We are moving the book reviews from the journal on-line to this blog. This means reviews will be accessible faster, closer to the time that books are published. And, they will be more publicly and easily searchable. We will continue to publish articles in the print journal. But since book reviews are not peer-reviewed, there is scope for experimenting. So why not experiment? We’re also hoping this will create more dialogue. We welcome feedback on this move and on formatting, etc. Please let us know what you think!

For our inaugural online review, here is Rob Shields’ (draft) essay. Please roll over references for abbreviated bibliographic information.

Review of ‘Architext‘: A book series on architecture, design, history and discourse

Unlike the French, readers in the English world rarely focus on specific collections. Yet, their regular colours and shapes are more than mere brands. Orange and green Penguins and the Everyman Library of classics practically defined 20th century middlebrow fiction and non-fiction. The Routledge imprint is unusual for the visibility and reputation of its series such as the International Library of Sociology and, more recently, the avowedly global ‘Architext‘ series, which is just a bit younger than the 10 years this journal has been published. An assessment of a series as a unit has the merit of revealing lacunae and missed opportunities within the discourse of urban and architectural history and theory. For example, some insights such as the productive relation between media, communication and planning arise repeatedly but their wider implication is never grasped or developed.

Since the late 1990s, Thomas Markus and Anthony King’s Architext series has framed buildings and cities as social (e.g. Marcus & Neumann, forthcoming). They are objects invested with social meaning and also with unrivalled power to shape the social relations that take place within and around them. It is one of the few architectural series which explicitly depart from the twin attractions of buildings as fine art to be understood visually, a conceit dominated by art publishers such as Rizzoli and Taschen, and place as a theoretical construct and context, a meditation dominated by academic publishers such as MIT Press and University of Minnesota Press. The usual expectation would be a historical focus - the tack taken by most geographical publishers such as the Center for American Places or presses wishing to reflect local culture, in which University of Texas Press, for example, stands out. Indeed, the Architext series would make for an interesting seminar outline.

While many journal articles have consistently pointed toward a social understanding of architecture, book publishing decisions subtly impact on the accessibility of different approaches and circulation of ideas because they hedge in the textbook choices of instructors and even the framing of undergraduate curricula. Although the internet has made many books locatable, even downloadable, I nearly choked when a radio interviewer wrapped up a noon-hour interview on New Orleans’ recovery by asking where listeners could buy the post-Katrina ‘Urban Calamities’ issue of this journal (Space and Culture 9.1). The hurdles of finding academic writing, let alone owning a copy and understanding it, are unusual in the era of wikipedia.org and blogging (to wit).

Leora Auslander briefly mentions what I would call the anthropology of academic thought, research and exchange in the Foreword of Embodied Utopias identifying four publics:

“the one-time intellectual engagement of grant-writing…whose audience was limited… the repeated, informal, very engaged but necessarily brief, monthly evening meetings of the workshop of ten participants, of which no enduring record was kept; the one-time but three-day long…encounter at the conference itself, in which about one hundred people participated, the trace of which lies in the unpublished written versions of the papers presented, hidden in the authors’ files; and, finally the potentially eternal embodiment of that work in this volume, now available to an infinite audience” (xv).

Many recent architecture students are familiar with the best-selling introduction to issues of Gender Space Architecture. Kim Dovey’s Framing Places, now in its second edition, is often used as a textbook. It follows in the tradition of Tom Markus’ work. However it now seems limited by the fascination of how built form and its spatial syntax can express power relations. Power is rather grossly understood rather than appreciated in its myriad and nuanced forms as relations of status, influence, taste and respect. It is bedevilled by dualisms such as society and space, buildings and activity, structure and agency despite a simplistic discussion of Bourdieu’s habitus which runs through the book. One would wish for much more of his Kabyle house and less of a structuralistic reading of his theories of field and distinction. Thus De Certeau is introduced to discuss resistance rather than performance or doing, leaving the impression that the built environment is somehow separate from the activity of people rather than an ongoing activity, which would leave students unable to make sense of, for example, the history and destruction of the huge 16th century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu activists 1992. The text really takes off late in the book with the author’s personal memoir of his teenage exploration of an abandoned fort where bodies, fears, attributed meanings (such as the abandoned iron and stone buildings possibly being haunted) and decay overturn the attempt to give a ‘design lesson’ (Dovey: 177) or match up the organization of plans to social hierarchies of function or prestige. We know that if this were all architecture is, we wouldn’t be publishing books about it. It’s not just ‘ironic’ that an abandoned fortress becomes a site of childhood adventure and leisure or that it rusts: even Ruskin feared the moral and political absolutism of durable materials. For him, rust is ethical. Such subtlety is needed to avoid trivializing sites that are now tourist attractions and that still matter as parts of a built heritage, such as Hitler’s bunker.

This text makes it clear how far and quickly the relevant fields are advancing. Markus and Cameron, for example, bring the collection together by examining the relationship between buildings and their texts, from programs and briefs to reviews to legal codes. This endeavour which would now include websites and could benefit from Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse approach and critical discourse analysis of Fairclough who explicitly compares building with ‘texting’ our worlds.

In my mind, Greig Crysler’s Writing Spaces and Tony King’s Spaces of Global Culture stand as manifestoes for this series. They build on theoretical texts such as Words Between the Spaces and Embodied Utopias on gender and the body. Can metropolitan utopias be womanly? Or, are they intrinsically masculinist and patristic? And should feminism become yet another ordering policy theme? Against this, Elizabeth Wilson celebrates Levi-Strauss’s slackness of the ’social tissue’ at the margins of 1940s New York and the importance of anti-utopian though not dystopic urban culture and spaces.

Writing Spaces is a unique investigation of the discursive space of debates concerning the built environment in five influential journals keeping an eye on the pedagogical possibilities of such a study to inform architectural and interdisciplinary education. In the book, he identifies one critical flaw which stands out, the division of the field amongst different disciplines on the basis of scale. These ‘fault lines’ hobble disciplines such as architecture, geography and urban studies’ ability to model causality and track trends and forces. A second major flaw of these disciplines is not remarked upon, the selective and casual appropriation of theory and method - in this series it is often Virilio - with at the same time a refusal to discuss what goes on to become discipline-specific readings of shared texts (Baudrillard, Foucault, Jacobs, for example). Usually higher education leads towards an awareness of the incompleteness of our knowledge. What lies behind the professions’ refusal to entertain interdisciplinary debates and the assertion of mastery - insecurity, dismissal, disinterest?

Cairns’ edited Drifting makes some projects previously published in diverse journals available (including from Space and Culture). It nicely captures the enormous and ‘unaccounted’ urban significance of the nonetheless statistical minority of the population that migrates between countries and into cities globally. Ironically in pursuing its strength of bringing the work of Mike Davis, Derrida and Ackbar Abbas to its audience, the collection neglects the work of Iain Chambers, whose location in Naples has contributed to making him the most consistent and critical writer in English on the book’s central theme of migrancy - and possibly the inventor of the current usage of this odd term (Chambers, 1985; Chambers, 1987; Chambers, 1990; Chambers, 1994; Chambers, 1997). Migrancy is not only an ‘idea in currency’ in the sense of being a common reference but a commodity: in line with my comments at the outset, I note that Architext’s owners (ultimately controlled by the Thompson family of Toronto) holds the copyright on most of Chambers’ material.

Beginning with Jaskot’s Architecture of Oppression, the books have maintained an interest in the operation and expression of power within architecture. This thematic has been developed over many years in the work of Tom Markus in particular. Elsewhere, the politics of building and the management of construction projects are a thinly spread mortar indeed. They have managed to largely escape critical investigation despite the importance of infrastructure and monuments in states, in national economies and in proclaiming and reproducing political and cultural values.

Where Jaskot rereads project management and construction histories, Kusno and Scriver and Prakash follows a similar strategy with a broad range of cultural texts to reveal colonial roots of postcolonial identity and tensions between the indigenous and trans-national for the case of Indonesia and in India. Public memory conditions how national identity is understood and forms the basis of any ‘Indonesian’ or other national architecture.

The postcolonial, a theme developed for over thirty years in the work of Anthony King, is the second major axis of the series. Elsewhere I have discussed his Spaces of Global Cultures (see Shields, 2005). Architext develops the historicity and material culture and geography of the humanities discussion of the rise of local literary intelligentsias and artistic elites (in literature, music) in previous European colonies and their ‘discovery’ and dissemination by cultural industries in global metropoles (New York, London, Paris, see Shields, forthcoming). While this has given a discursive bloom to local cultures, their enclosure within traditional relations of ruling and economic domination are attended to in other texts such as those by Fuller on Italian imperialism, Murray, Sheppard and Hall on post-apartheid cities and finally by Jyoti Hosagrahar’s recent book Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture, Urbanism and Colonialism in Delhi which won a 2006-07 Book Award from the International Planning History Society.

Contributors to Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity such as Gregory Clancey consider the spatial history of discourses and the political uses of ‘emergency’ as well as the militarization of daily spaces in the city. Ryan Bishop explores how intelligence for example, is considered as a social technology contributing to the genesis of the millennial global city. Crossing communication and urban studies, these initiatives remain descriptive and miss the opportunity to demonstrate what urban studies and planning has to learn from communication and media. This intersection warrants book-length and comparative analysis.

Architext gives us some sense of the intersections of disciplinary knowledges, social forces and cultural flows which have formed and continue to reshape contemporary global metropoles and the urban crossroads where globalization is encountered as a lived and material phenomenon of the street. The collection moves forward to sustainability issues in forthcoming books (Guy & Farmer, forthcoming). But what about such de-constructions as the Babri Mosque, not to mention the World Trade Centre and the ongoing politics of cultural memories of such events? In such a series it would be nice to see a critical examination of what one might crassly label (for the policies were often crass and the implementation more so) ‘third world slum and housing’ initiatives from the 1976 UN Habitat conference onward. As Clancey points out in Beyond Description, why was housing delivered even though it was wages that were demanded by urban populations? There would also be space for a good book on the urban context and impact of Olympic schemes. This is especially true in relation to public spaces, a topic which warrants consideration in the light of critical notions of ‘publics’ and ‘counterpublics’ and in light of historical scholarship challenging the separation of the private from a rational and economic public sphere. Other conjunctures include the status of port cities and, given the urban setting of many social and natural disasters, the phenomenon of ‘recovering cities’ and nature in cities, including urban agriculture and food supply infrastructures.

Reviewed by: Rob Shields, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

- Ondine