----------------------------Original message----------------------------
i thought this would be of interest to urban map librarians
especially...This is forwarded from the H-Urban listserve.
Alice Hudson, NYPL
______________________________ Forward Header __________________________________
Subject: Review: _Geographies of Exclusion_
Author: "Kevan D. Frazier" <[log in to unmask]> at ~Internet-Mail
Date: 9/16/97 5:49 PM
Cross-posted from [log in to unmask] (September, 1997)
David Sibley. _Geographies of Exclusion_. London and New York: Routledge,
1995. xviii + 206 pp. Plates, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-415-11924-3; $18.95 (paper), ISBN 0-415-11925-1.
Reviewed for H-Book by Christopher Leo <[log in to unmask]>,
University of Winnipeg
Barricades for Society, and for the Mind
This interesting and timely book investigates the psychological and social
origins of ghettoization in the broadest sense. It looks at how boundaries
and barriers work in practice to exclude "undesirable" people as well as
ideas. It is a subtle, historical, and contemporary analysis of how images
of difference originate in the minds of children and how they are
translated into the reality of exclusion in adult life, and in society as a
whole.
This could be a subject whose time has come (more on this later), and if
so, Sibley breaks important ground. Some of the more interesting and
controversial recent studies seek to expose the realities of ghettoization
and exclusion from a political, rather than a socio-geographical
perspective (Davis 1992, Sorkin 1992, Foglesong 1994). Sibley adopts a
similarly critical stance, but offers a less flamboyant approach. His
methods of investigation are careful and thorough, and his stance
open-minded. I begin with a brief summary of the book and proceed with
critique of part of the author's argument.
Sibley attacks his topic systematically, beginning with a dip into object
relations theory to explore how we identify ourselves with some things and
people, and distance ourselves from others. In Chapter Two, he begins an
exploration of some of the images associated with object relations, such
things as conceptions about black and white, and about disease and
closeness to nature as metaphors for assumed inferiority.
Chapter Three moves from the psychological to the social, discussing how
society's boundaries are identified, established and maintained. Two
particularly interesting passages deal with moral panic--an outbreak of
mass anxiety over a perceived threat to society--and inversions of
authority relations, in which marginal groups seize the social centre.
Chapter Four, which deals with literary and media images that map "pure"
and "defiled" spaces, is followed by a discussion of how the individual
psyche interacts with conventional social conceptions, and with built form,
to construct "purified" spaces, suitable for mainstream society, as well as
defining those spaces set aside for deviants. Sibley stresses that this
creation of spaces is a two-way process, of projection and introjection:
our conceptions help to shape the spaces we inhabit, and set aside for
others, while, at the same time, our conceptions are themselves shaped by
the spaces we see, and know about.
Chapter Six focusses on the home, the neighbourhood and the nation,
describing how each of them function as spaces of exclusion and how
exclusionary images and practices of the nation, the locality and the
family influence each other. A particularly interesting observation in this
chapter deals with the ragpickers of Paris, who were excluded from
bourgeois society, and lived in shantytowns, but enjoyed a considerable
degree of freedom from the usual constraints of bourgeois society. Within
bourgeois society, their freedom made them an object of envy, and they were
romanticized, even as they were being excluded.
In Chapter Seven, the analysis shifts from the realm of social groups and
spaces to that of ideas, and the author investigates how the establishment
of boundaries for the purposes of exclusion is applied to the production
and regulation of knowledge. Three case studies are introduced in to
explore how "inappropriate" knowledge is excluded from serious
consideration.
The next two chapters delve into the reasons for the marginalization of W.
E. B. DuBois, the revered African American sociologist and political
activist, and of the urban research of the women of the School of Social
Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Referring to the fact
that both of these cases are in the past, Sibley comments: "My case studies
may be instances of the exclusion of knowledge which no longer occur, but I
am not sure about this. Academic post-modern writing, although celebrating
diversity, does not seem to me to represent a radical break with the past."
Anyone wishing to make an academic career, he adds, is still well-advised
"to play the game according to... rules which give some ideas legitimacy
and render others inconsequential..." (p. 117).
Sibley's study is appropriately interdisciplinary for a subject with an
exceptionally varied array of causes, effects, implications and resonances.
The author casts widely and imaginatively for data and theory, drawing on
such diverse sources as anthropology, psychoanalysis, film, criminology,
semiotics, and more. Understandably, that leads to some unevenness. For
example, the discussion in Chapter One of the infantile origins of the
definition of self, and its separation from the other, ends a bit
confusingly, underlining the fact that, interdisciplinarity aside,
geography and psychotherapy are a good distance apart. Sibley's command of
the literature and its concepts is surer when he draws on geographical,
anthropological and sociological sources, as he does in most of the book.
In one respect, however, the argument falls strangely on ears attuned to
urban politics. In its treatment of contemporary urban exclusionary
practices, an air of unreality hovers over the book, stemming from the fact
that the discussion is informed by a historical perspective and deals
primarily with the way reality is conceived, rather than the realities
themselves.
In themselves, these characteristics are not a cause for concern, but, when
he looks at cities today, they lead Sibley to conclude that society has
become less inclined to ghettoization, "embracing more of the population,
with the class divide in particular becoming more elusive as a boundary
marker. The imagery of defilement... Is more likely to be applied to
'imperfect people'... Including the mentally disabled, the homeless,
prostitutes, and some racialized minorities" (p. 69). While it is true that
class boundaries at the end of the 20th Century are not what they were 150
years earlier, the line of argument conveys a misleading impression of what
is happening in many cities today.
In North America, especially the United States--leaving out the rest of the
world in order not to complicate the argument unduly--exclusion is a hard
political reality, not a game of image-making. Indeed, in a shorter time
frame, it is becoming worse, rather than better. Physical and psychological
barricades, far from coming down, are rapidly becoming emblematic of North
American urban society, in a way that they have not been in the past. In
city after city, architectural barriers and electronic security keep
commercial areas exclusive; privatization, and the implementation of fees,
transform public services into the private property of those who can afford
to pay; gated residential precincts and private police proliferate.
The self-isolation of the affluent in their private preserves is matched by
the involuntary isolation of poor people, typically in inner cities. Their
more affluent fellow citizens flee to the periphery, or barricade
themselves in exclusive areas, leaving others to deal with the results of a
growing concentration of social problems, usually in the city centre. The
issues they face are grinding poverty and psychologically destructive
social isolation, far more serious matters than the inaccurate bourgeois
notions about skinheads, gays and racial minorities which Sibley stresses.
Sibley's argument is true as far as it goes: ghettoization of the poor is
less drastic than it was a century-and-a- half ago in Europe. But the book's
long historical perspective, and its emphasis on images, masks more
immediate, grittier realities--realities that seem likely to be exacerbated
in future.
An era of unprecedented global mobility is rapidly rendering the so-called
third world an integral part of otherwise wealthy cities, while the
mobility conferred by the private automobile all but empties many inner
cities of their middle class populations, leaving behind the helpless poor
and criminals who feed off them. These developments nourish middle-class
fears. The response--the architectural and electronic barriers,
privatization and gated communities--adds up to a series of attempts to
harden class, and often racial, barriers, an ominous counter-balance to the
ameliorative factors Sibley stresses.
My observations are fully compatible with the spirit of Sibley's argument;
indeed they suggest that the significance and influence of this book is
likely to grow with the passage of time. Sibley has made some important
points and missed others. Much more remains to be said on a topic which has
not been given the attention it deserves, and to which Sibley has made a
first-class contribution.
Bibliography:
Davis, Mike. _City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles_.
New York: Vintage, 1992.
Foglesong, Richard. _Walt Disney World as a Model Private City._ Bristol,
U.K.: Conference on Shaping the Urban Future: International Perspectives
and Exchanges, 1994.
Sorkin, Michael, ed. _Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and
the End of Public Space_. New York: Noonday Press, 1992.
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