exercise. Legal historians and historical geographers will profit from following many of the leadsoutlined in these significant scholarly contributions.

Lauren BentonNew York University, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.06.016

895Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 871e903

David Pinder, Visions of the City, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, xiþ 354 pages,£17.99 paperback.

This is a book about utopian visions of the city in the twentieth century. It is also an argument fornot giving up on utopian impulses even though most of the utopian schemes of the twentiethcentury have been largely discredited. What we need to do, Pinder argues, is to think about uto-pianism in more radical and open ways by turning away from utopias of spatial form to utopias ofspatial process. What Pinder means by the latter is illustrated in the chapters on the Situationistswhich are the real focus of the book.

Pinder begins on familiar ground with ‘restorative utopias’, as represented principally in theGarden City ideas of Ebenezer Howard. Although Howard’s ideas have been raked over inmany other publications, Pinder’s reading of his works clearly draws out the patriarchal, au-thoritarian and anti-urban assumptions that underlie this and similar utopias. This model ofutopia is then contrasted with the more pro-urban, modernist tradition, climaxing in thework of Le Corbusier. Again, although familiar and much ploughed ground, the author drawsattention, through judicious quotations, to the powerful role of organic and hygienic metaphorsin Le Corbusier’s work, and his obsession with bringing order and harmony to the threateningspaces of the city, an obsession that pushed him into links with proto-fascist organisations inthe 1930s.

By way of transition to his main themes, Pinder nicely contrasts Le Corbusier’s visit to NewYork in 1935 with Andre Breton’s almost simultaneous visit to Prague. Breton’s surrealist,dream-inspired view of the city directly opposed Le Corbusier’s modernist vision of urban order.Pinder does not develop this surrealist theme in much depth, but it serves to carry us forward tothe author’s main focus on the Situationists, who blended surrealist elements into a more radicalartistic and political programme.

The Situationists were a small avant-garde artistic and political group, active in Paris in the 1950sand 1960s, who have had an influence out of all proportion to their size across a range of cultural andpolitical fields and who have attracted growing academic interest in recent years. Pinder sketches intheir underlying ideas, their political objectives, and the range of practices that they pioneered in ur-ban settings. Their leading figure, GuyDebord, criticised contemporary capitalism as ‘the society ofthe spectacle’, dominated by consumerism and commodity culture.More specifically, the Situation-ists were strongly critical of modernist planning, the dominance of the motor car, the destruction ofcentral Paris through ill-judged regeneration schemes, the gentrification of the historic core and thedisplacement of workers to the soulless new suburbs of the grands ensembles. To confront the societyof the spectacle they experimented with innovative, urban-based practices designed to heighten

896 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 871e903

awareness and break through the false consciousness of everyday life. These practices included de-tournement, derive, the construction of situations, and psychogeographicmappings of the ‘soft infra-structure’ of the city. Many of these ideas have become familiar to geographers over the past fewyears, not least through some of Pinder’s earlier published work in article form. The psychogeo-graphic tradition has also been revived in new forms in the writings of Ian Sinclair and I have triedto show the pedagogic potential of some of these ideas for urban fieldwork in a recent 2004 article inthe Journal of Geography in Higher Education.

Pinder’s survey of the Situationists is efficiently done, although for political and philosophicaldepth it does not begin to displace Sadie Plant’s pioneering account in The Radical Gesture (Rout-ledge, 1992), and does not have the scope of Simon Sadler’s book on The Situationist City (TheMIT Press, 1998). Pinder’s main contribution here, I think, is to explore in some depth the workof the Dutch artist Constant. Constant was only briefly associated with the Situationists but hisideas on creativity and third space, and his artistic and architectural experiments in designing‘nomadic cities’ according to Situationist principles, are deeply fascinating. Pinder has twosubstantial chapters tracing out the origins of his ideas and their manifestation in his designsfor a future city, ‘New Babylon’. Using drawings, graphics and models Constant sketchesa city for a more ludic, creative, post-revolutionary society freed from the tyranny of work bythe advance of automation. His models show structures like space ships, suspended from pillarsover the countryside, joined together in changing and disorientating ways, with flexible internalstructures and varied ambiences. Some of these ideas were taken up and developed further in sub-sequent architectural traditions, such as the Archigram movement.

Pinder gives a generally sympathetic exposition of the ideas and practices of Constant and theSituationists, but in his final chapter he does touch upon a number of criticisms of their work,such as a tendency towards technological optimism in their belief in the liberatory potential ofautomation, and their blindness to certain sexist and elitist aspects of their language and writing.Indeed, Pinder might have pushed some of these criticisms further. Although I share his fascina-tion with their work, there are aspects of Situationism that have proved hopelessly impracticaland even self-destructive.

In this final chapter Pinder also looks back on the utopian tradition as a whole and reviewsa variety of contributions by other authors, such as those influenced by feminist and postcolonialthought. His position here converges with that of David Harvey who has also defended the con-tinuing value of open, dynamic, provocative visions of alternative futures as long as they do notdegenerate into utopias of fixed, spatial form. However, the tension between openness and con-crete form is not easy to resolve, and it is difficult to talk about genuine alternatives in a languagethat is inevitably complicit with current trends. Pinder’s argument is also weakened by a failure toaddress the question of what agency is required to translate these utopias into practice. In the endPinder raises more questions than he answers, but along the way he presents much interestingmaterial in a clear and readable way and provides some thoughtful arguments for keeping at leastone form of utopian thinking alive.

Keith BassettUniversity of Bristol, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.06.017