Book reviews

Gender and the Built Environment: Emancipation in Planning, Housing and Mobility in Europe. L. Ottes, E. Poventud, M. van Schendelen and G. Segond von Banchet (Eds), Assen, Van Gorcum, 1995, 298 pp, pb, ISBN 9 0232 3027 2 (no stated price)

Baltic Europe in the Perspective of Global Change. Antoni Kuklinski (Ed.), Warsaw, Oficyna Naukowa, 1995, 517 pp, pb, ISBN 83 85505 27 X (no stated price)

Trading Industries—Trading Regions. H. Noponen, J. Graham and A. R. Markusen (Eds), London/New York, The Guildford Press, 1993, x + 310 pp, £16.99 pb, ISBM 0 89862 753 2

Competitive Cities: Succeeding in the Global Economy. H. Duffy, London, Spon, 1995, 190 pp, £24.99 hb, ISBN 0 419 19840 7

De l'atelier au territoire: Le travail en quête d'espace (From workshop to territory: labour looking for new spaces). Thérèse Evette and François Lautier (Eds), Paris, L'Harmattan, 1994, 248 pp, £15.00 pb, ISBN 2 7384 3159 3     

About Pakistan and Bangladesh

Book reviewed in this article: A Family in Pakistan: Ailsa Scarsbrook and Alan Scarsbrook Focus on Pakistan: Mano Rumalshah Pakistan and Bangladesh: Nicholas Nugent     

Contested visions of American democracy: citizenship, public housing, and the international arena

This essay reexamines the history of public housing and the controversy it generated from the Great Depression to the Cold War. By recasting that history in the global arena, it demonstrates that the debate over public housing versus homeownership was also a debate over the meaning of American citizenship and democracy, pointing up starkly divergent notions about what was and was not American. Through an examination of national conflicts and neglected local struggles, this article further shows that the fight over public housing was far more meaningful and volatile than traditionally assumed. Both critics and advocates of public housing drew from international experiences and imagery in positioning the home as a constitutive feature of citizenship in American democracy. Fears of Bolshevism, fascism, and communism served to internationalize issues of race, space, and housing and together shaped the decision of whether a decent home was an American right or privilege.     

The World Bank's ‘Assault on Poverty’ as a Political Question (1968–81)

This article analyses the actions of the World Bank between 1968 and 1981, under the presidency of Robert McNamara, in the context of the Cold War and the directions of US foreign aid policy. It discusses the reasons for, and the means by which the World Bank led, the ‘assault on poverty’, with an emphasis on rural poverty. It problematizes the theory which supported this initiative, analysing its operationalization in the countryside; it discusses the principal format that it assumed, the reasons which propelled it, the political calculation which guided it, the interests at play, and the results that were reached. Finally, the article argues that the ‘assault on poverty’ slogan expresses the disposition and the willingness of the World Bank to intervene in domestic questions, aiming to alter, in a selective and focused manner, the condition of particular social groups in client countries, rather than improving the general conditions of economies. This in turn demanded the strengthening of its advisory, technical assistance and economic research functions. If McNamara's policy of fighting poverty can be considered a failure in economic and social terms (a diagnosis widely accepted in the literature), this article argues that, politically, it was successful by constructing the foundations for the neoliberal-type focused social policies that were in vogue in the following decades.