Marginal Spaces Book Reviews

Marginal Spaces by Michael Peter Smith Book Summary

The literature on modernist and postmodernist urban development is abundant, yet few researchers have taken up the challenge of studying the areas hi which marginalized people live as sources of resistance to continued modernization. In Marginal Spaces, Michael Smith has assembled case studies combining structural and historical analyses of the moves of powerful social interests to dominate social space, and the tactics and strategies various marginalized social groups employ to reclaim dominated space for their own use. The marginal spaces embodied in the title of this fifth volume of the Comparative Urban and Community Research series include five sites of domination and resistance. A squatters' movement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, resists the adverse consequences of four decades of urban development. A homeless encampment in Chicago engages hi "guerilla architecture" and other moves designed to reconstitute prevailing social constructions of the problem of "homelessness." An antigentrification movement hi the East Village of New York engages hi an ongoing struggle to resist efforts by developers to market their neighborhood as space for luxury condominium development. There is a Public Housing Council organized by African American women hi New Orleans that is resisting both the material regulation of their daily lives and the dominant social construction of public housing as a racially gendered space suitable only for "dependent" women and children of color. Finally, there is a subordinate labor market niche hi California agriculture where indigenous Mixtec peasants from Oaxaca are displacing the more traditional mestizo farm workers, but who are also politically organizing as a transnational grassroots movement, pursuing a binational strategy to alleviate then- economic, political, and cultural marginality. Contributions and contributors include: "House People, Not Cars!" by Corey Dolgon, Michael Kline, and Laura Dresser; "Tranquillity City" by Tahnadge Wright; "Private Redevelopment and the Changing Forms of Displacement hi the East Village of New York" by Christopher Mele; "Resisting Racially Gendered Space" by Alma Young and Jyaphia Christos-Rodgers; and "Mixtecs and Mestizos hi California Agriculture" by Carol Zabin. This volume will be of interest to urban planners, sociologists, and political scientists, especially those with strong interests hi local ethnography and concrete policy.

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