Book Reviews 149 Mires’ story includes more than tales of boosterism and politicking; one of her additional strengths is her analysis of artist renderings and architectural blueprints for the U.N. complex; as surviving artifacts from the hosting competition, those documents reveal how postwar optimism and suburbanization was reflected through the built environment. For example, proposals set forth by Chicagoans and those in the Black Hills indicated a distaste for crowded urban centers and predilections for modern “mini-cities” surrounded by greenswards and graced with ennobling architecture; scholars of urban history and planning may recognize in these images elements of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept or John D. Kasarda’s recent Aerotropolis (2011). Highly informative, well-researched, and narratively compelling, Capital of the World stands as a singularly important work that will appeal to students and general readers of urban history, diplomacy, economics, architecture, American studies, and the history of New York. Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York. By Cathy Lisa Schneider. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, 344 pages, $69.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Seth Armus, St. Joseph’s College New York It is rare for an academic book to be this perfectly timed. Cathy Lisa Schneider’s comparative study of race riots in New York and Paris made its appearance just as Ferguson, Missouri (a community within greater St. Louis) exploded in America’s worst urban unrest in decades. This also coincided with a campaign of violence against Jews throughout Europe (and notably Paris)—attacks which, at least superficially, resembled earlier riots because the antagonists were mostly socially-disadvantaged European Muslims. The timing was good news for the author, who must have been a bit shocked to suddenly find herself discussing her recondite monograph on national television. Schneider’s inquiry takes on issues that are familiar to students of violence in urban America—namely, why do riots occur in some cities and not others? How has New York (a city of stark economic inequality) mostly avoided this? Moreover, why did New York’s only modern exception, the 150 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Crown Heights riots of 1991, occur under the watch of the city’s first Black mayor, whereas Rudolph Giuliani’s long tenure was absent race riots? This, despite the fact that his policies appeared to specifically target blacks and Latinos, and his years in office saw repeated instances of grotesque abuse by the police. For clues to this puzzle she looks to France, and in particular Paris, a city celebrated as a model of inter-ethnic harmony, until, suddenly, in 2005, it was not. In that year, decades of calm were shattered by riots that were exceedingly difficult to explain. Politicians and sociologists scrambled to figure out what went wrong—and the academic establishment (with its Marxist or economic determinist scholarship) seems not to have come close to answering the questions. Schneider offers an eclectic mix of analyses, but ultimately believes the key to understanding a cities’ success and failure lies in the way they have “activated” or “de-activated” racial boundaries. Schneider’s book is actually a traditional piece of sociology—she is anxious to explain why past models have failed, but she remains devoted to the notion that explanatory models can be predictive. Her critique of past sociology is sharp—and the book’s introduction admirably summarizes and contextualizes the literature on riots and rioting—in particular the “problem ” of why riots appear detached from socio-economic crises. Observing the contortions sociologists have gone through makes for necessary, if uncomfortable, reading, and Schneider is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom. She takes issue, for example, with the narrowness of French sociology on racial violence, much of it stuck in the assumptions of earlier decades. Key figures like Pierre Bourdieu and Patrick Weil have been guilty of defining racism as, somehow, un-French and a de facto American import. Schneider does not buy it, and, to this end, she is quite clear in her rejection of Loïc Wacquant’s frustratingly popular “anti-ghetto” thesis which, briefly, argues that French and American problems grow from opposite circumstances. Wacquant’s structuralist approach can neither explain nor adequately convey...
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Sep 16, 2015
Jinxin Zhang + 3
Open Access
