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Book Review: Developing capacity through technical cooperation: country experiences

structure, institution and agency as they operate to produce locally-specific social exclusion. Carried out in the case of Johannesburg, such an analysis helps uncover important recent developments, which more traditional readings of the city have hitherto tended to bypass. Summarizing an impressive amount of empirical evidence, the picture of Johannesburg with which we are presented is that of an increasingly fragmented society, with inequalities running across a multiplicity of axes. Underlying these developments is the city’s economic transition, initiated in the late 1970s but accelerated in the 1990s, encompassing both a shift in the main sectors of activity (tertiarization of the economy) and a shift from import substitution to an export-led growth model (Part I). The social and spatial repercussions of such developments are commensurate with post-Fordist urban transition in the industrial North. Changes in production and consumption are leading to a more extreme pattern of class segregation rather than the physical integration of the post-apartheid ideal. Exclusion in contemporary Johannesburg is thus increasingly a class phenomenon, with a small class of well-off, demanding and increasingly multiracial postFordist winners distancing ever further a long tail of precarious, unskilled and largely (black) unemployed (or informally employed) postFordist losers. The overall picture of fragmentation is echoed at a micro level of analysis (Part IV). Households, women, youth, migrants, HIV/AIDS-infected people, communities, are all shown to be differently affected by macroeconomic changes. Unequal, too, is their ability to respond, to access municipal resources or take part in the newly evolved participatory governance mechanisms. Thus, social exclusion is also about being a freshly arrived back-yard shack dweller in one of the many townships perforating the Johannesburg landscape. It is about being a foreign African trader hampered by debilitating xenophobia. Social exclusion is about not being affiliated to the right political party, the most powerful civic organization or resident association in particular parts of the city. But exclusion is also a chosen means of coping in the fast-changing, polarized and violent city, when residents opt for gatedcommunity or migrant hostel accommodation. The juxtaposition and richness of these macro, meso and micro layers of analyses, rarely brought together in prior accounts of the city, the profusion of empirical evidence, combine to make Uniting a divided city an essential read for students of Johannesburg – and other divided cities. Inevitably, the reader is left at times wanting for more: more information about the dynamics of social exclusion in other parts of the city, and how these relate to the wider city environment; more details on the role of intermediary institutions such as trade unions, business organizations or civics, in shaping/mediating those dynamics. Perhaps also, a firmer statement about how a greater sensitivity to the multiple causes of exclusion – which lie at the interface of a structureinstitution-agency analysis – can be operationalized towards the establishment of inclusive urban governance; how it can help redirect the deep structural divisive tendencies of this postFordist city towards a positive and inclusive urban future. That we are left with such an awoken sense of curiosity is testimony to the book’s success. Bold in its scope, in its claims for Johannesburg as quintessential twentyfirst century city, in its cosmopolitan reading of cities in general, the book is ultimately, also, a thoroughly enjoyable read: complex, stimulating, informative and yet highly accessible.