Book reviews

The Restless Urban Landscape. Paul L. Knox (Ed.), New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1993, 285pp.

Towards a New Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy. Alain Lipietz, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992, 206pp.

London: A New Metropolitan Geography. Keith Hoggart and David R. Green (Eds), London, Edward Arnold, 1992, pbk.

Regional Innovation Policy: Case‐studies from the Ruhr Area, Baden‐Württemberg and the North East of England. Robert Hassink, Faculteit Ruimtelijke Wetenschappen Rijksuniversiteit, 1992, 187pp., ISBN 90–6809–155–7.

Environmental Problems in Eastern Europe. F. W. Carter and D. Turnock (Eds), London, Routledge, 1993, 249 pp., ISBN 0–415–06229–2.

From Garden Cities to New Towns: Campaigning for town and Country Planning 1899–1946.. Dennis Hardy, London, E. and F. N. Spon, 1992, 340pp., £39.95 hbk.     

EVALUATING A COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT PROGRAM: A CITIZENS GROUP PERSPECTIVE

A citizens advisory group evaluation of a Community Development Block Grant program is compared with similar responses from city staff and city council members. All three groups provided quite positive assessments with the citizens group evaluations closer to staff responses than to council members. Objective indicators of program targeting also reveal that projects and funds have been committed to those areas of greatest need. An argument is made that citizen groups which are closely involved with certain urban programs may be able to provide useful evaluations of program performance.     

Application of Hurst Resecaling to Geophysical Serial Data

The empirical investigation of several geophysical time series indicates that they are composed of segments representing different natural regimes, or periods when events are strongly autocorrelated. Using a data transformation method developed by Hurst, these regimes are differentiated by rescaling the time series and examining the resulting transformed trace for inflections. As regime signals are not completely mixed and have rather long run lengths, Hurst rescaling produces a clustering of extremes of the same sign and elevates the Hurst exponent to values greater than 0.5. These regimes have a characteristic distribution, as defined by the mean and standard deviation, which differ from the statistical characteristics of the complete record. Analysis of sunspot numbers, monthly precipitation records from the midwestern United States, and annual watershed discharge yield regimes that correlate to well-documented periods of extreme activity. Rescaling appears to be useful in screening time series of unknown characteristics to differentiate periods dominated by regime-specific physical processes.     

Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana

This article addresses the phenomenal success of pentecostalism, a global religious movement par excellence, throughout postcolonial Africa. Investigating pentecostalist views of and attitudes towards commodities in southern Ghana, the article shows that pentecostalists represent the modern global economy as enchanted and themselves as agents of disenchantment: only through prayer may commodities cease to act as ‘fetishes’ which threaten the personal integrity and identity of their owners. Pentecostalism creates modern consumers through a ritual of prayer, which helps them handle globalization and control foreign commodities in such a way that they can be consumed without danger. Through prayer, commodities cease to possess their owners; the latter are rather enabled to possess the former. Pentecostalism engages in globalization by enabling its members to consume products from the global market and by offering its followers fixed orientation points and a well-delimited moral universe within globalization's unsettling flows.     

The Effects of Mayoral Power on Urban Fiscal Policy

Can mayors of American cities overcome the enormous constraints of environmental forces to exert some control over municipal spending priorities? Despite case study evidence suggesting that mayors can and do influence public policy making, the expectation of this research was that mayoral power in a comparative research design likely would not have a pronounced effect on city spending. Using multiple regression techniques and various socioeconomic, demographic, and political variables, the analysis indeed showed that mayoral strength was not a significant predictor of municipal expenditures for 1987. The findings also revealed only slight differences in the way the mayoral power variable operated when cities were divided by city government form (mayor-council vs. council-manager). The research did demonstrate that mayoral power was most likely to be effective in controlling city spending among localities having partisan ballots.     

It's the Lungfish,stupid: knowledge fights,activism, and the science–policy interface

Since the post‐positivist turn in the 20th century, many scholars and philosophers have argued for the importance of Other Ways Of Knowing – including local, embodied, situated, partial, and indigenous knowledges – in developing a better understanding of the world. This argument has been further stressed by a large subset of scholars working in the fields of geography, policy, planning, natural resource management, and community development, yet in practice, positivism retains its epistemological dominance. Drawing from a case study of a dam proposal at Traveston Crossing, Queensland, Australia, this paper will explore these epistemological tensions from the perspective of those whose first/primary ways of knowing about the issue were marginalised, namely the local activists who opposed the proposal. Using data gathered from document analysis and interviews, the paper will explore how these activists implicitly understood this epistemological marginalisation, how they adopted and employed positivist knowledge and language to further the exposure and credibility of their campaign, how this credibility was mediated by their identities, how they strategically deployed different forms of knowledge at local, national, and international scales, and how their successful navigation of these epistemological tensions was critical to the ultimate success of their campaign.     

Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England

This article uses the insights of material culture studies to explore the role of objects in the development of a politics of personality in the first half of the nineteenth century. Political objects were part of a broader material culture of fame and recognition in this period, encompassing a wide range of public figures such as royalty, military heroes and authors. These artefacts acquired agency, playing an important role in the construction of their subjects as recognizable public figures: an asset for popular politicians whose primary constituencies lay beyond the ranks of the enfranchised. By representing key moments in the public narrative of a politician's career, objects and other representations helped to cement the connection between individuals and the causes with which they were chiefly associated. Some objects, including jugs, teapots and other practical items, may have been used in the public performance of rituals of loyalty to a particular figure. Others, including the famous Staffordshire figurines, were designed for display in the home, becoming vehicles for the domestic re-enactment of public narratives and the performance or construction of personal loyalties and identities. The article concludes by considering the way in which objects associated with famous political figures, including autograph letters, signed prints or even more intimate objects such as locks of hair, could be used to forge real or imagined relationships between politicians and individual members of their wider public.