proto-urban outcome. The city in reality is obviously very much more than this, for this mesh of sociospatial relationships is interwoven with a host of additional phenomena, many of which act back reflexively on its organization and functions. Race and ethnicity, culture, the organization of family life, relations of authority and subordination, technology, architectural programs, the legal system, and so on, all play a part in the emerging fullness of the city, not in some chaotic, uncoordinated way, but only to the degree that they become intertwined elements of a specifically urban mode of spatial organization; that is, as agents in processes of spatial concentration, interaction, and differentiation in the wider context of capitalist society. A point of special

importance is that this admixture of spatially integrated activities is endemically susceptible to functional breakdowns and political conflicts that lie far outside the coordinating discipline of the market. The viability of the city therefore always depends on the emergence of very specific kinds of governance arrangements that provide remedial management services (including powers of social control) that are competent in technical and political terms to intervene at the specifically urban level of scale. All of this argument boils down to the simple but elusive principle that fruitful analysis of the city must always be capable of distinguishing between that which is essentially urban and that which is only contingently so, and this is where Rossi’s book comes back into the picture. Rossi’s three key variables—financial power, entrepreneurialism, and cognitive capital—are assuredly of major significance in their own right, and they are unquestionably useful points of leverage in any attempt to decipher the city–capitalism nexus. Rossi certainly goes part of the way in this direction, but his method, like that of much other work in urban studies today, consists to a significant extent in bolting big social issues like these onto an urban frame of reference that itself remains undertheorized—as opposed to picking through the ways in which their effectivity is transformed into and incorporated within an urban dynamic as such. As a consequence, his book is rather more informative about some of the basic quandaries of the current conjuncture at large than it is about the predicaments of urbanization in any strict sense. I recognize that I am verging on what some might characterize as an overscrupulous distinction between the essential and the contingent in the urban milieu, but these remarks do not just refer to arcane matters with no further implications. To the contrary, they provide us with a means of sharpening our theoretical concepts about cities, they offer clues about how to maintain a consistent forensic aim in any given effort of analysis, and they have particular importance in informing policy analysis and policy implementation. In respect to the latter item, consider the perplexing policy problem of poverty, and the possibilities and above all the limits of an urban-based approach to its treatment. Urban interventions can certainly alleviate many aspects of poverty, but only political action at the national level can reform the overall social and property relations that fundamentally underlie poverty and maintain it as a durable dilemma within capitalism. The metaphor of the “ontological machine” proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001) offers some useful hints here. If we extend the idea beyond its original concern with the production of subjectivity, we might say that the ontologi-

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cal machine of the city works not on the basis of the simple spatial copresence of diverse phenomena alone, but by virtue of its functions as a generator of agglomerative and land-sorting dynamics that impart to these phenomena a specifically urban dimension. Note that many different kinds of social relata can be found in the city and yet remain external to the workings of this machine, so that, in the light of the argument laid out earlier, they are essentially extrinsic to the urbanization process, as such. In spite of the demurrals that I have put forward, this is an important book, and a major contribution to debates about cities and society in the new phase of capitalism that is opening up in the twenty-first century. I have discussed at some length what I take to be a number of central problems not because I want to depreciate Rossi’s contribution, but precisely because his stimulating argument leads directly to consideration of some of the most basic and troublesome issues in the field of urban studies today. Rossi has raised many crucial questions, and has pointed to some fundamental research puzzles. There can be little doubt that this provocative and highly informative book will be read widely not only in urban studies circles but in the much wider sphere of social science generally.

Response by Ugo Rossi, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Università di Torino, Turin, Italy. The metropolis is the site of biopolitical production because it is the space of the common, of people living together, sharing resources, communicating, exchanging goods and ideas. . . . Biopolitical production is transforming the city, creating a new metropolitan form. (Hardt and Negri 2009, 250–51) The stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings. (Foucault [2004] 2008, 229)

In writing the book that has been so generously discussed in this forum, I have relied on two main sources of inspiration. The first is Hardt and Negri’s notion of the global metropolis as a privileged site for what they called “biopolitical production”; namely, the production of capitalist subjectivity drawing on the heterogeneous set of affects, cooperative networks, emotions, socially diffused knowledge, and communicative abilities condensed within urban and metropolitan environments. The second is Foucault’s idea of the “entrepreneur of himself” as a distinctive

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trait of advanced liberal societies. Building on this neoMarxian-Foucauldian sensibility, my purpose in this book has been to make sense of the life-oriented reconstruction of today’s “city–capitalism nexus” in the aftermath of the “great recession” of the late 2000s and the early 2010s, at the same time avoiding monodirectional understandings that place emphasis either on the negative (as in capitalism’s ontologies of dispossession, from Harvey to Agamben and Lazzarato) or the positive dimensions (as in the ontology of subsumption theorized by Hardt and Negri themselves) of this incorporation of life. Rather, the entrepreneurialization of society and life itself that I have investigated in this book, arguing that it is replacing the entrepreneurialization of governance prevailing in first-generation urban neoliberalism, brings together the negative (indebtedness, eviction, deprivation, machinic enslavement) and the positive (the animating fantasies of participation, community, innovation, self-fulfillment) under second-generation, postcrisis “late neoliberalism.” In doing so, I have centered my analytical perspective on the idea of ambivalence, as used by Italian theorist Virno (2006). This notion has allowed me to highlight the aforementioned duplicity of the city–capitalism nexus: the coexistence of a negative politics over life with a politics of life within postcrisis cities, incessantly expropriating as well as reenlivening city life through the mobilization of different cultural dispositifs. In my perspective, a progressive politics of social change has to wade through this complex duality and related processes of capitalist subjectivation. The juxtaposition of austerity urbanism and a new wave of technology-based urban economies (the so-called technology boom 2.0) in postcrisis cities is particularly illustrative of this dynamic. On the one hand, local governments have committed to the implementation of austerity measures and other budget cutbacks within a context of economic and sociospatial restructuring caused by the global economic crisis and at a time when the housing crisis has come to hit a growing number of households customarily associated with the middle class. On the other hand, a select circle of cities have started magnetizing venture capital flows, witnessing the rise of technology-based entrepreneurship within their central areas, as the technology-based sharing economy has radically transformed the ways in which residents and consumers interact with each other in a variety of domains involving the very foundations of social life, such as mobility, food, home, and education. The latter dynamic has contrasting effects on urban societies and the imaginary of capitalism: It contributes to reenergizing the “dormant


spirits of capitalism,” fostering a deepened sense of entrepreneurialism within the economy, but it also leads to the production of new inequalities of income and wealth. The U.S. economy provides clear evidence of this phenomenon: An elite of major cities (“the great American cities,” particularly those along the West and East coasts) have seen a precipitous rise in house prices and, more generally, a renewed economic growth that has benefited a circumscribed set of highly educated, skilled, and “creative” portions of the workforce (what mainstream urban economists variously define as “creative class,” “smart labor,” high-skilled workers, and the like), whereas racial minorities and other low-income groups within the same cities along with the residents of cities and rural areas in peripheral, economically struggling regions have lagged behind. It is no surprise then that sociospatial inequalities have been at the center of recent debates over the geography of electoral behavior in key capitalist countries such as the United Kingdom, after the “Brexit” vote, and the United States after the shocking election of Donald Trump in November 2016. In this context, a straightforward characterization of current political scenarios in terms of a resurgent urban– rural divide has gained currency within public debates. The postelection debate in the United States is particularly illustrative of this tendency. Many commentators have indulged in forms of “cityism,” glorifying the democratic distinctiveness of the “liberal cities” being seen in contrast to losing regions that have become reservoirs of populist resentment and other “negative passions.” In my perspective, however, this view overlooks at least two things: first, Trump’s urban roots as a real estate tycoon whose fortunes have been intimately linked to the exploitation of cities’ built environment and communicative capital (along with Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister, a living demonstration of the city–capitalism nexus, as I put it in the conclusion to the book); second, it ignores the fact that Trump’s crusade against the “inner cities” and their living conditions conducive to crime and social deviance has drawn on a long-term, bipartisan tradition of U.S. administrations criminalizing urban environments and their racial minorities (see Hinton 2016). In Europe, cities attract international migrants and refugees but also witness inimical reactions to this influx, particularly within disenfranchised lowincome neighborhoods. This means that contemporary cities, far from being happy enclaves for democracy and the ideal of an open society, are integral to the ambivalence of contemporary societies: their social hostilities, on the one hand, and their potential politics of coexistence and social justice, on the other hand. In sum, the

purpose of this book has been to help the reader achieve a deeper understanding of the multiply ambivalent roles of contemporary cities within today’s capitalist societies. This leads me to the response to my critics. Both Pauline McGuirk and Mark Purcell draw attention to the alleged pessimism of my book, as proven by my parsimony with regard to details about the construction of political alternatives. In a section of chapter 5 entitled “The Revenant City,” as Mark Purcell underlines, I emphasize the potential for a politics of postcapitalist transformation immanent in the functioning of urban biopolitical economies. Today’s corporatized “sharing economy” largely appropriates this potential, which is illustrative of a growing aspiration for communal life in our societies, in response to the individualized suffering brought about by the global economic crisis. In this perspective, in the conclusion I stress the need for an explicit repoliticization of community endeavors inspired by a conception of city life as a “space of the common” (Hardt and Negri 2009), as politicization staves off the ever-present risk of cooptation into the seductive dynamics of neoliberal urbanism. At the same time, despite this potential, there is no doubt that we have fallen on hard times, ones in which wars of class, race, and religion against minorities identified as enemies of global civilization have dramatically intensified in recent years (Alliez and Lazzarato 2016). If this book had been written four years ago, my account would have probably been different. In an article published in 2013, I concluded as follows (forgive me for quoting myself): Life lies at the centre of the politics of capitalist development and restructuring in times of unresolved economic turbulences, taking the form of a dialectical biopolitics marked by the confrontation between capitalist and market subsumption, resumed state sovereignty, residents’ reappropriation of life itself and the rise of social movements of unexpected intensity and geographical ubiquity, showing that “another world is possible” beyond the limits and failures of late neoliberalism. (Rossi 2013, 1073)

Four or five years later, subsequent developments have revealed a rather different picture, one resembling, as I write in the conclusion, what Polanyi wrote about historical fascism as a spectre constantly looming over capitalist societies coping with the failure of a selfregulating market economy: “fascism was an ever-given political possibility, an almost instantaneous emotional reaction in every industrial community since the 1930s. One may call it a ‘move’ in preference to a ‘movement’” (Polanyi [1944] 2001, 247). As a text purposely located in a historicized present, as both Theresa Enright and

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Jamie Peck underline in their commentaries, this book inevitably reflects my concerns related to the increasing likelihood of this “move.” My feeling is that mainstream understandings of advanced capitalist economies centered on the binary opposition between innovative actors, such as the creative class and the smart labor force mentioned earlier, and the rest of the workforce have contributed to reinforcing communitarian tensions, as shown in cities like San Francisco, Berlin, and London in recent years. In this sense, my characterization of urban neoliberalism as a living entity, an aspect on which Jamie Peck’s commentary dwells, is intended to underscore the workings of neoliberalism not just as a set of economic policies and even a larger government rationality but as a fluctuating form of life forged by an emotional politics constantly reviving class-based tensions within capitalist societies, particularly by opposing the winners to the losers of the technology-led economy in unprecedented ways. The book can be seen largely as a history of our troubled present in which social divisions within and among cities have become increasingly visible and politicized in new forms. On the conservative side, the rise of what is customarily defined as “populist politics” is the existing response to these contradictions. On the progressive side, the pursuit of a joyous politics of encounter, mobilizing the city as a space of the common in which powerless minorities and subaltern groups meet and organize themselves into horizontally assembled collectives, appears to be an adequate alternative to the “negative passions” of populist politics. My current work, the first outcome of which will be a book edited along with Theresa Enright (Enright and Rossi 2018), goes precisely in the direction of interrogating this productive ambivalence of the “urban political” within an increasingly polarized political landscape. Writing from a perspective attentive to the contradictions of the city–capitalism nexus, understood as a hybrid formation, I have abstained from engaging in a definitional understanding of the urban as such, a point raised by both Allen J. Scott and Lisa Björkman. Contrary to recent orientations in urban studies that tend to center scholarly debates on the definition of the urban (Brenner and Schmid 2015; Roy 2015; Scott and Storper 2015), my approach requires asking preliminarily “What is capitalism?,” as since the very beginning of this book I conceptualize the urban as intimately interlinked—in a relationship of immanence—with technology-based capitalism in the current biopolitical age. After the crisis of 2008, public debates have seen a resurgent interest in the understanding of capitalism. My book aims to bring these debates into the realm of urban studies, calling attention

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to the distinctive contribution that urban knowledge can provide to a transformative politics of social change in a context in which an ultimately rent-based economy, in its different articulations (from the built environment to knowledge), tends to subsume everything under itself but in doing so unwittingly creates conditions for its obsolescence. References Alliez, E., and M. Lazzarato. 2018 [2016]. Wars and capital. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Björkman, L. 2015. Pipe politics, contested waters: Embedded infrastructures of millennial Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brenner, N., J. Peck, and N. Theodore. 2010. Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks 10 (2):182–222. Brenner, N., and C. Schmid. 2015. Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City 19 (2–3):151–82. Collier, S. J. 2012. Neoliberalism as big Leviathan, or . . . ? A response to Wacquant and Hilgers. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 20 (2):186–95. Dean, J. 2009. Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, M. 2012. Free economy, strong state. In Neoliberalism: Beyond the free market, ed. D. Cahill, L. Edwards, and F. Stilwell, 69–89. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York, NY: Continuum. Enright, T., and U. Rossi, eds. 2018. The urban political: Ambivalent spaces of late neoliberalism. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferguson, J. 2010. The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode 41 (1):166–84. Foucault, M. [2004] 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hinton, E. 2016. From the war on poverty to the war on crime: The making of mass incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holloway, J. 2010. Crack capitalism. London, UK: Pluto. Peck, J. 2017. Transatlantic city, part 1: Conjunctural urbanism. Urban Studies 54 (1):4–30. Polanyi, K. [1944] 2001. The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston, MA: Beacon. Robinson, J. 2011. Cities in a world of cities: The comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1):1–23.


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