BOOK REVIEWS

CONTENTSHow Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of LinguisticDiversity, by Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber. Review by Enrico Spolaore 375Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations, by Tom R. Tyler.Review by Timothy R. Wojan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378Local Redistribution and Local Democracy: Interest Groups and theCourts, by Clayton P. Gillette. Review Timothy J. Goodspeed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379Beyond Privatopia: Rethinking Residential Private Government, byEvan McKenzie. Review by Paula A. Franzese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381Investigating Quality of Urban Life: Theory, Methods, andEmpirical Research, edited by Robert W. Marans and Robert J. Stimson.Review by Michael Pacione . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382Reflections of a Pragmatic Economist: My Intellectual Journey, byEmery N. Castle. Review by Riley Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and theEvolution of a State, edited by Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, BruceWeber, and Beth Emshoff. Review by Lizbeth Martin-Mahar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386Handbook of Applied Spatial Analysis: Software Tools, Methods andApplications, edited by Manfred M. Fischer and Arthur Getis. Review byChangshan Wu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386The City Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and NewYork, edited by Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson. Review Eric Sandweiss . 388Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and theHumanities, edited by Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. NicholasEntrikin, and Douglas Richardson. Review by George F. Roberson and RichardW. Wilkie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles, by Nadia Amoroso.Review by Nikhil Kaza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392

How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity, by VictorGinsburgh and Shlomo Weber. 2011. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 232 + x. ISBN978-0-691-13689-9, $35.

Economists Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber tell us that people in the world today speakclose to 7,000 distinct languages (p. 9). Some are spoken by small groups, others are shared by largepopulations, and a few—such as English—are used by many all over the world. Linguistic diversityhas fascinated and worried humans for millennia—probably since tribes of hunters-gathers realizedthat their neighbors spoke a different, strange idiom. As the authors point out, myths about linguisticdiversity have emerged in several cultures (pp. 16–17). God sent multiplicity of languages to theconstructors of the Babel tower to stop their project (Genesis 11: 1–9). Hermes, the messengerof the Greek gods, confused the languages of humans, and the Hindu divinity Brahma punisheda tree that reached heaven by cutting off its branches, which fell to earth and created different

The Book Review Section of the Journal of Regional Science benefits from a financial contributionby Williams College.

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ways, the contributors to this volume ought perhaps to be just as glad that they have not managedto leave behind a similarly big target.

Eric SandweissDepartment of HistoryIndiana University

REFERENCEPark, Robert E., Ernest Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie (eds.). 1925. The City: Suggestions for the Study of

Human Nature in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, edited byStephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, and Douglas Richardson. 2011. NewYork: Routledge. 320 + xxxii. ISBN 978-0-415-58977-2, cloth, $140; ISBN 978-0-415-58978-9,paper, $47.95.

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities is a remarkable andtimely edited volume. Produced by the Association of American Geographers (AAG), which hasover 10,000 members in 60 countries, it’s the brainchild of Douglas Richardson, AAG’s ExecutiveDirector, and Denis Cosgrove, a noted cultural geographer who died in 2008. The book grew out ofAAG’s 2007 “Geography and the Humanities Symposium” that featured over seventy participants,was three years in the making, and was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities(Richardson, 2006, 2007a, b). (The symposium also resulted in a second “more experimental andexperiential” (Richardson in this volume, p. xxi) book about the humanities’ engagements with spaceand place, GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Dear et al., 2011; a review in thisjournal is forthcoming)). From the outset, Richardson sets a high bar for the present book, hoping itwill “form a foundational contribution,” “become influential and heavily cited,” and “generate heateddebate” (p. xx).

After Richardson’s foreword, Cosgrove’s precise prologue (“Geography within the Humanities”),and the editors’ introductory essay, there are 29 papers, divided into four sections: “Mapping,”“Reflecting,” “Representing,” and “Performing.” Several of geography’s most well-known figures areamong the authors, including Yi-Fu Tuan, David Lowenthal, David Livingstone, and Derek Gregoryin addition to the editors and Cosgrove. Richardson’s foreword provides a general introduction to thebook and the broader genesis of the project and symposium, and each of the other editors contributesa chapter. With one exception, all chapters after the editors’ introduction are sole-authored. Elevenare by women, all but one of them clustered in the “Representing” and “Performing” sections.

As with so many things nowadays, many contributors are transnational, but a survey of currentaffiliations shows that fourteen are based in the United Kingdom, eight in the United States, twoeach in Canada and Sweden, and one each in Italy, Australia, and Japan. While all are academics,most consider themselves first and foremost as geographers (there are five exceptions, three of themclustered in the final “Performing” section), but many are working in cross- or interdisciplinary waysin a wide range of departments/fields, including communications, landscape architecture, planning,history, philosophy, sociology, political science, literature, film, media, drama, performance studies,architecture, and urban design.

The first section—“Mapping”—is meant to go beyond cartography, and the word is to be usedin a “metaphorical sense of interpreting and creating images and texts and of making sense of a fastmodernizing or post-modernizing of the world” (editors’ introduction, p. xxx). Do the six chapterssucceed along those lines? Five of the six go into either deep historical underpinnings of landscapeideas, maps and the ideas behind them, or how twentieth-century thematic mapping relates tohistory (Susan Schulten). There is much to reflect upon in these chapters, but making sense of ourpostmodernizing world is not what the authors achieved, except perhaps as a way of thinking aboutthe past. The sixth chapter (Derek Gregory) explores the natural history of destruction, in this casethe brutal Allied bombing of cities in Nazi Germany during World War II, and how best to depictthat destruction (from above or below?) and how that in turn relates to memory and meaning of theacts. Most of the chapters in “Mapping” are well worth reading, but on the whole they are not asstrong as those in the other three sections.

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“Reflecting” is for us the strongest overall section in the book. Here the idea is to “adopt a morereflective, but no less engaged, perspective on the past as well as the present to probe the moraland cultural complexity of places and landscapes, and to reveal the dense web of meanings andsocial relations, which lie behind that which seems in plain view” (editors’ introduction, p. xxx). Themajority of the authors give us extremely solid works: Timothy Cresswell, who makes the case for“mobility . . . alongside such notions as landscape, space, place or territory . . . .” (p. 77); Entrikin, whotackles the relationship between geography and philosophy; Livingstone, who looks at Darwinianlandscapes); and Anthony Pagden, who discusses how “the desire to move, to travel . . . togetherwith the ability to transform nature to meet human needs, constituted not merely dominion over theworld, but a form of knowledge of it” (p. 120). Tuan’s “The Good Inherit the Earth” is not his strongestessay, although such a book without Yi-Fu Tuan’s wisdom would not have been complete. The oneweak piece in this section is Edward Casey’s “Do Places Have Edges?” It is a valid question, butstatements like, “If the edges of ready-to-hand things are prized for their pliable practicability, thoseof present-at-hand particulars are esteemed for their measurable constancy” (p. 67), are convolutedand not too revealing.

The editors’ stated aim of the third section—“Representing”—is to address the “crisis of rep-resentation” (p. xxxi), and how depictions of the world are more than “mimetic correspondenceswith material reality, accurate or inaccurate, but projections of human values, hopes and fears,sometimes coercive ones” (ibid.). As such, this section participates in a longstanding concern in thehumanities and one with significant past and present currency in geography. In a strong and variedsection—featuring diverse and mixed media including poetry, photography, film, statuary, travelwriting, drawing, and painting—several articles stand out. Indeed, after studying Joan Schwartz’sapproaches to reading photographs, it is hard to imagine anyone’s photographic gaze not being for-ever changed and enriched. DeLyser’s case study, on the politics of public commemoration, equallyserves as a poignant reminder on the possibilities and responsibilities of academically groundedcommunity-based advocacy. And Diana Davis’s “Reading Landscapes and Telling Stories” (on thepower of art in shaping perceptions of/in the Maghreb) sheds important light on placemaking in anunderstudied world region and one that has been prominent in recent headlines in the still unfolding(so-called) Arab Spring.

Section four—“Performing”—is an attempt to go beyond written and visual forms of represen-tation, “or rather beyond the limits of too screen-like or desk-bound an interpretation of images andtexts, to an appreciation of their relations with various embodied, multi-sensory practices, of sound,smell and touch, and the expressly physical engagement with the material worlds of their makingand meaning” (ibid.). This idea previously has been incorporated into well-known geographical ana-lytical concepts including sense of place, experiential geography, and spirit of place (genius loci). Inforegrounding the performative, the sense that where and when something happens is crucial is wellillustrated by Sheila Hones in “The Novel as a Spatial Event”—where she puts reading a novel intothe readers’ context rather than being wholly abstraction—while Mike Pearson uses it to create (notonly analyze) worlds. In perhaps the most evocative piece of the volume, “Deserted Places, RemoteVoices: Performing Landscape,” Pearson traces his 20-year engagement with the “notion of a deepmap” (p. 280) and his desire “to record and represent the substance, grain and patina of a particularplace through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the po-litical and the cultural, the factual and the fictional, the academic and the discursive: depth not asprofundity but as density of both topics and modes of address, in full cognizance of local and personalknowledge” about places (ibid.). He discusses his 10 years of creating site-specific performances thatdevelop the idea, invite participation, and suggest horizons that others might explore. In a worldfilled with things we don’t like, Pearson presents a method of living and creating our own worldswe’d like to inhabit.

While the idea of “mapping” as a metaphor is in current vogue for charting routes throughconcepts and approaches—especially in linguistic studies—or as a group of graphic metacognitivetools, it is quite misleading in many ways, and it tends to muddy the intellectual waters wheninterpreting, creating, and making sense of places. Probably that is why a number of the chapters inthe “Performing” section are so caught up with the ideas behind traditional maps and a more distantpast, and not so much with trying to understand “a fast modernizing or post-modernizing” world.Another term needs to be developed for this idea, perhaps more along the lines of “envisioning” (asin the book’s title), “cognitive visioning,” or just “place cognition.” Our issue with this section is not

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with the individual chapters, but with their disconnection with the description of what the editorsset out to do. Clearly, the theme of visualizing complexity of thought and interpretation within thecontext of place is exciting, and it is wide open for future work. So while the stated charge to theauthors of the section is a good one, and the chapters in it are well done, they don’t seem to workindividually or collectively in furthering the editors’ aims.

Many of the book’s strengths are in reflection—something the academy needs to spend far moretime doing—and in these troubled times we need far more academics out interpreting and trying tomake a world we actually want to live in. By relating to caring about our everyday places, and tothe desire to maintain a balance between “love of place” and the sheer economic gain that can bedrawn from it, these ideas will have a much greater resonance in academia. Making worlds—whilereflecting on them, representing them, and performing them—is a compelling theme for this book,along with envisioning what makes places what they are. It is clear an important door has beenopened to future scholarship along these lines.

A final thought: these chapters are all solid pieces and the book would make a wonderfulreader for a graduate seminar on the topic. The themes that are stressed are important to get intoa broader discussion, especially in a rapidly evolving discipline like geography. Douglas Richardsonhas to be congratulated heartily for getting the grants to have a symposium, bringing togethergeographers and humanities scholars, and publishing two books from the efforts. Indeed, we’redelighted to see that the discussions will continue in earnest at the 2012 AAG Annual Meeting inNew York: it will feature 40 paper and panel sessions on new interdisciplinary research and practiceat the intersections of geography and the humanities. These interdisciplinary sessions will engagea variety of topics, including ones in literature, history, cinema, popular culture, performance art,comedy, curatorial practice, geographic imagination, painting, and photography and their relationto place, space, landscape, scale, cartography, and other aspects of geography (http://www.aag.org/cs/humanities).

So from all these efforts, it’s important to ask where the ideas will go next. We hope theywill progress toward addressing a major crisis in the academy, which seems to be moving away fromsupporting humanistic understanding, and toward creating (and preserving) the kinds of places thathelp define our lives. Mike Pearson’s chapter points a way to help people build knowledge throughexperiences in a place over a lifetime (or whatever length of time) that is a way of living one’s lifeand making meaningful connections to places.

George F. RobersonRichard W. WilkieDepartment of GeosciencesUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst

REFERENCESDear, Michael, Jim Ketchum, Sarah Luria, and Douglas Richardson (eds.). 2011. GeoHumanities: Art, History,

Text at the Edge of Place. New York: Routledge.Richardson, Douglas. 2006. “Geography and the Humanities,” AAG Newsletter, 41(3), 2 and 4.————. 2007a. “Symposium to Explore Interactions Between Geography and the Humanities,” AAG Newsletter,

42(6), 7–9.————. 2007b. “Geography and the Humanities Symposium,” AAG Newsletter, 42(7), 7.

The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles, by Nadia Amoroso. 2010. New York: Rout-ledge. 176 + xvi. ISBN 978-0-415-55179-3, cloth, $155; ISBN 978-0-415-55180-3, paper, $53.95.

To a social scientist, the subtitle of the book is irresistible. Without shining light on the in-visibles, we have no hope of grasping the scale, scope, and character of the issues facing cities.What is invisible? How best to unveil the shroud? These questions may perplex many of us, buteach of us approaches them with a different conceptual frame. Nadia Amoroso is an architect whoteaches at the University of Toronto and is interested in visualization of information (preferablyin mixed media) that traditionally has been represented in “invisible” text, ideas, and numbers. Iam trained as an urban planner who considers them perfectly visible. On the other hand, poorly

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