Book reviews

of five Latin American cities, then moves to the growth of Latin Amer- ican cities, rural to urban migration, labour and employment, housing strategies, urban management, protest and social movements, and concludes with an overview of crucial problems for Latin American cities, including demographic pressure, economic growth and decline, governance, debt and social inequity. While the scope of topics is impressive, Gilbert does not fill out all topics satisfactorily in this relatively brief monograph.

The opening chapter, describing the cities of Bogotfi, Caracas, Guadala- jara, Rio de Janeiro and La Paz, is particularly weak. Description is im- portant, but the author needs to sup- ply more data to support his assump- tions. For the most part, his descrip- tions, such as 'looking out from the hotel window' at the shanty-towns of Bogotli (p 3), read more like postcards to home than scholarly interpreta- tions. However, his snapshots of these five cities do give the reader a certain sense of travelling with the author.

The greatest strengths of the book are the chapters on housing, urban management and, to a lesser degree, urban protest. Gilbert outlines the major issues and debates surrounding housing in Latin America. He is aided, of course, by the large volume of writing on the subject but does a very good job at distilling the most critical points. His chapter on urban management outlines some of the dif- ficulties and solutions for the delivery of services and infrastructure in rapid- ly growing cities with feeble and deli- cate economic bases. The chapter on urban protest, while somewhat terse, describes and explains the various 'carrot-and-stick' approaches of gov- ernment to quell resistance, the rela- tive weakness of popular opposition, and the recent attempts to mobilize grassroots protest throughout Latin America.

The book contains some typo- graphical and grammatical errors (pp 20, 79, 137, 146) and some incorrect facts too close to home for me. Rio de Janeiro's early trams were drawn by mules, not horses, and were retired in 1911, not 1926 (p 83) (Boone 1994). Tramways in Buenos Aires carried 324

million not 3.24 million passengers in 1919 (p 83). In general, the book would have been improved by a closer examination of the history of Latin American cities. On p 79, the author states that in 194(l, 'there were few suburbs and the Latin American city lacked the vast expanse of suburbia that it possesses today'. Certainly, suburbs were smaller in 1940 than today but they were expansive none- theless. Even by 1920, Rio de Janeiro was spilling out onto the Fluminene lowlands more than 20 kilometres north of the city centre and to the south more than 10 kilometres into the suburbs of Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, Jardim Botanico and beyond. An extensive streetcar network aided its expansion. By 1904, on average, every man, woman and child took 136 streetcar trips a year, a figure lower than American but greater than most European cities. Gilbert's statement that 'without well-developed mass- transit systems, most people had to walk to work' (p 79) is not supported with figures and deserves careful scru- tiny.

Similarly, Gilbert gives the impress- ion that large, rapidly-growing Latin American cities are phenomena of the post-1940 period (p 79). However, particularly in the industrialized southern cone, cities have been grow- ing rapidly and have had large popula- tions for a very long time. By 1890, Rio de Janeiro contained more than 500 000 persons, and by 1920 more than 1 million. In the same 30-year period, Silo Paulo was one of the fastest growing cities in Latin America and by the end of the period was quickly approaching the 1 million mark. By 1909, the population of Buenos Aires topped 1.2 million. A closer study of the history of Latin American cities would also reveal that they have had the problems associated with modern cities, including shanty- towns, weak representation for the poor, lack of services, crime, urban protest and informal employment for a very long time. Modern Latin Amer- ican cities would be better understood if Gilbert had given more pages to their history.

In summary, the book provides a comprehensive guide to some of the

critical issues and themes of the study of the Latin American city, but the relatively few pages devoted to so many important topics is too skeletal a treatment of the complex nature of urban Latin America.

Christopher Boone Department o f Geography

McGill University" 845 Sherbrooke St West

Montreal Quebec H3A 2K6

Canada

Boone, Christopher (1994) "The Rio de Janeiro Tramway, Light and Power Company and the "Modernization" of Rio de Janeiro During the Old Republic' Unpublished PhD Dissert- ation, University of Toronto

Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893 James Gilbert University o f Chicago Press Chicago and London (1991) 279 pp ISBN 0 226 293173

On both sides of the Atlantic, the end of the last century was a time of vigorous debate on ways to tackle enduring problems of the modern city. Edward Bellamy and William Morris shared a belief that capitalism could not be relied on to provide a solution, but the one turned to a centralized brand of socialism and the other to pure communism. More than that, Bellamy, the Bostonian, cast the fu- ture in terms of large and ceremonial cities, whereas Morris believed that, given the chance, people would flee the metropolis in favour of small towns and villages.

Some industrialists, with a more direct stake in the urban system, felt compelled to acknowledge that life for their workers was not all that it might be, but sought to counter the socialist challenge with support for reforms and model settlements. In these new places, in both North America and Europe, the intention was to improve living and working conditions for workers and their families, while maintaining profitable enterprises.

Seeking a compromise between the various extremes, the English inven-

120 Cities 1995 Volume 12 Number 2

tor, Ebenezer Howard, with experi- ence of life on both continents, de- vised the novel idea of the garden city. In Howard's utopia, the metropolis would give way over time to a more decentralized pattern of garden cities, offering their citizens shared financial benefits coupled with the best of town and country. His seminal text on these settlements of the future was pub- lished in 1898.

One hundred years on, in contrast with the 1890s, there is nothing like this debate in the 1990s; the two de- cades are a world apart. It is not that the magnitude of perceived problems can be seen as any less in one decade or the other; what is significantly different is the strength of belief in the 1890s that those very forces that had created the problems of urban life could be redirected to create solu- tions. Towards the end of the 20th century, planners, politicians and so- cial reformers seem not only power- less in the face of a continuing crisis of the city, but also singularly without vision.

Perhaps it is timely, therefore, in search of much-needed inspiration if not also as a source of practical ideas, to revisit the plans of some of these earlier luminaries. In his lucid account of Chicago's utopias of 1893, centred on the World Columbian Exposition (popularly known as the World Fair), James Gilbert offers the reader one such opportunity.

At the heart of the book is an interpretation of the culture and architecture of the World Fair itself, located on the waterfront of the burgeoning lakeside city. As part of this interpretation, Gilbert shows how the milieu of the event was influenced by related themes, notably the pater- nalism of George Pullman's model industrial community and the fun- damentalism of Dwight Moody's evangelical crusade. Other books have been written on the 1893 World Fair, but, in finding a way through the intricacies of this wider milieu, this latest work claims its own place in the literature.

Chicago, as one of the world's largest cities was also, at the end of the century, infamous for its hideous slums, for its smoke and pollution, for

the horrors of the stockyards, and for its labour conflicts. Those who de- cided that the world event should be sited in Chicago rather than New York were not ignorant of these conditions, but preferred, instead, to give centre stage recognition to the capitalist energy and organization that had caused the city to grow at all. Chicago, in the Mid West, was at the heart of the new America, symbol of the limit- less ambitions of a nation; and here was an unrivalled opportunity to de- monstrate what had been achieved to date and what wonders lay yet in prospect. In more subtle ways, too, in displaying the nation's great strengths and potential, and with a view to the coming century, it articulated a ser- ious and coherent challenge to Euro- pean hegemony.

Following two contextual chapters, Gilbert leads the reader through four successive narratives - one on ways in which the experience of visitors was shaped by their reading of the guide- books, a second on the main features of the World Fair itself, a third on George Pullman and his model settle- ment, and the fourth on Dwight Moody's evangelical crusade at the Fair and the austere suburb founded by his benefactor, Turlington W. Harvey. Visitors to the Fair were able to visit the settlements of both Pull- man and Harvey (each named after its founder), rather like several genera- tions later, visitors to the Festival of Britain went to view the new East End neighbourhood of Lansbury to see with their own eyes what the State, in practical terms, could do.

Gilbert rightly draws a sharp dis- tinction between two parts of the Fair, the fantasy and pastiche splendour of the White City, and the sheer com- mercialism of the booths in Midway; the one is represented as high culture and the other as low. In assessing what was done, one might have looked for a more trenchant critique of the Fair's director of works and chief architect, Daniel Burnham. Presented with a golden opportunity to raise the sights of a nation to the prospect of socially- worthwhile city design, he resorted, instead, to a make-believe world of pseudo-classical architecture, the likes of which were not seen again until the

Book reviews

construction of Disneyland. What Gilbert does especially well is

to compose, from a wide variety of primary and other sources, clear and colourful profiles of the Fair itself and of the experience of the many millions of visitors. The Fair holds its own fascination as one of the earliest mass tourist events, raising interesting ques- tions of the first experience for many of city life and urban values, of the logistics of transport and accommoda- tion, and of ways in which the visit was recorded and communicated to friends and relatives elsewhere.

After the Fair closed, fires that swept the exhibition ground, planned demolition and industrial strife at Pull- man quickly removed all but memor- ies of the event, revealing, perhaps, not just the ephemerality of the architecture but also the partiality of what it purported to represent. It left little for posterity. Like a stage set, the White City had briefly shimmered in the sun, while all the time the adjacent dark city of stockyards and substan- dard housing lay brooding and neg- lected. For all its claims, the fact is that the Chicago World Fair and the associated experiments which Gilbert describes - were not really utopian at all; it was not about an imaginary future so much as a celebration of capitalism. One hundred years on, bereft of ideas though we may ourselves be, it is not to the World Fair of 1893 that we should look for inspiration.

Dennis" Hardy Faculty o f Humanities

Middlesex University London N17 8HR, UK

Metropolitan Governance: American/ Canadian Intergovernmental Perspec- tives D N Rothblatt and A Sancton (eds) Institute o f Governmental Studies Uni- versity o f California Berkeley (1993) 469 pp US$24.95 ISBN 0 87772 334 6

There can be little doubt that the study of metropolitan government, after a severe decline in the late 1960s after it had been described by Charles Adrian as 'an infantile disorder in the

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