Seeing Cities Change

Local Culture and Class

Bibliographic Data

ID12145451
AuthorsMatthew B Anderson, Matthew Anderson (0000-0002-9092-2580, Montana State University Billings, corresponding author), Alyson R Rode (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Year2012
Volume30
Issue1
Pages151-152
Publication date2012-12-03
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0887-3631 • E-ISSN: 1940-6320
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08873631.2012.750434
OpenAlexW1965029872
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class, by Jerome Krase, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. viii+290 pp., US$104.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-4094-2878-7 In Seeing Cities Change, Jerome Krase delivers a trans-disciplinary examination of visual methodologies and approaches to critical urban and social analysis. The book is mostly a collection of articles that span much of the author's career, and straddles the disciplinary boundaries of urban sociology, anthropology, planning, and geography. Krase's primary interest is with the utility of visual methods in understanding the complexities of how people enact social change through transforming (and therefore producing) the physical spaces they inhabit. In this frame, the ethnic vernacular landscape is used as the central lens through which processes of neighborhood change, such as succession and gentrification, are examined. The introduction presents and develops the book's conceptual framework, perhaps best summarized by Krase as spatial semiotics. Drawing upon literature from visual sociology and ethnography, the visual is promoted as an indispensable dimension of analysis that is, for Krase, typically given short change in urban studies. In the process, the strengths and weaknesses of two prominent traditions in urban studies are interrogated: urban political economy and urban ecology. Krase, although aligned more toward political-economic sensibilities, charts a middle-of-the-road path that navigates the work of notable scholars in both camps, such as Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Sharon Zukin, as well as the Chicago School figures of Louis Wirth, Robert Park, and Ernest Burgess. Along the way, many other major figures are also thrust into what becomes a very eclectic review of a wide range of ontological and epistemological orientations, such as planners like Jane Jacobs, French social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, and those working in the traditions of Symbolic Interactionism and Phenomenology. The point of engaging such a diverse range of conceptual paradigms is to identify what Krase asserts as the central organizing construct in urban studies: space. What would otherwise be a disorienting traversing of seemingly divergent and loosely related bodies of literature is cleverly linked through this central connecting thread. In this context, where space is positioned as a key dimension to understanding and explaining social processes, Krase convincingly argues that visual modes of analysis should hold a more privileged position in the social science methodological tool kit. The bulk of the book empirically examines the evolving landscapes of many historic and contemporary ethnic neighborhoods, particularly Chinatowns, Little Italy's, and Polish American neighborhoods

Discipline · Gentrification · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Visual culture · Anthropology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Law · Urban Studies

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