Book Review: Digital places: living with geographic information technologies

differential access. The essay expands a useful story of coping strategies while unpacking the notions of both women and open space to look at different groups of women and different designs of open space. Meanwhile Leavitt, Lingafelter and Morello take us through an auto-photographic project getting young girls to record their own poor Los Angeles neighbourhood, and its microgeographies of play and deprivation. Taking a rather different space, Longhurst looks at the supposedly feminized space of the shopping centre, but in terms of the pregnant female body. In one sense unsurprisingly, this unravels the relationship of a sexualized, marketed femininity and its exclusion of the reality of many women’s lives. On the other hand, as the essay suggests, the relationship of pregnancy and motherhood is rather more problematically situated in regards to both sexuality, gendered behaviour and consumption. Skelton’s essay, around sexually forceful female ragga artists from Jamaica, unpicks the relationship of place and sexuality in a different direction showing their performances as trebly coded by places – by the space of performance, by the urban ghetto and by Jamaica. The different ways these different places interact with sexuality and audience reaction makes a fascinating account mapping out some sexual empowerment, some containment and the sexual inequalities within the ghetto. This collection offers much thought-provoking material that, as the chapter by Boys suggests, gets us beyond ‘reading’ urban space, beyond a simple metaphorical model where architecture stands for social organization, and into the actual uses of different spaces. The collection usefully emphasizes how different places are inhabited and the differences places make to inhabitants. The overall connection of identity politics with geography develops an important issue, and the chapters offer new perspectives that more carefully disentangle the links between spaces physical and imagined, embodied practices, and the performance of gender.