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Book Review: Remaking the Global Economy: Economic-Geographical Perspectives

how possibilities emerge in urban space. Various chapters, from Bridge on everyday rationality to Pinder on utopian urbanism, experiment with different practices of emancipatory urbanism. There is therefore a sense, also articulated in Lees’s Introduction, that progressive thought can give hope to cities as well as place hope in cities. Indeed it is appropriate that David Harvey, and Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, offer closing reflections on the emancipatory city because in recent writings each has offered quite different responses to the common problem of how to create something better. The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possibilities makes an important, and timely, contribution to work on cities because it exemplifies the responsibilities that radical thought has to foster something better through a mixture of fascinating theoretical and empirical cases. The three parts do, however, raise a set of additional questions – in part because the collection obliges us to think critically and creatively about how to foster an urban politics of emancipation. First, the term ‘emancipation’ is surprisingly underdetermined and varies in use between the chapters. How does it incorporate, supplement or replace ideas of freedom, recognition, redistribution, dignity, justice, equality, or liberty? Second, questions remain about how the promise of the city is theorized given the attention to ‘difference’ and ‘practices’. Part 1, for example, works primarily with an account of difference as difference from something else rather than a more disruptive account of urban life as animated by the singularities of difference in itself (with the exception of Ruddick). On emancipatory practices (Part 2), little attention is given to how ‘practice’ or ‘performance’ are theorized (with the exception of Bridge) or what happens to the term ‘structure’. Third, the collection raises some unanswered questions about the relation between explanatorydiagnostic thought and anticipatory-utopian thought. What is the place of modes of critique in relation to utopianism? How do we practise judgement if the task is to disclose possibilities and paradoxes? Is anticipatory-utopian thought necessarily synonymous with the creation of a (re)vision through the imagination? These are, however, relatively minor questions that do not detract from an excellent collection which is animated by a powerful sense of political and intellectual purpose. Most refreshing, despite the heterogeneity of different substantive cases and juxtaposition of at times contradictory theories, is the welcome sense of a common project linking the 15 chapters. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, I think it is the tone of the book that gives it a coherence which compares positively to other, more fractured, edited collections. The chapters are animated by a belief, a trust, that things could be otherwise because each author works hard to resist the pessimistic defeatism that has inadvertently animated other critical work on cities. But, because this is a hopeful rather than optimistic collection, the question mark in the title is appropriate given that emancipation cannot be guaranteed. The Emancipatory City? Paradoxes and Possibilities embodies hope but also risk and, consequently, a sense of urgency since ‘the uncertainty of the outcome remains . . . danger and faith are the truth of hope, in such a way that both are gathered in it’ (Bloch, 1986: 112).