Book Review: City worlds, Unsettling cities: movement/settlement, Unruly cities? Order/disorder

Abstract

This series of three books accompanies a third-level Open University course, ‘Understanding cities’, which is designed to take a ‘new’ look at cities. The basis for this claim appears to be that while many texts either document the urbanization process in relation to the historical geographies of capitalism or exploring the complex nature of urban social life, few consider how cities are produced in the context of the social relations that occur both beyond and within the city. While I remain unconvinced that this constitutes an entirely ‘new’ way of thinking and writing about cities, I can certainly see the merits of this approach as a way of encouraging students to think synthetically, engaging critically with debates about globalization and urbanization by thinking about how different geographies and histories intersect and overlap in the contemporary city. Accordingly, I think this series of books will be of interest to students on a wide variety of courses at different levels, having a generic appeal. Moreover, I suspect many lecturers will also have good reason to hunt these down because, by now, most know what to expect from OU texts – that they provide challenging material in an accessible format, that they are presented to the very highest production standards, and that they include specially commissioned and original essays from a carefully selected range of contributors who are widely recognized for the quality of their writing. As such, even though there will probably be few, if any, outside the OU who would prescribe all three as essential course texts, it is easy to imagine that many chapters here will appear on reading lists for courses in urban, social and cultural geography (as well as perhaps political and economic geography). From this viewpoint, there is much to recommend these books. For example, although most textbooks inevitably classify, codify and compartmentalize knowledge, this series does seem to be serious about encouraging students to think