At its heart,
From the outset, then, this understanding moves the discussion of the transition from socialism beyond a typical political-economic vocabulary. Investigating the flows of capital, people, and information allows Söderström to highlight what he calls the “emergence of new geopolitics of urban relations” (p. 55), bringing the conversation to a deeper, more subtle place. He then places this conversation into the wider context of the Global South turning away from Europe and North America as providers of models of urban development and reorienting toward South–South or East–East relations.
Söderström begins the book with a general overview of his theoretical grounding and overall goals. He then launches into the meat of the text: a broad-strokes review of each city's recent political history followed by a progression through a series of theoretical explorations and practical examples of policy brought to life in the streets. Every chapter introduces a particular set of concepts and then investigates the realization of these concepts in the subject cities, illustrated with the help of concrete projects on the ground. These include the specific local contexts of urban planning and the making of policy of public space in general, the construction of an elite housing development, a farmer's market, a new highway interchange, and an upscale shopping mall.
What emerges is a picture of Söderström's methodological concepts illuminated, as it were, from two sides, via real-life projects in both Hanoi and Ouagadougou. This strategy is successful at bringing to light the more problematic and contradictory aspects of relationally produced policies. In this way, Söderström does a good job at explaining why, for instance, policies created for the specific contexts of London or Lyon may not always translate well to the vastly different worlds of Hanoi or Ouagadougou. If there is a problem with this conceit, it is that the specific examples in each city may not be immediately comparable. It would be nice, for instance, to pair the failed farmer's market attempt in Ouagadougou with a similar farmer's market project in Hanoi. Of course, ideal direct comparisons are not always available, so Söderström fits assorted real-world examples underneath a broader conceptual umbrella. This is a good work-around solution, but still the idea of perfect parallel projects in comparative perspective is an alluringly poetic idea. This speaks to the fact that Söderström is at his best when exploring the ground in Hanoi and Ouagadougou – he has a keen eye for finding compelling projects to examine – and his book could only benefit from more concrete demonstrations of his conceptual ambitions in practice.
On the conceptual and methodological side of the spectrum, Söderström makes a strong case for using actor–network theory to underpin a relational approach to understanding post-colonial development, policy mobility, and the nature of power. This, he argues, is critical to creating a broader understanding of a city's relational world, itself a key ingredient in building a better politics of urban relatedness. With this in mind, Söderström's choice of subject – two “relation-poor” cities – is particularly clever. After all, the web of connections in a more prominent city would likely be significantly harder to untangle and analyze, whereas it is still reasonably plausible to get a grasp of the more modest relational world of his chosen cities. This dovetails neatly into Söderström's point that all cities are world cities, and overall this book represents a convincing argument for more attention focused on the Global South.
Söderström painstakingly traces the translocal connections involved
in the making of public space policy and examines the results as they are
implemented on the ground. Continuing on the thread of actor–network theory
and policy mobility, this investigation of the creation and application of
public space policy represents the epicenter of the entire work. This takes
place in the specific and very local cultural and historical contexts of the
subject cities, and Söderström is quite right to discuss how these
local specificities profoundly influence topological relations in order to
assemble a coherent policy. The time spent building a solid contextual and
methodological grounding allows Söderström to explain extremely
specific local results, including the meaning of
With a clear, logical structure and a foundation of rigorous methodology,
Söderström examines urban policy, form, and production in order to
build a new and more fluid conception of relatedness with “elsewhere”. He
succeeds in furthering the discussion on urban development in the Global
South, providing concrete examples that policies cannot simply be
“transposed” into new contexts. Indeed,