New York; London: Routledge, 2016. xiii, 246 pp. (Illustrations.) US$59.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-415-72029-8.
Nihal Perera’s latest book foregrounds ways in which people make spaces in line with their cultural practices, everyday activities, and shifting aspirations. While at first sight this might appear to be a somewhat mundane dimension of contemporary urban and regional studies, Perera makes a compelling case for its significance. In part, people’s spaces and the efforts that go into making and maintaining them are important simply because of their historical and geographical ubiquity. Of course, there is spatio-temporal variability in both the need for and scope of people’s spaces—Perera suggests that they are often particularly significant in the global South—but people everywhere (re)make their living space in ways that exceed codified, professionalized knowledge in the fields of architecture, engineering, or planning. Even more significantly for academic audiences, Perera argues that scholars of planning and researchers in cognate fields have given insufficient attention to people’s spaces. He puts this down to a privileging of expert knowledge and conceptual abstraction, as well as an overwhelming tendency to focus on the state and the market as the key drivers of socio-spatial change. People’s Spaces: Coping, Familiarizing, Creating seeks to provide a corrective to those extant tendencies by detailing the transformative capacity of ordinary (and, in some cases, more marginal or subaltern) members of society.
Following a substantial introduction chapter that lays out the intertwined professional, political, and scholarly contributions of the book, the subsequent ten chapters are all case studies. Each of those chapters is straightforward and readable, the emphasis being on empirical material that demonstrates the book’s overall thesis in different times and places. Six of the chapters are on Sri Lanka, including two on Colombo under European rule. They concern how space in the colonial city was “indigenized” (chapter 1) and “feminized” or appropriated by women (chapter 2). These chapters revisit and extend Perera’s earlier historical work which first made him known to transdisciplinary urban studies audiences (Society and space: Colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonial identity in Sri Lanka, Westview Press, 1998). The other Sri Lanka chapters examine: how ordinary people forged their own spaces, social structures, and institutions during the separatist conflict (1983–2009), exceeding the ethnic and spatial dichotomies of the war; the means through which residents of Galle Fort negotiated and, in some cases, circumvented World Heritage Site restrictions on their socio-spatial practices; how post-tsunami reconstruction efforts in Hambantota district were dictated by donor agencies in ways that constrained survivors’ rebuilding capacity (a kind of “second tsunami,” 130) until they were able to infuse the process with their own memories and aspirations; and, the social dynamics of a handiya (a socio-spatial “intersection”) in a suburb of Colombo.
One of the Sri Lanka chapters and three of the other four chapters are co-authored. Those explicitly collaborative parts of the text, as well as many of the ideas and material in the single-authored chapters, arose from an immersive planning study program that Perera himself initiated and directs. I would have liked to have read more—beyond the acknowledgements section of the book and brief mentions elsewhere—about the three-way learning relations between researcher, students, and local community members that this entailed. Certainly, the process gave rise to rich empirical insights into space-making practices across many sites: in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Dharavi (in Mumbai, India), Daanchi (outside Kathmandu, Nepal) and Gangtok (India) as well as in Sri Lanka. Perhaps revealing some of my own disciplinary preoccupations as a geographer, I was surprised that there was no explicit conceptual engagement with “place” in the book—Perera draws instead upon work on (trans)locality—especially given its explicit focus on the human rather than abstract dimensions of space. What I really do appreciate, however, is Perera’s conceptual understanding of the workings of power in space/place-making. Across various cases, he shows how people’s spaces are not crafted in some autonomous realm outside or beyond wider authorities, but through negotiated relations with them. As in the seminal work of James C. Scott that Perera refers to at several points, such relations rarely manifest in the form of overt protest or resistance, and this is precisely why many other scholars miss or (wrongly) dismiss them.
There is no doubt that People’s Spaces contributes to the development of a relatively neglected area of contemporary urban and regional studies. Perera is correct, I believe, in attributing that neglect at least partly to the primacy currently afforded to political economic processes rather than sociocultural practices. To that I would add mention of a tendency for scholars to be drawn to the high-profile and spectacular rather than the everyday or (seemingly) mundane. In making the case for the novelty of his contribution, however, I do think that Perera overlooks some important traditions of existing work. The Chicago School of Sociology, for example, included myriad examples of urban ethnography that examined ordinary people’s sites, spaces, and associated institutions in their own terms, rather than trying to fit them into overarching theoretical categories or more-than-local explanatory frameworks. Indeed, these are among the oft-cited criticisms of the Chicago School and of ethnographic approaches to urban society and space more widely. This is not to suggest that the same forms of criticism may, in turn, be extended to Perera’s book. Apart from covering multiple time-spaces, coverage of each of his case studies is attentive to local detail without being localist (especially chapter 6, where work on translocality is mobilized to understand the constitutive connections involved in post-tsunami rebuilding). In addition, the conclusion chapter does an effective job of summarizing how the varied cases speak to the volume’s wider theme. I do wonder, however, whether more could have been done to draw out comparative insights across the diverse examples of “people’s spaces” covered in the book. The empirically rich material assembled for each of them certainly suggests potential for further work along such lines.
Tim Bunnell
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 548-550