Cities in Global Capitalism_reviewed by Alan Walks

BOOK REVIEWS 394 The interesting thing about these chapters is that they explore processes of gentrification which, while deserving of individual conceptualization in their own right, are also intertwined. Gentrification is a concept usually thought to be residential. The chapters on tourism and retail gentrification show that a neighbourhood does not have to be entirely or mostly residential to experience symptoms of gentrification followed by displacement. Following on from these, the chapter on rural gentrification explains how the concept of wilderness can attract gentrifiers and trigger gentrification in remote and rural spots, even though gentrification is thought to be an urban concept. Slum and social housing gentrification happens when affordable housing stock on previously peripheral land becomes gentrified for the use of higher-income social classes; the relevant chapters here investigate in particular direct state intervention in these situations. New-build gentrification covers the long-debated question of whether newly built housing stock can count as gentrification and if so under what circumstances. Part V stands out as the most interesting section of this book, addressing the least researched aspect of gentrification, namely the alternatives to and resistance against gentrification. Resistance against gentrification is explained not only with reference to mass protests and lawsuits against state institutions or real estate developers, but also through everyday acts of resistance that may go unnoticed and conflicts enacted on the ground. This is a very refreshing way of looking at resistance, especially in countries under authoritarian regimes. It is followed by an investigation of the alternatives to gentrification that can exist even ‘in the middle of gentrified neighbourhoods’ (p. 425), such as community land trusts and eco-villages. Often investigated in their own right, such ways of communal living to provide a more affordable housing solution are explored as a means of countering gentrification while stopping neighbourhoods from becoming run down. Two concepts––immigration and planning laws––are addressed in two dedicated chapters as new ways of understanding and resisting gentrification. Finally, the book concludes with a very interesting chapter on ‘self-renovating neighbourhoods’ (p. 467) as an alternative to gentrification. It presents the idea of DIY regeneration focusing on collectiveness, concluding with the words: ‘The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative’ (p. 478). Overall, Handbook of Gentrification Studies is a very thorough work, allowing as it does for (the clearly very necessary) flexibility in the gentrification literature. The authors not only deal with issues long debated in the gentrification field, but also present readers with rather new and refreshing ways to explore these processes, concluding with a call for resistance and the creation of alternatives to this process. Aysegul Can, Istanbul Medeniyet University Ugo Rossi 2017: Cities in Global Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press In Cities in Global Capitalism, Ugo Rossi has written a remarkably succinct yet nonetheless comprehensive review of the importance and role of the city in general, and global cities in particular, in the evolution of contemporary global capitalism. One of the most recent publications in the Polity Press Urban Futures series, this is an extended yet focused review of the literature, allowing the author to make his own interventions in the debate. While the main focus is on the last two decades, Rossi is able to weave into his review much of the history of postwar capitalism. One of the key merits of the book is the way Rossi brings different critical theories to bear on the relationship between global urban development and neoliberalism. The work comprises five main chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion chapter wrapping up the book. The first substantive chapter (‘Emergences’) examines the structural shifts occurring within global capitalism that have made––and re-made–– urban economies through their industrial past, the rise of entrepreneurial managerialism, BOOK REVIEWS 395 financialization and the growing importance of cognitive-cultural capital. The second chapter (‘Extensions’) specifically examines the role of cities, including so-called ‘global cities’, in the extension and transformation of global capitalism, interrogating issues of global policy transfer, the politics of globalization and processes of planetary urbanization. These two chapters do not merely recite and synthesize the literature on urban transformation. Rossi puts disparate theorists into conversation, including on the one hand the classic economic geography of Alan Scott and Michael Storper, the political economy of David Harvey, Saskia Sassen and Emmanuel Wallerstein, plus the planetary urbanization perspective that Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid develop from Henri Lefebvre, and on the other hand the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the biopolitical perspectives of Giorgio Agemben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, together with the autonomist perspective of Maurizio Lazzarato. Having laid out the history of urban transformations and introduced each of these theories to one another, the third chapter (‘Continuities’) interrogates the relationship between urbanization, the politics of austerity and the rise of neoliberalism. It explores how the processes of urban development––and even more so, the urban experience of living in, creating in and consuming in and of the city––has been neoliberalized and provided a vehicle for the neoliberalization of entire ways of life. Rossi mixes urban political economy and biopolitical approaches into an explanation of how, through the rise of an urban culture of––and indeed cult of––homeownership, talent and creativity, urban life itself has become the material (and immaterial) basis for capitalist valorization, extraction and expansion. The global financial crisis, and the extractive nature of globalized mortgage markets, features in a number of places, informing the relationships between financialization and neoliberalization. Rossi suggests that within ‘this context, neoliberalism has served as the politico-moral engine for the adoption and dissemination of a totalizing life regime in cities across the world’ (p. 90). Yet, cities are also the sites of contradiction, crisis and struggle, as well as necessarily the source of ‘promised resurgence of contemporary capitalism’ (p. 110). Cities are cause and consequence, site and prize. The fourth chapter (‘Diffusions’) digs deeper into the contradictory ways that globalization has necessarily produced, and depended on, the creation of urban differentiation through the diffusion of pan-urban policies, cultures and economic processes. Through detailed excavations of the meanings and urban importance of three key processes––McDonaldization, Disneyfication and Guggenheimization––Rossi revisits the theorizing of globalization in terms of either homogenization or glocalization, putting the recent literature into conversation with Jameson’s postmodern condition, Brenner and Schmid’s planetary urbanization and Robinson’s ordinary cities. Rossi suggests that the politics undergirding these three key processes reveal contradictions in the assumptions about urban growth and entrepreneurialism, while foretelling the rise of new forms of extractive capitalism. The fifth and last substantive chapter of the book (‘Variations’) is where Rossi adds more of his own voice to this extended review. He examines whether the contemporary global economy, characterized by the financial, trade, immigration and information networks of global cities profiting from the rise of the cultural-cognitive capital (information technology, etc.), could act as the potential basis of a renewed social economy and/or the foundation for new collective forms of urban living and association, or whether instead the city in global capitalism is becoming a mechanism for accumulation by dispossession. Of course, there is already evidence of the latter, while the former remains an elusive but nonetheless present potentiality. Rossi ends the chapter by discussing the possibilities and contradictions of the ‘sharing economy’, and the ways platform capitalism could be employed for both social and extractive ends. Rossi concludes the book less by summarizing the main points of his extensive review and more by commenting on the political implications of the relationship BOOK REVIEWS 396 between urban transformations and global capitalism. According to Rossi, the forms of life that have been made and re-made under the evolution of capitalism, with cities increasingly differentiated and differentiating, ‘revive the spectre of fascism’ yet also ‘allow for the rise of a transformational politics’ (p. 178). I wish this particular chapter had been longer, as the subject matter is so fascinating, but at only eight pages Rossi could merely touch on some of the possibilities and fruitful lines of theorizing around the politics of the current conjuncture. I guess this will have to be the subject of his next book! Overall, Rossi’s book represents an important contribution to our understanding of the role of cities in contemporary capitalism. Not only does it summarize and synthesize a significant amount of work, it also brings into conversation an impressive range of urban theory. Is anything lacking? I would like to have seen more engagement with feminist scholarship on the city, and would like to have known what Rossi thinks of the growing literature on urban assemblages and how this might fit (or not) with his perspective. The story told here is also largely that of the rich developed nations (and the Pacific rim), one which seasoned urban scholars will already know well. That said, Rossi’s book does what it sets out to do well; I would recommend it as a resource for those attempting to understand the relationships between the evolution of the world economy, the politics of neoliberalism and transformations in urban life. Alan Walks, University of Toronto Verónica Gago (ed.) 2017: Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Veronica Gago’s book Neoliberalism from Below is a welcome translation of her work La Razón Neoliberal, originally published in Argentina in 2014. The book is a child of its time, when it appeared that the foundations of the neoliberal project in Latin America were shaking, with widespread popular discontent and the rise of governments proposing anti-neoliberal discourses. Recent political shifts in South America have shown that the end of neoliberalism is not necessarily the next milestone for the region. Nevertheless, the book convincingly illustrates that neoliberalism is not just an abstract order imposed upon ordinary people by international financial institutions and state policy. Decades of neoliberal reasoning are not easily erased––indeed quite the contrary, with the book showing that grassroots communities actively incorporate neoliberalism’s core logic into their own forms of organizing economic life. Gago makes this argument by studying the case of La Salada, Latin America’s largest informal market, which thrives largely thanks to the labour of Bolivian immigrants undertaking both the manufacturing and selling of (counterfeit) branded clothes. The case presented also links with debates on migration, transnational networks, immigrant labour and social welfare, making it a welcome addition from ‘the global South’ (which would have been inaccessible to many readers had it remained untranslated). Neoliberalism from Below captures how neoliberal practices are sustained across time and political shifts in Latin America through the adaptation of its core logic by wider society, as shown by its focus on marginalized Bolivian immigrant groups in Buenos Aires. Gago uses La Salada market, located at the city’s margins, as an entry point to explore how neoliberalism’s practices are profoundly absorbed into everyday practices in the informal economy. Neoliberal logics penetrate many aspects of Bolivian immigrants’ lives, from the villas where they live, work and create communities, to the transnational connections they have through production and consumption in La Salada. Whilst Bolivian immigrants constitute only a small portion of the total urban population,