| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City (New York: Monthly Review Press 2002).

DIALECTICAL URBANISM contains a number of previously published (and rewritten) articles, together with some new materials, which Andy Merrifield has melded together to tell a particular story about the contemporary urban experience within the advanced capitalist city. The central theme of the book is that this contemporary urban experience is one riven by a number of contradictions. Specifically, as suggested by its title, Merrifield seeks to explore what he calls the dialectic of urbanism and urbanization, by which he means the dialectic between the experiences of living in the contemporary, post-industrial metropolis and the ways in which the urban built environment are physically constructed as part of the accumulation process under capitalism. Three tenets run through the book, as outlined by Merrifield in its introduction: first, "truth claims about cities must be conceived from the bottom upward, must be located and grounded in the street, in urban public space, in everyday life"; second, the built environment is an inherently political social product and different sorts of organizing and localized action are necessary to construct more socially just cities; and third, there is an ambiguous metaphysical condition to the urban experience in which both optimistic and dysfunctional aspects of modern life are expressed — cities can be simultaneously liberatory and oppressive, utopian and dystopian, full of pessimism or full of hopeful potential.

After laying out the conceptual structure for the book, there are then five chapters which examine a number of contemporary conflicts within several US and British cities. In Chapter 2 Merrifield explores conflicts over the creation of the bourgeois playground of Baltimore's Inner Harbor, particularly as it has impacted the area around the old American Can Company plant. The chapter recounts how federal government urban policy has been hijacked during the past twenty years or so by large financial interests and how speculative investments in the spaces of the built environment have encouraged the gentrification of old industrial facilities. Merrifield examines how a local community group sought to intervene in the built environment to save the American Can plant from being demolished so that it would retain both its corporeal and psychic position within the local community's lifeworld. For Merrifield, part of the paradox of this conflict between developers and local community activists is that whilst the community activists took on the power of speculative capital (and so might be seen by some on the left as heroic proletarians) they were also, in many ways, quite racist, bigoted, and nationalistic in their politics — many supported the first Gulf War and were quite explicit that they did not want "Jewish parasite developers" destroying their neighborhood. Merrifield calls this situation (racist and nationalistic proletarians fighting the forces of capital) a "political dilemma" for the left, for it complicates some representations which see working-class community activists who challenge the power of capital as flawless heroic figures — though ultimately the dilemma may stem more from the left's idealized notion of how proletarians should act and its failure to understand the power of patriotism for many working class people than from the actual practices of community activists and workers themselves.

In Chapter 3 Merrifield looks at the conflicts that have divided neighbours within the poorer parts of Liverpool, England. In particular, whereas the majority of residents within the poorest of Liverpool's inner-city neighborhoods are white, struggles for social justice have usually been portrayed as an issue particularly for mobilizing black Britons and non-white immigrants, and questions of class have tended to disappear from local political organizing agendas which have been articulated by many non-white community activists. One of the questions for Merrifield, then, is how to celebrate ethnic difference amongst urban subjects whilst simultaneously trying to maintain some sense of commonality and cohesion amongst workers who share similar class positions. As a way of exploring this question further, perhaps, in Chapter 4 Merrifield recounts the living- wage activism in Los Angeles in which janitors and other low-wage workers — who are mostly non-Anglo — have managed to organize around issues both of class and ethnicity. For Merrifield, continuing the theme of urban dialectics, the living-wage campaigns which have arisen in over one hundred US cities represent American workers' antithesis to capital's assault on their standards of living. They are the working-class response as many jobs and services have been sub-contracted out by a downsizing corporate America and by local governments during the past twenty years.

Having spent some time in the book investigating conflicts within the contemporary city, Merrifield then ponders in Chapter 5 the issue of order and disorder in the city, contrasting the writings of 19th-century writers such as Marx and Dostoevsky with 20th-century writers such as Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford. In particular, Merrifield argues that both a certain amount of order and disorder are essential for a vibrant urban culture, an argument that he delves into through an analysis of the transformation of 42nd Street/ Times Square in New York City. Continuing the focus on NYC, Chapter 6 scrutinizes what has been happening to Single-Room-Occupancy (SRO) tenants as many neighbourhoods in the city become gentrified as the city reinvents itself as a post-industrial, financial services and tourist-destination metropolitan centre. Finally, Chapter 7 serves as a conclusion to probe what Merrifield calls the "negative dialectic of the city" and the conflicts under capitalism between use-values and exchange -values in the built environment.

In summing up, although Merrifield is not the first to make the argument that there are deep contradictions within cities, he writes about the topics covered in the book with great passion and aplomb. The book is easy to read — Merrifield is an evocative writer — and the prose flows in such a manner that you want to turn the page to find out what happens next. The book would be appropriate for students of all levels, from first-year undergraduates to graduate students, who are dealing with urban issues across a wide range of social science or humanities disciplines, particularly for those interested in reading about case studies of contemporary urban struggles. One criticism of the book, however, relates to the copy-editing. Although most books usually have some typographical errors (in this one the reader might be left wondering whether the "ballet boxes" of page 72 relate to voting or to dancing ), there is a significant problem with the footnoting in Chapter 2 — 48 footnotes are made in the prose but there are only 47 footnotes for the chapter at the end of the book (it appears that the inconsistency begins around footnote 36). If a second edition of the book is planned, this inconsistency should be corrected.


Andrew Herod University of Georgia

In issue 52, Pamela Sugiman's review of Ann Eyerman's study of current trends in office work cited the title of this book in different ways. The correct title of the book, published by Sumach Press, is Women in the Office: Transitions in a Global Economy.

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