Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Sociotechnical Change (review)

When cities are rebuilt—whether after fire or earthquake or bombardment, in pursuit of a social or environmental objective, or to adjust to a structural change in economic activity—the physical characteristics of the built environment become a significant factor in determining what changes and what remains the same. Our cities are not easy to change. Property laws and ownership patterns, the very materials of which buildings are erected, the fabric of community relationships, institutions that regulate planning, the interconnected nature of infrastructure networks, and the financial methods for development all come into play. This convergence of factors defines the context in which governance becomes important. The technical and aesthetic qualities of a project often matter less than the interplay of self-interested parties. Bringing about a consensus, either to maintain or restore the status quo or to change it, can take time, which not only costs money, but ultimately can introduce a new set of variables that affect the viability of the original project.

It is this dynamic of negotiation that is at the center of Anique Hommels's concern. To explicate it, she has written a methodological treatise around three case studies from the Netherlands that involved the rebuilding of specific sites in Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Utrecht that were the result of postwar interventions by modernist planners with a concern for the inter-relationship among different transport modes, housing, and retail functions. The book is neither a straightforward critique of modernist planning nor an appeal for postmodernist styles. What is apparent to this reader, but is less explicit in the text, is the difference in political styles between the 1950s and 1960s and the last two decades.

Contemporary planners have to work in a more open political environment in which local politics matter; this is true regardless of their style, but to make projects easier to finance and adopt it could affect urban design.

Hommels is addressing an academic audience, however, with the intent to adapt STS to sociotechnical change at the scale of a medium-sized urban district, in the hope that urban studies and STS can profit to mutual advantage. The objective is worthy, but the author puts too much importance on the methodological framework, thereby ignoring the extent to which urban historians analyze the behavior and consequences of actors as varied as community groups, financial interests, planners, and politicians when major urban projects are (to use the fashionable word) "contested." One has the impression that a new vocabulary implies a new phenomenon, whereas it may simply be a new label for what has been going on for a long time.

This telescoping of the subject is unfortunate. But one need only reread Jane Jacobs or Lewis Mumford to be reminded of this. And more recently, geographer Robert A. Dodgshon, addressing much the same phenomena in Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change (1998), wrote of the "fact that complex and advanced societies have a great deal of past information stored and communicated in the form of the built environment," which he perceptively argues "amounts to an increase in the inertia of landscape" (p. 179). In terms that are conceptually related to Hommels's, but with a vocabulary as recondite, Dodgshon recognized that inertia and flexibility in space can be exploited by groups to develop a strategy of change.

Much of Hommels's vocabulary, which is introduced to give conceptual clarity to different political patterns, gets in the way. Phrases like high and low inclusion, dominant and technological frames, embeddedness and obdurancy, whatever they may mean to readers today will not be intelli-gible in ten years, and they challenge the reader to try to put the argument into other words. The terms matter, however, because they define the "three constructivist conceptions of obduracy," or the capacity of the...