1738 BOOK REVIEWS
From 1975, Vientiane shifted once again to
being primarily a Lao urban centre, although
broader regional and global processes continue
to shape the city. From 1975 to the late 1980s
and early 1990s, these were Vietnamese and
Soviet infl uences, although the authors note
that Vientiane shows relative little evidence of
Soviet-style architecture and urban planning.
From the 1990s, forces shaping Vientiane have
shifted to include substantial infl uence from
Thailand, south-east Asia more generally within
the framework of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asian Develop-
ment Bank inspired ‘Greater Mekong Sub-
region’ and the broader trends of contemporary
globalisation.
As this review should make clear, one of the
authors’ main points is that (with the partial
exception of the Lan Xang period) Vientiane
and its history have been constructed largely
through processes of marginalisation, as much
or more than processes of centrality commonly
associated with and assumed for urban sites.
The detail and clarity this book brings to the
account make it well worth consideration by
anyone who is interested in theories of urbanism
and urbanisation. As a superb account of a
small, out-of-the-way city in a small, out-of-
the-way nation, one hopes that this book will
not be destined to marginality and obscurity by
the very processes it critiques.
Eric C. Thompson
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore
Raum, Überwachung, Kontrolle: Vom
staatlichen Zugriff auf städtische
Bevölkerung
Bernd Belina, 2006
Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot
321 pp. E29.90 paperback
ISBN 3 89691 635 1 paperback
In recent decades, new narratives and strategies
of space control have entered the thinking and
practices of policing: crime hot spots, dangerous
places, banning orders, open street CCTV,
place-specifi c police powers to stop-and-search
and computerised crime mapping are some
examples. This trend is accompanied by the
downscaling of policing competencies and
the responsibilisation of local actors through
the creation of crime reduction partnerships,
public safety round tables, urban wardens, and
the revitalisation of municipal police forces.
It is this spatial turn in policing that the
German geographer Bernd Belina critically
examines from a Marxist perspective in his
book Raum, Überwachung, Kontrolle: Vom
staatlichen Zugriff auf städtische Bevölkerung
[Space, surveillance, control: governing urban
populations]. What are the meanings of space
and scale for contemporary crime control and
criminal justice policies? Do they really matter
in these contexts, and if so, how? These are the
key questions approached by the author.
His answer is, briefl y spoken, that space and
scale do matter, but not as abstract factors that
determine the social and urban fabric or
explain their shape and change. Instead, both
space and scale are strategically utilised in
spatial and scalar practices in order to regulate
and maintain the social order and mode of
capitalist production and manage its inherent
crises. The concept of governing through crime
through space and scale is the key to Belina’s
book. Against the ‘democracy at work’ thesis
that criminal justice policies are responding
to the electorates’ demands, Belina argues in
the tradition of critical criminology that they
actually create and frame fear and discourses
on crime. The specific function of space in
these discourses and policies then is to justify a
pre-emptive risk-based logic of crime control
that is expanding state control beyond indi-
vidual acts or criminalised groups towards
selected territories being labelled as ‘criminal’
or ‘dangerous’.
Thus, Belina argues “against space” (p. 25)
and its respective turns and fetishisms. Instead,
drawing on Henry Lefèbvre and radical geo-
graphers such as David Harvey and Neil Smith,
he suggests that space (as well as scale) is mean-
ingless without the context of social processes
BOOK REVIEWS 1739
and practices. The author works with a dualism
and thus escapes from Lefèbvre’s “ominous
third” (p. 40), the espace vécu. Space is the
physical, material space, on the one hand, and
stands for meaning, signifi er and ideology on
the other. Rather than standing for themselves,
space and scale are invoked in social practices
as the means—or, if deployed against other
interests, even as strategies—of achieving
economic, political or other purposes, such
as “landscape in order to walk ..., territory
in order to exercise power over population”
(p. 28). How this happens in the context of
crime control and criminal justice policies is
exemplifi ed in the empirical chapters of the
book which study different aspects of such
spatial and scalar practices with a focus on
Germany and the US.
First, Belina shows how the buzz-words and
concepts of ‘broken windows’, ‘zero tolerance’
and ‘New York’ are deployed as ideologies of
space to the end of, borrowing from Jonathan
Simon (1997), “governing through crime”.
The ‘broken windows’ thesis proposes that the
social phenomenon of increased presence of
‘disorderly’ people in particular areas might
attract and entail severe crime and a breakdown
of social order. In so doing, the thesis serves as
justifi cation for the spatially selective enforce-
ment of a neo-conservative vision of order.
The ambivalence of zero tolerance as a fl exible
concept to denote disproportionate racist
police work as well as a measured and just
law enforcement allows it simultaneously to
promote and conceal the selective policing
of space. When deployed against drug mar-
kets in Afro-American ghettos, zero tolerance
policing might satisfy the revanchism of White
suburban middle classes as well as it might
nurture the hopes of the resident population.
Last but not least, ‘New York’ as spatial meta-
phor is exploited to prove the alleged success
of such policing strategies and to promote their
superiority over competing strategies.
Secondly, Belina discusses how debates about
public space mask the shift from inclusionary
towards exclusionary visions of social control.
While earlier notions of public space represented
ideals of equality and citizenship, recent slogans
to ‘reclaim the streets’ indicate the move to
displace certain sections of the population in
order to appease others. Thirdly, he shows how
efforts to ‘reclaim the street’ materialise in the
form of open street CCTV, banning orders and
the selective policing of territories targeting
the unwanted and marginalised, the beggars,
junkies, prostitutes and homeless, those whose
‘phenotypes’ disturb aesthetic visions of new
urbanism.
Fourthly, it is shown how responsibilities
for crime control have oscillated between the
local and the central state in the US since the
1920s and how these politics of “scale jumping”
(p. 269) are determined by strategic interests
and the quest for regulation. Only from the
1920s onwards did local police forces become
more formalised (ending community-based
policing of frontiers and boundaries), while
in the 1960s the federal state intervened for
the fi rst time at the local scale in response to the
urban riots during this time. Since the 1980s,
the ‘war on drugs’ has brought federal law on
the agenda while the 1990s witnessed the pro-
motion of ‘community policing’. (De)indus-
trialisation and spatial strategies on crime, the
author shows, are deeply intertwined.
He concludes that the changing practices of
governing through crime through space and
scale are to be understood as efforts to manage
the economic and political contradictions of
capitalism. The spatial turn in policing and the
new downscaling of crime control thus have
to be seen as efforts to stabilise the neo-liberal
project by regulating and containing the ‘sur-
plus’ population at possible low costs.
Belina’s comprehensive analysis of the role
that space and scale play for criminal justice
policies is a sophisticated synthesis of critical
criminology and radical geography. It both
echoes and refi nes works on the governing of
neo-liberalism through crime as, for instance,
indicated in the ‘roll out’ concept of Jamie Peck
and Adam Tickell (2002) or elaborated in the
writings of Steve Herbert (1997; Herbert and
Brown, 2006).
1740 BOOK REVIEWS
Sometimes the author paints with a very
broad brush, for instance, when he more or
less ignores the significant quantitative and
qualitative differences between open street
CCTV in Britain and Germany. Moreover, one
wonders why there is basically no word about
space strategies outside urban areas, despite
their importance for the policing of borders
and the control of migrants who are, as Belina
will know, key (not only) to the neo-liberal
project.
However, his book is an important contri-
bution to the understanding of strategies of
crime control in (neo-liberal) capitalism and,
what is more, it is part of the author’s project
to transfer and translate the ideas of radi-
cal geography and promote them among
a German-speaking audience (Belina and
Michel, 2007). Thus, it is also a contribution to
a better understanding between Anglophones
and researchers from continental Europe—
obviously a matter of concern for the author
(Belina, 2005).
Volker Eick
John F. Kennedy Institute
Department of Politics
Freie Universität Berlin
and Eric Töpfer
Zentrum Technik and Gesellschaft
Technische Universitãt Berlin
References
Belina, B. (2005) Anglophones: if you want us to
understand you, you will have to talk under-
standably, Antipode, 37(5), pp. 853–855.
Belina, B. and Michel, B. (Eds) (2007)
Raumproduktionen—Beiträge der radical geography.
Eine Zwischenbilanz. Münster: Westfälisches
Dampfboot.
Herbert, S. (1997) Policing Space: Territoriality and
the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Herbert, S. and Brown, E. (2006) Conceptions of
space and crime in the punitive neo-liberal city,
Antipode, 38(4), pp. 755–777.
Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (2002) Neo-liberalizing space,
Antipode, 34(3), pp. 380–404.
Simon, J. (1997) Governing through crime, in:
L. Friedman and G. Fisher (Eds) The Crime
Conundrum: Essays on Criminal Justice,
pp. 171–180. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Blair’s Community: Communitarian
Thought and New Labour
Sarah Hale, 2006
Manchester: Manchester University Press
213 pp. £55.00 hardback
ISBN 0 7190 7412 6 hardback
The argument in Blair’s Community can be
succinctly put in three propositions: that it
is generally thought that New Labour has
been an administration whose philosophical
approach to governance and society includes
a large dose of communitarianism; that this
would be a difficult case to make even if it
were true given the breadth of communitarian
thinking and the divisions within that genre;
and that it is in fact not the case anyway, since
any supposed communitarianism in Blair’s
approach was a misreading of the many and
contradicting signals emitted in his term of
office by a Prime Minster whose particular
brand of high pragmatism included discursive
mechanisms which he perceived to hit the right
public buttons.
As the author points out, Blair was singled
out by Amitai Etzioni as one of the UK’s ex-
amples of a “growing number of political
leaders” who “often speak communitarian”
(Etzioni, 1995, p. ix), but her suggestion is that
even this appropriation by the communitar-
ian order was a misinterpretation of the true
meaning of the various soundbites that con-
stituted Blair’s communitarian repertoire.
Blair was for Hale, in essence, an authoritarian
who recognised the possible unpopularity of
parts of his ‘common sense’ approach to crime
and incivility and took linguistic measures
to dilute the more hard-line consequences of
an intolerant law-and-order agenda with the
more inclusive implications that radiate from
the “warm glow” of talk of community (Hale,
2006, p. 76). I have put this in slightly more
bald terms than the author does, but I do not
