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Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (Eds), The Resilient City: How Modern CitiesRecover from Disaster, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, 376 pages, £15 paperback.

The fact that cities rarely die is the abiding message of this fascinating collection of essays thatemerges from a seminar series at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 2001e2002.Sixteen contributors join the editors to explore ‘how modern cities recover from disaster’, bringinga range of expertise that extends from history, sociology, journalism and cultural studies to archi-tecture and city planning. The starting point, not surprisingly, is ‘9/11’, the devastating terroristattack on the World Trade Center in 2001, but the scope of examples is wide and the causes ofdestruction numerous, including earthquakes, fires, floods and the events of war and civil distur-bance. Vale and Campanella begin by arguing that ‘cities rise again’, or at least most of them do,quoting the unusual example of Saint-Pierre on Martinique, once known as ‘the Paris of theAntilles’, that was buried beneath lava flows in May 1902.

Three ‘narratives of resilience’ then deal with popular and political optimism in the quest forrecovery after the great Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Similarly,the response to 9/11 was almost entirely one of optimism and hope: the WTC must rise again,albeit in a different form. Terrorist attacks in Oklahoma City in April 1995 brought destructionto the Federal Building and gave rise to countless spontaneous memorials as well as the distinctivespace of ‘memorial chairs’ that may be lit individually at night. And, of course, the fantasy of ur-ban destruction has figured in works of fiction about New York, often in the context of imaginedenemy attack in wartime.

A second clutch of essays scrutinizes the symbolic dimensions of trauma and recovery, citingthe patriotic reconstruction of Washington D.C. following the British invasion of 1814, andthen three examples from Europe and the Near East. The rebuilding of Berlin after 1945 wasaccomplished in the context of two contrasting ideologies in East and West, and with differentmaterial results exemplified by the former Stalinallee and the western showcase estate of theHansa quarter. The reconstruction of Warsaw similarly generated a range of differing ideologicaland material results, from the rebuilding of the Old Town Square to conform approximately withtraditional images of pre-war Poland, through the Soviet gift of the Palace of Culture (evocativeof Moscow and surrounded by booths selling western goods the last time I was in the city), to thesoulless estates of workers’ apartments that may be found around any large city in the world. Therevival of Gernika (‘Guernica’) was long delayed after its bombing in April 1937 by Hitler’s planesat the request of General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. True to form, this ur-ban symbol of Basque democracy duly rose from its ashes and continued to hold its iconographicsignificance. In the case of Jerusalem, destruction and reconstruction were repeated events acrossa broad span of history.

The final section of The Resilient City examines the ‘politics of reconstruction’ and the prag-matic issues of emergency relief, temporary housing and finally permanent reconstruction. Ex-amples are drawn from Tokyo during and after 1945, in the light of earlier rebuilding followingdisastrous urban fires and plans for city improvement, and from the war-torn city of Beirutwhose suffering seems to be never ending. The little-known destruction and rebuilding of theChinese city of Tangshan following the 1976 earthquake stands alongside the widely-acknowl-edged rebuilding of Mexico City after the earthquake nine years later. Rather unconventionally,the rebuilding of Los Angeles is traced following the outbreak of civil unrest in 1992 that

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caused damage to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, an engaging essay on theimplications of disaster on electronic networks of communication and information handlingshows how duplication, off-site storage and spatial firewalling can reduce the impact of cyber-attack on vital digital data. Vale and Campanella conclude that the four-stage model of recov-ery from disaster (emergency/restoration/reconstruction I/reconstruction II, commemoration)devised in the 1970s still holds considerable validity as a means of grasping how recovery worksout in practice. Their twelve ‘axioms of resilience’ provide what editors of collected works oftenfail to deliver, namely a set of summary messages that move beyond the detail of the case stud-ies presented.

As someone researching the revival and reconstruction of urban and rural settlements in Francefollowing both world wars, I very much welcomed this book. Although not mentioning France, itscomponent essays remind me to explore symbolic (as well as material) aspects of recovery. Had Inot seen the captions, the photographs of destruction in Warsaw, Tokyo and Berlin could havewell been scenes of disaster in Caen or Le Havre in 1945, or in Reims in 1919. The idea of ‘resil-ience’ as opposed to recovery, revival or reconstruction, is one that I shall embrace in my futurework. With 65 illustrations (mostly photographs) and detailed chapter-specific bibliographies, thisis an effective and attractively-produced book that insists ‘the resilient city is a constructedphenomenon, not just in the literal sense . brick by brick, but in a broader cultural sense’also (p.353).

Hugh CloutUniversity College London, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2007.01.015

Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy,London, MIT Press, 2005, , 1072pages, £32.95 hardback.

This collection is an accompaniment to an exhibition of the same name and curated by thetwo editors held at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe between March andAugust 2005 (you can visit the exhibition virtually at http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de/). Itis a very big book, sometimes seeming to be all encompassing, but sometime actually quitenarrowly focussed. It consists of more than one hundred relatively short essays by writers, art-ists, and academics, divided into fifteen loosely themed ‘Chapters’. Some of the essays are the-oretical statements, some are provocations, some provide empirical and historical case studies,and some report on experimental projects to conjure new publics into existence. Scatteredthrough these are easily digestible gobbets from writers such as Swift, Heidegger, Sieyesand Dewey on the interrelated themes of words, objects, representation and publicness. Itis, fittingly enough, lavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, prints and maps. Thisall goes to make up a genuinely heterogeneous assemblage of ideas around the practicesand technologies of public life.

The contributions are gathered together around an opening theoretical essay by BrunoLatour. This essay provides the frame through which, one suspects, this collection will be trum-peted as path-breaking e it certainly spells out the claims for originality made in the marketing