provision in early twentieth-century Lyons make a substantial contribution to our knowledge ofthe suburbanization of that city.

Water, electricity, hospitals and municipal welfare schemes figure prominently in the re-maining sections of the book that contain studies of cities as varied as Grenoble, Poitiers,Rennes and Saint-Etienne. At Clermont-Ferrand, the Michelin Tyre company was the city’smajor source of employment for many decades and operated its own welfare schemes andmedical facilities, often in advance of those provided by the city. By contrast, at Lyons itwas the municipality that was the pioneer. Edouard Herriot, who was mayor from 1905 to1940 and again from 1945 to 1957, spearheading a sustained programme that built an impres-sive array of social housing, schools, clinics, hospitals and sports grounds that remain in useto this day. A handful of essays on urban renovation during the past quarter century at Rou-baix and on the mounting challenges that face urban policy makers in France conclude thevolume.

Without doubt, the Rouen conference demonstrated the vitality of urban studies among Frenchhistorians. The decision to publish all the presentations (plus the summaries of rapporteurs andcomments from local politicians) in a single volume clearly presented the editor and his assistantswith a major challenge in terms of identifying clusters and linking themes, and ensuring that con-tributions continued to make an impact right to end of the book. I felt that the five subdividedsections were not entirely convincing and that many papers on the theory and practice of munic-ipal policies might have been configured in different ways. I also experienced a real sense of frus-tration at the general absence of maps, diagrams and photographs. The question, ‘But where isthat?’ came into my mind repeatedly; regrettably few essays contained any attempt to providean answer.

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.01.011

471Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 454e478

Tom Mels (Ed), Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004,262 pages, £49.95 hardback.

Introducing what amounts to a festschrift for geographer Ann Buttimer, Tom Mels explainsthat ‘humanistic geography’ can be characterised ‘as a form of reanimation against the reifiedworld of positivist science and technocracy’, adding that ‘This reanimation of people and placesis also reflected in the substantive studies of the individual chapters of the present book, which allin their own particular ways connect to and express this ‘‘humanistic spirit’’ in the rhythm ofgeography’ (p. 8). Further, paraphrasing Buttimer, ‘To reanimate places is to register the closeharmony, dissonances, and transpositions in the polyphony of places and tempos beyond reifiedexistence. It reminds us how social rhythms are in fact lived and cannot be separated from thecomplex everyday experience of human beings in their diverse social and material environments’(p. 26).

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Unfortunately, most of the contributions to Reanimating Places fail to reanimate their subjectmatter. The failure is partly editorial. There is no coherence in the selection of contributors andtopics. The juxtaposition of Edmunds Bunkse’s meditation on the persistence of childhoodrhythms in his transplanted adult world and David Leys’ summary of the failure of Canada’sBusiness Immigration Program (which, incidentally, largely contradicts Buttimer’s optimisticnotion of the dynamism of the lifeworld) is meaningless. Equally questionable is the juxtapositionof Anne Godlewska’s essay on the life of Marie de l’Incarnation, a seventeenth-century French-Canadian Catholic nun (an essay which, again, contradicts Buttimer’s position, as it largely showsMarie’s transcendence of place) and Gunnar Olsson’s elliptical notes on the Babylonian creationepic known as the Enuma Elish. These and other juxtapositions and groupings in ReanimatingPlaces serve neither the authors nor the topics.

An additional obstacle to receiving this book in the spirit that is meant is the generally unin-spired prose style in which most of the contributions are written. They exhibit most of the worstfeatures of academic writing. In particular, they betray a fetish for footnoting the most unexcep-tionable generalisations. A more substantive criticism of the volume is, in fact, the failure of anyof the essays to descend from generalities in a way that would reanimate Buttimer’s general argu-ment. Those contributors that do focus on the local choose instances that are so specialised (atleast as they are presented) that they unconsciously parody the book’s object, rather than assistin fulfilling it. Eric Clark’s long-term study of the relation between land value and rent levelsin Malmo, Sweden, may be interesting to specialists (although it is hard to see why it is in thiscollection), but comparing the relation to a ‘long slow flamenco dance’ (p.155) is, whilst earnestlyargued, at best tangential to the interpretation of his data.

David Seamon’s long review of the work of Christopher Alexander, Bill Hillier and DanielKimmis could have been interesting, but its determination to play down the differences betweenthese writers reduces their work, and his conclusion, to a restatement of the obvious: ‘the works of[the above] are pivotal for remaking place in the city and for extending in unimagined but crucialways the work on urban lifeworlds begun by Buttimer and [others] .’ (p. 141). Other chapters areself-referential in other ways: Gerry O’Reilly’s account of his third level geography students’reactions to the Boyne Valley landscapes being a case in point. It is astonishing that O’Reillycan present the conclusion, that ‘Students wished to enjoy and experience the Boyne landscapes’in terms of a ‘Love of life, place, landscape, and country [] rendered devoid of traditional nation-alist discourses’ (p. 105), as unproblematic. Like Nuala C. Johnson’s chapter about the exhibitionphilosophy informing the Ulster Folk Museum (these two chapters could have been usefullyjuxtaposed, but are not), O’Reilly is really documenting the seductiveness of what Patrick Wrightmight call National Trust false consciousness. The blandness of his data, and his willingness to beenchanted by the naivete of his students, colludes further in turning what is presented as an in-vestigation into the relationship between landscape and history into another exercise in socialand cultural amnesia.

The editor of this volume claims that it makes a contribution to ‘a geography of rhythms’. Butits capacity to do this is weakened because no social or cultural mechanism for the production of‘rhythms’ is described. To put it more directly: the phenomenon that allows ‘co-existence’ in Jean-Luc Nancy’s word, that prevents (as Hannah Arendt put it, more colloquially) people from trip-ping over each other’s feet, is discourse, the human faculty of speech and its technologies. Todefine rhythm only in opposition to ‘reification’, as Mels does, does not explain how people are

473Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 454e478

simultaneously placed and un-placed, placed relatively in time and space. Social rhythms are not‘lived’ in some kind of collectively unconscious way: they are the expression of communicativestructures, institutions and technologies that constantly bring places into being (and replacethem). Place, habitus, dwelling (and the other terms routinely invoked throughout this book)do not precede rhythm: they are rhythmic residues or complexes. What matters from a geograph-ical perspective is that, as Lacoue-Labarthe has pointed out, rhythm is what (in a double sense)gives place to movement. It is the character of time, and place as placing. But nowhere in thisvolume do these themes appear. Had they done so, the tired old opposition between place (andits variants, habitus, dwelling, landscape, etc.) and time (and its equally mythical variants, routine,cycle, epoch, pattern) might have been laid to rest.

I wish I could be more positive about a volume many of whose tastes and interests are con-genial to me. But the shallowness of editorial vision, the incoherently organised and generallydully-written chapters e not to mention the sub-standard proofing e and the general lack ofimagination as to what a philosophically well-grounded geography of rhythms might be, makesthis a most disappointing book. In this latter context, it is extraordinary that, although Lefebvre’srhythmanalysis is invoked, it is not critically discussed. Lacking animation, and failing to graspthe simple but profound fact that rhythm is a modality of communication, Reanimating Placesis not an enterprise that I would have recommended for publication.

Paul CarterUniversity of Melbourne, Australia

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.01.012

Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester andChicago, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 592 pages, US$49.00 cloth.

The historian Asa Briggs, in Victorian Cities, observed that ‘Every age has its shock cities’(Odhams, 1963, 56). Harold Platt e also a historian, based at Loyola University, Chicago e haswritten a comparative urban political ecology of two shock cities that rose to prominence at thebeginning and end of the Victorian era, respectively. Manchester and Chicago have, of course,attracted a good deal of research attention in the past. The originality of Platt’s book is to com-pare the environmental consequences of their prodigious economic and demographic growth.Though London and New York were major industrial centres when Manchester and Chicagowere inconsequential settlements, the sheer rapidity of the latter two places’ development (fromthe 1840s and 1890s, respectively) made them harbingers of the capitalist urbanisation thatcame to dominate the so-called ‘industrial age’. In each case, Platt constructs a highly readablenarrative of environmental transformation in and around the two cities in their early decadesand of subsequent attempts to govern urban nature by reform-minded politicians and businesspeople.