Abstract
Tom Slater’s Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question offers a necessary and profound intervention into public and academic dialogues about urban communities. Slater argues that commonplace conceptual framings of the so-called “urban question” by mass media, policy-makers, business leaders, and academics tend to normalize the interests of powerful social groups. Moreover, Slater points out that emergent buzzwords and concepts have obscured the role of “state structures and institutional arrangements that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the evolution of capitalist urbanization” (p. 1). However, the book is more than a critique of existing paradigms and policy buzzwords and their practical implications. It seeks to unearth the causes and consequences of persistent urban inequality and the ongoing immiseration of marginalized communities that such approaches fail to illuminate.
The emergence of policy-driven rather than theory- or concept-driven analyses of urban communities is not the only target of Slater’s critique. He also aims at the rise of “data-driven” scientism in rising urban science programs at elite universities such as MIT. In particular, the author notes that unequal subjection to data collection and the embedded biases and assumptions of predictive “big data” analysis have often served to rationalize oppressive social control against marginalized groups within urban populations. While such seemingly novel approaches are presented as a panacea to the shortcomings of current urban research and practice, they do not engage the frames and epistemologies necessary for addressing the mechanisms and social processes underlying persistent urban inequalities. Slater contends that they often merely provide data analytics for city bureaucrats to legitimate policies which bolster the status quo.
The two major concepts that drive Slater’s analysis are agnotology and symbolic power. Agnotology concerns how ignorance intentionally becomes embedded in the process of knowledge production. In this case, the text centers on how this dominant paradigm of urban research evades engagement with the macrostructural and sociopolitical dynamics that produce the various urban crises that lie at the heart of the field’s analytic focus. Relatedly, the influential concept of symbolic power developed by Bourdieu (1991) refers to the influence dominant groups wield in defining and representing social reality. These conceptual guideposts provide a somewhat loose but coherent throughline for the book’s exploration of central tendencies within contemporary urban research.
The book is perhaps most robust when it connects shortcomings of the dominant paradigm of urban research to the very practices and policies that reproduce mass inequality and immiseration in cities. This rubric seeks to connect epistemology, urban power relations, and critical analysis of the role of capitalism and the state in urban dynamics. Chapters Two through Seven break down specific assumptions and frameworks that undergird modern mainstream urban research. For instance, Slater analyzes how focusing on the “resilience” of communities in urban research and policy normalizes the root causes of inequality. Slater demonstrates how these approaches obscure more than they reveal about these crises and their sociopolitical and material solutions. Like many of the frameworks critiqued here, the book convincingly demonstrates how they render social exclusion, political inequality, and economic exploitation as opaque, nebulous externalities or even forces of nature.
This section on resilience and change then dovetails into Chapter Three, which offers a course correction in the form of the rent gap theory. By clarifying this approach’s tenants, Slater reorients matters of modern urban inequality in terms of “the state’s role in creating economic conditions for gentrification” (p. 65). In short, it provides a counternarrative to explain the mechanisms of gentrification, especially attentive to the role of financial interests tied to urban spaces and to cultural representations of space and place that accord them degrees of stigma or prestige. In this spirit, the book also offers a critical reading of the popular 2016 urban sociology text Evicted (Desmond 2016). Despite its engaging and empathetic ethnographic descriptions, Slater points out that Evicted’s policy and practice recommendations (such as rent vouchers) do not touch on the political, economic, and structural conditions at the heart of the eviction crisis.
Toward its end, the book lays out possible frameworks that help further reorient the field in more holistic and power-reflexive directions. For instance, its incisive critique of the research on neighborhood effects demonstrates just such a critical intervention. The notion that where people live affects their well-being and access to opportunities is undoubtedly apparent to most sociologists, but Slater points out that much of the work and policies using this concept do not engage the underlying sociopolitical causes of neighborhood-level disparities. This section does not merely offer an alternative explanation for these effects by recontextualizing them through Marxist critiques. It also fruitfully applies Wacquant’s concept of territorial stigma (2007) to demonstrate how the neighborhood effects concept reinscribes general notions of “good” and “bad” neighborhoods and obscures and naturalizes inequality. As the text notes, “neighborhoods don’t DO anything” (p. 132). Along similar lines, Chapter Seven offers a recontextualization of related research on so-called urban “ghettos” as a product of larger processes of containment and extraction.
The book contributes to an emerging set of scholarship that draws from neo-Marxism and the black radical tradition to foreground questions of material interests, political domination, racial oppression, and economic exploitation to explain urban phenomena such as gentrification, displacement, and racialized and classed patterns of institutional treatment. The text also engages with the role of social movements in resistance to gentrification, although, compared to other sections, this topic is somewhat underdeveloped. At times the book comes off as a set of loosely related but discrete essays, and the author notes that he has published portions of these arguments elsewhere. While the book closes with some thoughts on the possible implications and political uses of theory, it would have benefited from tying these threads together and clearly articulating concrete, practical insights for collective action, research agendas, and policy proposals. Overall, Shaking Up the City is poised to stimulate critical thought about the orthodox answers to “the urban question” and shape the urban research, practice, and policy agenda. As a book heavily engaged in disciplinary debates and questions of epistemology, it is especially appropriate for graduate seminars on public policy, urban studies, city planning, or urban sociology.