Book reviews

Australian politics

Francis G. Castles (ed.), Australia Compared. People, Policies and Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991) pp.290. $22.95 ISBN 0 04 442339 X.

A. Kouzmin and N. Scott (eds), Dynamics in Australian Public Management: Selected Essays (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990) pp.454. $34.95 ISBN 0 7329 0187 1.

Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880–1900 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988) pp.320. $24.95 ISBN 0 86840 370 9.

Rosemary Whip and Colin A. Hughes, Political Crossroad: The 1989 Queensland Election (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991) pp.270. $29.95 ISBN 0 7022 2362 X.

Glenn Withers (ed.), Commonality and Difference: Australia and the United States (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian/American Educational Foundation, 1991) pp.138. $19.95 ISBN 1 86373 074 5.

Comparative and international politics

Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990) pp.288. $US12.95 ISBN 0 81570 059 8.

Zehra F. Arat, Democracy & Human Rights in Developing Countries (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991) pp.219 $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 170 4.

Ian Bellany, A Basis for Arms Control (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1991) pp.155. $n.p. ISBN 1 85521 051 7.

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 1991) pp.421. $n.p. ISBN 0 86091 318 X.

Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces Since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp.411. $US57.00 ISBN 0 231 17520 0.

John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.128. $27.95 ISBN 0 631 16428 6.

Bogdan Denitch, The End Of The Cold War: European Unity, Socialism, and the Shift in Global Power (London: Verso, 1990) pp.123. $24.95 ISBN 0 86091 532 8.

David Donnison, A Radical Agenda: After the New Right and the Old Left (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991) pp.215. £9.95. ISBN 1 85489 030 1.

Peter Drysdale (ed.), The Soviets and the Pacific Challenge (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) pp.160. $17.95 ISBN 1 86373 010 9.

Leon Hurwitz and Christian Lequesne (eds), The State of the European Community (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.475. $49.95. ISBN 1 55587 249 2.

Tetsuya Kataoka, The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan's Postwar Politics, (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1991) pp.237. $n.p. ISBN 0 8448 1714 7.

Daphne A Kenyon and John Kincaid (eds) Competition among States and Local Governments (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press, with the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1991) pp.285. $n.p. ISBN 0 87766 517 6.

Jan‐Erik Lane and Svante O. Ersson, Politics and Society in Western Europe, 2^nd edn, (London: Sage, 1991) pp.421. £10.95. ISBN 0 8039 8407 3.

Stephanie Lawson, The Failure of Democratic Politics in Fiji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.307. $90.00 ISBN 0 19 827322 3.

E.M. McLeay (ed.), The 1990 General Election: Perspectives on Political Change in New Zealand, Occasional Publication No.3 (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 1991) pp.183. $NZ29.95. ISBN 0 475 11202 4. ISSN 1170 7356.

Henry Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.552. $n.p. ISBN 0 19828 390 3.

Philip R. Pryde, Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.314. $37.50 ISBN 0 521 40905 5.

Anthony Smith The Age of Behemoths. The Globalization of Mass Media Firms (New York: A Twentieth Century Fund Paper. Priority Press Publications, 1991) pp.80. $n.p. ISBN 0 87078 325 4.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World‐System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.242. $35.00 ISBN 0 52140604 8.

Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.151. $US30.00 ISBN 1 55S7 266 2.

Political theory and methodology

Norman Barry, Welfare (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990) pp.144. $24.95 ISBN 0 335 15595 2.

Peter Beilbarz, Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp.168. $49.95 ISBN 0 415 06616 6.

Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) pp.497. $n.p. ISBN 0 7450 0634 5.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) pp.242. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 538 7.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Ethics, Politics, and Human Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp.191. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17885 6.

Barry Hindess, Choice, Rationality, and Social Theory (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) pp.132. $70.00 ISBN 0 04 301306 6.

A. Khoshkish, Power or Authority? The Entelechy of Power (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) pp.128. $n.p. ISBN 0 8191 8395 4.

Frank Lewins, Social Science Methodology: A Brief but Critical Introduction (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992) pp.110. $14.95 ISBN 0 7329 1331 4.

David Miller (ed.), assisted by Janet Coleman, William Connolly and Alan Ryan, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.570. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17944 5.

Raymond Plant, Modern Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.398. $34.95 ISBN 0 631 14224 X.

Alan Udoff, Leo Strauss's Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.327. $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 232 8.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

Exploring the associations between cooling centre accessibility and marginalization in Montreal,Toronto, and Vancouver,Canada

Cooling centres provide respite, safety, and social support during extreme heat events for populations that do not have the resources to own or operate in-home air conditioning. The objective of this study was to measure the spatial accessibility of cooling centres and analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, Canada. The potential spatial accessibility of cooling centres within a 15-minute walk was measured at the dissemination area scale using the two-step floating catchment area method. A two-stage modelling approach was used to analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization. Approximately 62%, 58%, and 54% of the populations in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver had access to at least one cooling centre. In Montreal and Vancouver, high marginalization areas were more likely to have cooling centre access than low marginalization areas. Of the areas with cooling centre access, smaller access scores were observed in areas with high residential instability. Approximately one-fifth of the areas in each city had no cooling centre access and high marginalization, and may be considered for future cooling centres or programs that improve accessibility to existing centres.     

Book Reviews

Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes. M. Castells and P. Hall. London, Routledge, 1994, x + 275 pp, £45.00 hb, ISBN 0 415 10014 3, £14.99 pk, ISBN 0 415 10015 1 pb.

Transport and Communications Innovation in Europe. G. Giannopoulos and A. Gillespie (Eds). London, Belhaven Press, 1993, xii + 369 pp, £42.00 hb, ISBN 1 85293 269 4.

The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. F. Fisher and J. Forester (Eds). London, UCL Press, 1993, 327pp, £14.95, pb, ISBN 1 85728 183 7.

Regional Development in the 1990s. The British Isles in Transition. P. Townroe and R. Martin (Eds). London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers and Regional Studies Association, 330pp, £22.50 pb, ISBN 1 85302 139 3.

Urban Land and Property Markets in France. R. Acosta and V. Renard. London, University College Press, 1993, 166pp, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85728 050 4.     

The future role of GIS education in creating critical spatial thinkers

Teaching of critical spatial thinking in higher education empowers graduates to effectively engage with spatial data. Geographic information systems (GIS) and science are taught to undergraduates across many disciplines; we evaluate how this contributes to critical spatial thinking. The discipline of GIS covers the whole process of spatial decision-making, but GIS modules often ignore the context setting of spatial problems, and just cover the technical aspects of how to use GIS software. We outline how some existing GIS practicals could be improved to focus on the development of critical spatial thinking skills, competences and abilities that are valuable to graduates.     

New East Manchester: Urban Renaissance or Urban Opportunism?

In this paper we ask how a shrinking city responds when faced with a perforated urban fabric. Drawing on Manchester's response to its perforated eastern flank —and informed by a parallel study of Leipzig—we use the city's current approach to critique urban regeneration policy in England. Urban renaissance holds out the promise of delivering more sustainable—that is more compact, more inclusive and more equitable—cities. However, the Manchester study demonstrated that the attempt to stem population loss from the city is at best fragile, despite a raft of policies now in place to support urban renaissance in England. It is argued here that Manchester like Leipzig is likely to face an ongoing battle to attract residents back from their suburban hinterlands. This is especially true of the family market that we identify as being an important element for long-term sustainable population growth in both cities. We use the case of New East Manchester to consider how discourses linked to urban renaissance—particularly those that link urbanism with greater densities—rule out some of the options available to Leipzig, namely, managing the long-term perforation of the city. We demonstrate that while Manchester is inevitably committed to the urban renaissance agenda, in practice New East Manchester demonstrates a far more pragmatic—but equally unavoidable—approach. This we attribute to the gap between renaissance and regeneration described by Amin et al. (Cities for the Many Not for the Few. Bristol: Policy Press, 2000) who define the former as urbanism for the middle class and the latter as urbanism for the working class. While this opportunistic approach may ultimately succeed in producing development on the ground, it will not address the fundamental, and chronic, problem; the combination of push and pull that sees families relocating to suburban areas. Thus, if existing communities in East Manchester are to have their area buoyed up—or sustained—by incomers, and especially families, with greater levels of social capital and higher incomes urban policy in England will have to be challenged.     

Publications briefly noted

ONG JIN HUI, TONG CHEE KIONG and TAN ERN SER (eds). Understanding Singapore Society . Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1997. xxiv, 608 pp. US$29.00, paper.

MARIA MIES. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: women in the International Division of Labour . New Edition. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1999. xix, 272 pp. A$29.95, paper.

V. R. SAVAGE, L. KONG and W. NEVILLE. The Naga Awakens: growth and Change in Southeast Asia . Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998. US$39.00, hardcover; US$29.00, paper.

ALAN LAWRANCE. China under Communism . London: Routledge, 1998. xii, 158 pp. US$15.99; £9.99, paper.

FREDERICK C. TEIWES with WARREN SUN. China's Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward , 1955–1959. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. xvii, 319 pp. US$27.50, paper.

ANDREW WALDER (ed). Zouping in Transition: the Process of Reform in Rural North China . Harvard Contemporary China Series, 11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. US$45.00; £29.95, hardcover; US$19.95; £13.50, paper.

J. A. G. ROBERTS. A Concise History of China . Basingstoke: Macmillan; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. US$45.00, hardcover; US$16.95, paper.

NIELS MULDER. Filipino Images: culture of the Public World . Quezon City: New Day, 2000. 232 pp. P300 (US$45.00), paper.     

Book reviews

CHINA

MELISSA SCHRIFT. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: the Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 214 pp. Bibliography, index. US$52.00, hardcover; US$20.00, paper.

WM. THEODORE DE BARY and TU WEIMING (eds). Confucianism and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 327 pp. US$20.50, paper.

MICHAEL B. McELROY, CHRIS P. NIELSEN AND PETER LYDON (eds). Energizing China: reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. xvii, 719 pp. Tables, figures, biographical notes, index. US$25.00, paper.

SHUMEI SHIH. The Lure of the Modern: writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiii, 427 pp. US$60.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

SUSAN MANN and YU‐YIN CHENG (eds). Under Confucian Eyes: writings on Gender in Chinese History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 323 pp. Illustrations. US$50.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

ARUN AGRAWAL and K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN (eds). Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representation, and Rule in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. 316 pp. Foreword by James Scott, introduction, tables, endnotes, bibliography, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

K. J. JOSEPH. Industry under Economic Liberalization: the Case of Indian Electronics. New Delhi: Sage, 1997. 242 pp. Rs450/US$21.00, hardcover.

PETER P. MOLLINGA (ed). Water for Food and Rural Development: approaches and Initiatives in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 377 pp. Rs 495, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

M. RAMESH with MUKUL G. ASHER. Welfare Capitalism in Southeast Asia: social Security, Health and Education Policies. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000. xii, 217 pp. £50.00, hardcover.

DAVID M. AYRES. Anatomy of a Crisis: education, Development and the State in Cambodia, 1953–1998. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 256 pp. US$52.00, hardcover.

MARTIN STUART‐FOX. Historical Dictionary of Laos , second edition. Lanham, Maryland and London: Scarecrow Press, 2001. 527 pp. US$75.00, hardcover.

SINITH SITTIRAK. The Daughters of Development: women in a Changing Environment. London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. ix, 153 pp. Bibliography, index. ISBN 1–876756‐00–4. A$39.95, paper.     

Towards transnational feminist queer methodologies

This article introduces the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research as seeking to conceptualise the transnational as a methodology composed of a series of flows that can augment feminist and queer research. Transnational feminist queer methodologies can contest long-standing configurations of power between researcher and researched, subject and object, academics and activists across places, typically those which are embedded in the hierarchies of the Global North/Global South. Beginning with charting our roots in, and routes through, the diverse arenas of transnational, feminist, participatory and queer methodologies, the article uses a transcribed and edited conversation between members of the Liveable Lives research team in Kolkata and Brighton, to start an exploration of transnational feminist queer methodologies. Understanding the difficult, yet constructive moments of collaborative work and dialogue, we argue for engagements with the multiplicities of ‘many-many’ lives that recognise local specificities, and the complexities of lives within transnational research, avoiding creating a currency of comparison between places. We seek to work toward methodologies that take seriously the politics of place, namely by creating research that answers the same question in different places, using methods that are created in context and may not be ‘comparable’. Using a dialogue across the boundaries of activism/academia, as well as across geographical locations, the article contends that there are potentials, as well as challenges, in thinking ourselves through transnational research praxis. This seeks complexities and spatial nuances within as well as between places.