690 BOOK REVIEWS © 2007 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG these elements include the use of skilled facilitators as cultural ‘bridges’ between community and institution. The CPS successfully used this tactic and the benefits to the poorer East Traxton residents were greater and clearer. Fung argues that skilled external facilitators helped balance differences in power and status. But after the facilitators left the programme, both CPS and the residents’ beat group were unsuccessful in main- taining cohesion and unity in addressing the neigh- bourhood’s crime issues. Fung contends that the resident activists had not yet acquired the required capacities ‘to formulate precise, feasible proposals with sundry neighbourhood public-safety concerns and to assert such proposals with confidence’ (p. 207). Fung concludes in his last chapter that accountable autonomy, a process of deliberative problem-solving in which institutional actors and community residents hold each other accountable and use expert and local knowledge to resolve community issues, requires a set of generative institutions. He provides examples of these generative institutions in three international short case studies that highlight the importance of community education efforts to facilitate resident participation in accountable autonomy; the impor- tance of institutional actors or third-party outsiders as cultural ‘bridges’ and facilitators; the need to educate institutional actors, not just residents, to engage in collaborative and accountable participation; and the challenges of sustaining a reasonable and structured deliberative process long term, particu- larly in ‘non-ideal’ conditions. My view of this book is that Fung opens the door to the examination of democratic participation by challenging all of us to consider structure in addition to agency, and more importantly to examine the strategies institutions can use to create and sustain empowered participatory governance. As he suggests, this is a process that may not occur on its own, thus challenging notions that democracy is a process that is open and available to all who espouse to uphold: ‘principles of equality, respect, self-command, reason and mutual understanding’ (p. 242). I have worked on several projects to engage English-language learn- ing immigrants in their community’s governance structure in Southern California. Fung is correct in his appraisal of the challenges to creating a deliber- ative process in non-ideal situations, in other words, those communities that are buffeted by poverty, crime, isolation and lack of a cohesive response by government institutions. Much has been written about the ‘deficiencies’ of these communities. But one of Fung’s key contributions in this volume is that these structural conditions demand a structural response. Under-served communities can engage in deliberative participation if the appropriate institutional support is provided – on-going training for community leaders; facilitators who can educate residents and institu- tional actors concerned with accountable autonomy and a continued push for participatory devolution. My criticisms of this book are few. For practitioners, there are sections that are clearly targeting academics, including ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and other quantitative analysis of predictors for par- ticipation that tend to elaborate to a mind-numbing level. The number of street-level case studies can at times be confusing, and I found myself drawing a chart to keep track of the differences in the three Chicago neighbourhoods (Traxton, Central and Southtown) in addition to the composition and issues facing the LSCs and community police beat groups. For geographers, this book provides a needed push to connect geospatial data analysis to social processes occurring ‘on the ground’ in urban communities. While Geographic Information Systems (GIS), ArcWeb Explorer and Virtual Globe software can provide valu- able pictorial data for understanding complex urban problems, Fung’s book suggests that this is only the first step. In order to obtain a fuller picture of the needs of under-served communities, geographers must collaborate with sociologists, urban planners and prac- titioners to connect hard data with participatory dynamics, community history and structural conditions that may preclude responding to an urban neighbourhood’s needs. More importantly, with a nod to certain post- modern theorists, Fung argues that researchers must also engage urban residents in the process of address- ing their challenges. To my mind, this means that geographers should engage research on mechanisms for participation among urban residents beyond sim- ply mapping spatial data, GIS, census data and other tools; sociologists should educate and learn from res- idents about the power dynamics and social processes that impede community well-being; and finally plan- ners must include time in their procedures to engage residents as partners and not as social service clients. In sum, this book is a worthwhile read that makes a productive contribution to an area of research that continues to demand both street-level research and theoretical constructs that can help move our com- munities towards a truly deliberative democracy. Arlington,TX Maria Martinez-Cosio Cosmopolitan Urbanism J. BINNIE, J. HOLLOWAY, S. MILLINGTON & C. YOUNG, eds., London 2006: Routledge. 259 pp. ISBN-10: 0415344921, ISBN-13: 978-0415344920, (pbk). After decades of being ignored as a concept useful for understanding life in the city, ‘cosmopolitanism’