AdrianFranklin2010: City Life. London: Sage Publications.AlexandraBoutros and WillStraw (eds.) 2010: Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture. Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press.Jeremy W.Crampton and StuartElden (eds.) 2007: Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Debating how cities differ from one another is a popular parlour game these days. Any silence at a dinner table can be bridged by starting a sentence such as ‘Since I have moved away from Berlin, I miss …’ or ‘London is such an optimistic city, a lot more so than …’. Then the discussion takes off. It essentially revolves around the question of how to characterize cities and it confirms what everyone knows and what unmistakably comes out in the course of the conversation: cities differ fundamentally. There seems to be an accepted system of comparison. New York is compared with Paris, Berlin and London, but not with Bombay or Nuremberg. There is broadly shared knowledge about the special features of cities and about the strategies of cities to set themselves apart, all of which is effectively purveyed chiefly in newspapers and magazines. Urban planners, too, single out a city's special features in order to develop appropriate proposals for the way space should be conceived. Planning must not only be sensitive to the differences between cities and formulate compatible solutions for them but must also promote differentiation in terms of strategies for achieving uniqueness. However, little or no framework exists for organizing knowledge about which strategies of this kind are promising in which cities. The distinctiveness of cities has thus reappeared on the research agenda. First, social scientists are closely analysing how cities operating under severe competitive pressure are working hard at differentiating themselves. Secondly, claims about the universality of cultural knowledge are being fundamentally challenged from the perspectives of postmodernism and postcolonialism. Despite all the rhetoric about globalization, local specificities are coming back into focus. Like others, Adrian Franklin opens his book, City Life, by observing that urban studies are disposed to either treating cities as abstract systems or to detailing problems and undesirable trends. Most analyses do not capture what is special, magical, phantasmagorical or transcendental about a city. Franklin has written a book about ‘how cities, or many of them at any rate, came to be such central elements of our lives and why they take the form they do’ (p. 2). He underlines that cities are inextricably linked with the routines of the people who live in them. They are the daily reference system for action, even for people who have to travel many miles to get to the next city. Nairobi is the point of reference even on a farm in Africa, as we know from Karen Blixen's Out of Africa. As Franklin explains, these cities have each grown historically in their own way, ‘have come together from very diverse and different contexts, histories, cultures and opportunities, they are not the same’ (p. 5). His book is an attempt to write against a perspective of urban studies that treats cities of the same size like clones of one another, all homogenized by a global industry. Franklin goes about his project using the heading ‘Making city life’ to foreground the qualities that make a city successful. He asks about the conditions that enable its inhabitants to create an urban culture. This inquiry forms the second part of the book. In the first part he explores what is called the ecological relationship between humans, machines, buildings and ‘nature’. He states that he wants to avoid the trap of presenting cities as though humans were the only relevant actors. ‘The agency of trees, and by that I mean what trees actually do, has been systematically ignored in trying to understand the increasing threat (and cost) they pose to major cities’ (p. 223). Franklin's objective is to describe cities as work in progress. To this end he presents the reader with various case studies. One is on Canterbury, a former Roman centre and today a city that has ceded its economic, political and cultural functions to London. Another is on Bristol, the port city that was shaped by industrial machines and that, in his view, could today be characterized as Coketown in Mumford's sense of the word. His research also includes Paris, which he believes has successfully resisted the functional logic of modernism and has cultivated awareness of places (such as the Place des Vosges) where one can immediately slow down to ‘enjoy the moments of being in the city’ (p. 53). According to Franklin, city life today is structurally embedded in a consumer society, migration, the rise of the creative and cultural industries and the reconstruction and aestheticization of urban communities. This view, he writes, opens the field for a renaissance of ritualized city life, despite all the existing drawbacks. It is becoming important again to have places where one can eat and drink together, places to dance, places that are sexualized and that offer the possibilities of meeting others. Not all cities, but many of them, create places for ‘spectacle, excitement and ritual’ (p. 191). Employing examples such as jazz, street markets, city gardens, and shopping centres in different cities, Franklin plausibly argues that people today seek far more than simply shopping or sightseeing. They want to be challenged, entertained and educated. They want to feel involvement and belonging — and they find it in many cities. He notes that urban renewal does not solve the problem of urban poverty, but it does offer more fun for more people. ‘The joy of dancing with others, of planting a garden, of being known in a city quarter or in a café or pub, of being challenged or interpellated by a reflexive and robust art scene or excited by a local soccer team and stumbling on ways to make ourselves anew — all these are the point of city life’ (p. 228). Adrian Franklin has written a very worthwhile book. It succeeds in redirecting the reader's attention to the strengths of contemporary cities without glossing over the drawbacks of zoning, commercialization and segregation. He shows that cities today, despite their capitalist rationale — and partially thanks to it — offer a wide range of possibilities for stimulation, education, recreation for highly diverse social groups and residential quality. Where the book falls short is in fulfilling its promise to bring the special character of cities to bear fruitfully on social-science research. Although Franklin writes that cities have a ‘particular rhythm and pulse’ and that they are more than ‘a sum of their parts’ (p. 223), the cities he analyses remain examples from which to draw generalizable conclusions. Whether Canterbury or London, the purpose of describing the cities is to learn about how contemporary life works there. But it remains unclear what distinguishes the rhythm in London from that in Paris and whether other cities have similar rhythms (like London but not like Paris). The complex enterprise of sorting out and characterizing the manifestations of city life is not resolved. No attempt is made either to formulate theoretically what makes the city in its entirety more than the sum of its parts or to distinguish it from other entireties. The intrinsic logic of a given city as distinct from some other one vanishes behind the evidence that most cities (but not all) are the liveable, multifaceted products of many people's actions. The culture of cities is also the subject of the volume edited by Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw. The book is the outcome of the eponymous interdisciplinary research programme funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To analyse city cultures, the book's contributors concentrate on the aspect of circulation. Circulation is taken to mean not only ‘movement of cultural forms but is als [sic] the manner in which such forms establish rhythms of discourse over time’ (pp. 6–7). Like Franklin, Boutros and Straw do not want to limit circulation to ideas, influences or impulses, but desire rather to have it include the constraints of material form. In this volume, too, the introduction stresses that the city can no longer be seen as a passive context for globally circulating products. Rather, ‘the city is itself constituted by circulation’ (p. 9). Mobile technologies, mass transportation, media and migration shape the city. According to Boutros and Straw, the singularity of the city arises from the urban imaginary. They state that the coexistence of multiple ways of being urban imaginaries provides the analytical lens through which to comprehend each specific urban culture. Circulation is structured ‘by the pace of city life and by the ways in which the city is connected to points around the globe’ (p. 11). From that perspective the distinguishing feature of cities is understood as a path of the city (the local dimension) and as a node in the world (the global dimension). The book has three parts: ‘The mobile city’ deals with the dissolution of borders, ‘City traffic’ examines how vectors of mobility constitute the city, and ‘City circuits’ focuses on place and explores how it emerges from circulation. All the authors in this volume refer to circulation as an aspect of city life, but only rarely do they mention the production of differentiation or continue that metaphor as their thinking progresses. Language (Michael Darroch), waste (Will Straw), consumption in Berlin as a divided city (Alexander Sedlmaier and Barthold Pelzer), the flâneur in Adolfo Bioy Casares's novel Dream of Heroes (Amanda Holmes) and density in Dublin (Kieran Bonner): these essays show the diversity of disciplinary approaches to the topic of circulation, and each of the texts is definitely worth reading. The composite picture they convey shows that the city is in many ways a space of circulation, both material and immaterial. Unfortunately, however, it is often difficult to read the texts as answers to the questions and themes articulated in the foreword. A notable exception is the contribution by Adam Blum, ‘The imaginary of self-satisfaction: reflections on the platitude of the “creative city”.’ Blum emphasizes that circulation calls attention to continuous change, in other words, that the present, in terms of motion, is always being shaped as something formative of the future. Seen in this light, the city becomes the centre of action in the sense of being woven into an imaginative structure. As Blum says, the very image of the creative city conjures the illusion that every city ‘can be creative in its time for making such a life seem as if it matters’ (p. 67). Making a better life appears to be something that is possible to plan. The old idea of the city as a market place is implicit here, with market value as a standard being transferred so as to position the city as the place where absolutely everyone wants to be. It is the ‘object of desire’ as much as a ‘seat of action’ (p. 68). The creative city becomes the normative vision for every city. As Blum puts it, the paradox lies in the fact that Richard Florida's policy seeks to build on the specificity of each city but actually becomes the lodestar for all of them. He believes that Florida actually provokes urban researchers to liberate themselves from the idea that city life is inherently stimulating. Blum asserts that a re-reading of Aldo Rossi could help readdress the struggle between persistence and modification. To Blum, it is important for cities to resolve their problems by drawing on knowledge about the relationship between established structures and modifications adapted to them. He thereby argues both for a culture of carefully analysing each urban culture and the types of solutions adapted to the city and for a planning approach that puts higher priority on expanding what already exists (Weiterbauen) than on building something altogether new (Neubauen). Blum sees the great city as being one that is capable of relating the extremes to each other. He is original in reading Florida's book as a travesty, as an overemphasis on normal life, as an exaggeration that simultaneously makes one aware of this life and thereby enables one to call it into question. ‘Florida helps show how the city of today gives us an opportunity for pleasure only if we think of ourselves and our practices as constantly newborn — that is, infantile’ (p. 75). In Blum's view, Florida is popular because he accentuates the dream of eternal youth and, hence, of feasibility, flexibility and life design. Blum's essay does not deny the strengths of the experiential aspects that Franklin brings up, but he does unequivocally show the emergence of urban social and material structures that must be understood as one goes about designing the future. These structures are something that no political organ can change, for they suffuse the practices of city dwellers. Moreover, Blum demonstrates that these structures tend to be overlooked because, as he says, the desire to imagine unfettered development (be it the child's or the city's) is what dominates. There is only one possible conclusion: if one wants to shape cities, then one must grasp the structures that characterize a particular city as opposed to some other — because it is illusory to believe that all cities have the same structures. The question about the unique features of cities cannot be posed or answered without a grounding in spatial theory. The term space is used today to describe an organization of coexistence, just as the term time is meant to refer to an arrangement of sequences. Spaces thereby establish a relation between simultaneous placements. That which is placed has to be plural in order to be perceived as space. It is not the object that is space; space extends between objects. Space is therefore the quintessence of simultaneities. Thinking in terms of spaces sharpens one's awareness that the world is conceivable only as being differentiated socially and materially at the same time too. One of the authors who has repeatedly expressed this thought is Michel Foucault. He has insisted on contemplating logics that underlie manifestations of simultaneity. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden have edited a volume that gives an overview of Foucault's works on space and of the way geographers in the United States and France have grappled with them. In 1976 Foucault addressed questions to the geographers of the French journal Hérodote, and they responded in an issue of the journal. However, the exchange did not appear in English until a translation was published in 1980. Members of the English-speaking community therefore read the interview only after having read Foucault's works such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality (1978). They discussed the ideas intensely, while their French-speaking colleagues took little notice. Crampton and Elden's volume is now an attempt to systematize the debate. It starts with the questions that Michel Foucault originally posed to Hérodote. Foucault underscores that he is not an expert in geography and that he asks his questions in a completely open and curious manner. He begins with the problem of strategy, which must always be considered when knowledge is analysed, and wonders whether ‘domination is only a continued form of war’ (p. 19). He then launches the debate about whether constituting a knowledge of spaces necessarily has to mean constituting a science. He asks what power means in the context of analysing space. The volume documents the responses published in Hérodote in 1977 by Jean-Michel Brabant, Alain Joxe, Jean-Bernard Racine, Claude Raffestin and Michel Riou. They are followed by responses written in 2006 by the anglophone scholars David Harvey, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift and Thomas Flynn. The section that follows builds on these contributions through analyses by four authors (Stuart Elden, Matthew Hannah, Juliet J. Fall and Claude Raffestin) of the context of the responses. How do 30 years of history change the reception of ideas? How does the constantly evolving work by Foucault affect the way his ideas are received? And which argument can be attributed to the cultural contexts of the recipients? The reader can then delve into the original texts by Foucault. Relatively unknown French articles (mostly translated by Gerald Moore) thus become available to the anglophone public. Other texts that had already been translated but that had attracted little note thus far are reprinted in the book. The compilation explores Foucault's thinking about space, and it is complemented by new contributions that take Foucault's ideas further (for example, governmentality, health and sexuality, and surveillance). The volume is clearly organized. Reading it gives some insight into Foucault's work and how it was received by anglophone and francophone geographers. It is not surprising that the provocative question of power was discussed in France in the 1970s and that the discipline's own entanglement in the mesh of power was accepted there in principle. By contrast, Harvey offers the first thorough discussion of Kant's influence on Foucault. Astonishingly, he sees only Newton's influence on Kant (which is undoubtedly there, but which Kant definitely did not treat unambiguously as absolute space). Harvey concludes, ‘I have profound objections to Foucault's conception precisely because of its basis in a purely Kantian (Newtonian) interpretation of spatiality’ (p. 45). He finds Foucault's conception of heterotopia to be undialectical and Lefebvre to be much more worthwhile reading. Nigel Thrift, too, sees little geographic potential in Foucault's work. Foucault, he contends, tends to think of space in terms of orders. Space thereby becomes interesting as a medium for him, but he remains unaware of ‘a good part of space's aliveness’ (p. 55). Matthew Hannah combs through the anglophone discussion in geography and refers to many more texts than this volume contains. He shows that Foucault's ideas were always present but that Foucault did not become a classic in the sense of ‘pinning him down once and for all’ (p. 102). He concludes incisively that what is happening is a construction of ‘Foucault’ that is constantly being reinvented. Juliet J. Fall only confirms the absence of the author Foucault in the francophone discussion. This absence characterizes urban studies as well. The eight contributions that end the book on the current reception of Michel Foucault deal with subjects as diverse as medical geography, homosexuality, surveillance and eugenics. Space plays only a minor role. Nevertheless, the reader comes away with the impression that researchers in urban studies, too, would benefit from re-reading Foucault and from revisiting spatial theories if they wish to continue grappling with the problem posed by the specificity of cities and their design. First, this investment would be one way of pursuing Aldo Rossi's call for thinking in terms of structures. Secondly, the flip side of specificity is the mode of social ordering — and Foucault is really the expert on that subject.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.