Book Reviews

of informational models from which to draw. They have selected

the most effective of these models and built something greater.
They give the reader the tools to navigate an area of study that is
inseparable from a host of other disciplines, and whose history, for
that reason, has until now remained muddy.
This book thus serves as a guidebook in several ways. It is a
guide to itself. It is a guide to the study of graphic design history. But
most importantly it is a guide for structuring future holistic analyses
of nearly any subject.

The Endless City: The Urban Age

Project by the London School of
Economics and Deutsche Banks
Alfred Herrhausen Society by
Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (eds)
London: Phaidon, 2008, 510 pages, 1,500 color
illustrations, 500 black and white illustrations,
references, index. Hardback, US$69.95.

Reviewed by Simon Sadler

DOI: 10.2752/175470710X12593419555883
Simon Sadler is Professor
of Architectural and Urban
History at the University
of California, Davis.
sjsadler@ucdavis.edu

119 Design and Culture

The giant city is the enduring figure of modernity, and the inter
disciplinary topic par excellence in the humanities and social sciences
in the last two decades. For much of that time it has been the site
for an intellectual and ideological tussle between those analyzing the
city as the political economy writ large, and those reading the city as
the crucible of identity.
The Endless City synthesizes both approaches, and for that
reason alone represents an important contribution to the dialectic
of urban studies. Further, it prioritizes questions of policy over
theory, demanding, by its alarming orange cover, its lap-crushing
unwieldiness, and its sheer institutional clout, that decision-makers
take notice. Edited at one of the worlds leading academic centers
for the study of political economy, the London School of Economics,
and sponsored by the Alfred Herrhausen Society, a think-tank of the
Deutsche Bank, The Endless City represents the published findings
of the Urban Age Project, a transnational touring conference that
in 200506 pulled into its orbit an astonishing list of academics,
politicians, activists, and financiers.
The Endless City thus represents something of an apotheosis
for discourse on the city; it is at once progressive its pedigree
stretches back to Europes Enlightenment urban-reform and
architectural-planning movements and sublime, imbued with a

120 Design and Culture

Book Reviews

wonder at late- and postmodern global urbanism already familiar

to readers of Rem Koolhaass and Bruce Maus tomes. The cover
streams dizzying facts 121 buildings over eight storeys in 1980 in
Shanghai / 10,045 buildings over eight storeys in 2005 in Shanghai;
65% of New Yorkers belong to an ethnic minority / 56% of new
residents in London were foreign born in 2001 yet The Endless
City has passed beyond the various tropes of delirium, apocalypse,
ecstasy, and marginality that were key to the postmodern moment.
In an effort to renew a social-democratic agenda for cities, this
book contends that urban planning is (or should be) the central
theme of modern politics, given that both require the negotiation of
sustainability and growth, homogenization and diversity, enterprise
and justice, statistics and conjecture.
On this point, the forty or so essays, written by academics, journ
alists, architects, and politicians, reach an approximate consensus.
Characterized by tidy, sober, unsentimental expertise, the essays
consistently (albeit with some repetition and redundancy between
them) deliver readable, timely, insightful summaries of problems that
might otherwise seem utterly intractable. The text gleams with facts
and insights that have the potential to skew a readers perspective
forever. We learn from Anne Power, for example, that London
... requires 293 times its own land surface area more than the
whole area of Britain to sustain its huge consumption of energy
and resources (366). Or, my personal favorite, courtesy of Saskia
Sassen: in 2004 the UK exported 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes to
Germany, and imported 1,500 tonnes of the same product from the
same country (281).
To talk with authority about the urban world, from micro to
macro scales, as a joint project in the sweep of human history as
a whole, requires the book to assume a methodological stance
that approaches universal humanism. The name of the organizing
body behind the book, The Urban Age Project, certainly implies
as much, even if this approach unfolds in the books 500 pages
with little fanfare. A few authors issue minor memoranda about
the pitfalls of instrumental reason and the elision of difference, but
these warnings are subsumed by the books overarching argument
about the fundamental variables of the urban age: ever-increasing
population and a finite environment, the figuring of economy within
space, the relation of this generation to the next.
In combination, the essays of The Endless City make the meth
odological point that the universalism of the urban age must be
managed up from its specific sites. Specifically, managed: The
Endless City is the manifesto of a somewhat hip group of experts
who believe that social democracy should return to center stage
as the worlds great mediator. It is a measure of how far the world
slid rightward into neo-liberalism over the last few decades that The
Endless Citys attention to humanism and the rational distribution of
resources credibly figures as a protest, a call for a happy medium

between market- and proletarian-based anarchies. We have per

haps already experienced the former kind of anarchy in the banking
industry. But the specter that seems most to haunt The Endless City
is that of a multitudinous global proletarian rebellion that some recent
commentators have argued will be the corollary of an untrammeled
capitalist globalization. For example, Wolfgang Nowak of the Alfred
Herrhausen Society cautions cryptically in the books foreword that If
cities become ungovernable due to their sheer size, new secondary
powers will start to emerge that could ignite a general and apparently
aimless revolution(7).
True, Nowaks warning might feasibly be referring to the menaces
of terrorism and fundamentalism, but these receive little direct
attention in the book, which is remarkable, given fundamentalists
and terrorists ambitions to usurp democracy and capitalism as
the worlds most potent political forces. Terror is referenced only in
passing, with an air of noble pastoralism. One of the great tasks of
urban design lies in creating spaces that do not foreground fear,
Sophie Body-Gendrot suggests (359); Richard Sennett concurs
that an ease among strangers [is] the foundation for a truly modern
sense of us (297). And in their enigmatic meditation for the book,
Herzog and De Meuron suggest that threat is itself one of the agents
of urban morphology.
Nonetheless, the Urban Age Project reserves its right to a scep
tical optimism about mainstream political institutions (7). Skeptical
though that optimism may be, it extends, in The Endless Citys
conclusion, to an almost Corbusian navet, as transnational corp
orations, the glue of global cities are felt to have significant roles to
play: becoming champions for market principles like transparency,
accountability, innovation and empiricism ... to accelerate the build
ing of housing and infrastructure [and] ... the sharing of practices
and innovations across cities and nations (481).
The Endless Citys tacit plea for a return to responsible architect
ural planning is strictly ancillary to its call for more intelligent and
nuanced administrative policy. As the editors put it in their analysis
of Mexico City, the urban challenge is a matter of the architecture
of decision-making rather than a matter of architecture (11). Design
is certainly a recurrent topic in the book coeditor Deyan Sudjic
is director of the Design Museum in London, founder of Blueprint,
former editor of Domus, and the 2002 Director of the Venice Arch
itecture Biennale though it is promoted neither as visionary nor
apocalyptic but as process-based, in need of mandate, and, again,
endless. Even Rem Koolhaas is conscripted to this drive toward
joined-up urban transformation: I used to be almost contemptuous
of architecture myself ... [but] Recently I have become more
impressed again with architecture ... in its very awkwardness and
chaotic multifaceted nature dealing with economics, politics,
aesthetics, civilization it maintains at least a sympathetic and
sometimes impressive ambition to connect the dots (3202).

121 Design and Culture

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Endless City satisfies the designers eye with beautiful

pictographs, which look like something out of the Weimar Republic,
except that they point to no overtly socialist outcomes. In design, as
in policy, The Endless City defers to that classic dialectic of freedom
and constraint in which the new is managed but unburdened from
any overarching teleology (except that of sustainability broadly
conceived). The trajectory is directed only by the small-scale inter
ventions of design buildings, schools, clean-ups, galleries, traffic
management, bus services, markets, housing, the servicing of
cyclists and pedestrians and it is marked by a recognition that urban
morphology is principally a system of constraint. In his marvelously
frank essay on the design of high-rise buildings, Alejandro ZaeraPolo (of Foreign Office Architects) proposes that architects can
at best work with existing parameters, such as regional variation;
surely, then, The Endless City is no call to massive change of the
sort found in Bruce Maus work or in the recent revival of interest in
Buckminster Fuller.
Nonetheless, sustainability acts as the books oblique, nonpart
isan call for wealth redistribution. Our worlds ecological impasse
is perhaps all the more worrying when described in the pragmatic,
centrist terms of The Endless City. Though the narrative of The
Endless City seems concerned principally with the fate of the middle
class, it does at least present global politics in terms of class privilege
and deprivation. There is an end to The Endless City: for all its
diplomacy, the books insistence on a resurgence in cosmopolitan
urban political power necessarily champions a soft-left political
progressivism. And that, incidentally, should supply the design
industries with a steady stream of business.

Agitate! Educate! Organize! American

Labor Posters by Lincoln Cushing and
Timothy W. Drescher

122 Design and Culture

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009,

216 pages, 255 color plates, bibliography, index.
Paperback, US$24.95/UK13.95.

Angela Riechers is a
graphic designer and
second-year MFA student
in the new Design
Criticism program at the
School of Visual Arts,
New York.
artdeptnyc@gmail.com,
ariechers@sva.edu

Reviewed by Angela Riechers

DOI: 10.2752/175470710X12593419555928
American labor movement posters have one foot planted squarely in
each of the dual landscapes of labor history and design history. Their
bold, homegrown iconography is a source of inspiration for workers
during difficult times, urging them to join together, take action for
the common good, and demand a better future. Yet until now, labor