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Book Review: The Sage Companion to the City

as the formerly ‘stand-alone’ comprehensive volume fractures into so many thematic readers (such as the Routledge Urban Reader Series). The SCC stakes its claim to a share of the reader market in several ways. First, it endeavours to invert the more or less established structure used in this field of letting the urban luminaries speak for themselves by arranging original texts in chronological order and/or by grouping these into theoretical schools. The SCC’s alternative tack of using only fragmentary extracts from original texts and instead prioritising thematically structured contributions by contemporary urban scholars—together with the somewhat unorthodox ordering of themes and sub-themes—is done, it seems to me, to achieve two ends that are in principle praiseworthy. First, it destabilises the impression (arguably rendered in other readers) of there having been an ordered teleological progression, development and answering of the urban question both in terms of writings on and happenings in and to the city. The SCC, which in the introduction emphasises that the urban present is in the throes of “a [third urban] revolution that we are only just beginning to see, name and theorize”, seeks instead both to retain and feed off this uncertainty and to act as a guide and tentative ‘road map’ for beginners to this morphing and fracturing field of urban studies. This positing of uncertainty and frontier spirit may well explain why the editors frame the targeted readership as also including veteran urbanists. The danger here, of course, and one which has at least arisen in the context of using SCC in teaching at my own department, is of pedagogically failing to satisfy the needs of either segment. Further dangers, although more specifically concerning both the thematic rather than chronological/theoretical structure The Sage Companion to the City T. Hall, P. Hubbard and J. R. Short (Eds), 2008 Los Angeles, CA: Sage 398 pp. £75.00 hardback; £26.99 paperback ISBN 978 1 4129 0206 9 hardback; 978 1 4129 0206 6 paperback