Volume 29.4 December 2005 997-1009 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2005 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2005 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA BOOK REVIEWS Urban Mutations: Periodization, Scale, Mobility Tom Nielsen, Niels Albertsen and Peter Hemmersam (eds.) 2004: Urban Mutations: Periodization, Scale, Mobility. Aarhus: Arkitektskolens Forlag. A central difficulty faced by the contemporary urban designer is that of giving shape to the formlessness of urban sprawl, creating collective spaces when human interactions are increasingly dispersed across electronic and vehicular communications networks. But until relatively recently it was difficult for the practitioner and student to readily locate literature on the phenomenon untinted by polemic and partisanship. Urban Mutations combines two sorts of essay, one hailing from academic analysis, the other from the architectural studio, which combine to produce a generally calm and considered appraisal of the dilemma faced by cities and their designers. The book originates in a small international symposium organized by the Aarhus School of Architecture in September of 2002, and the Danish editing of the volume retains a northern European and Scandinavian flavor in both its topical approaches (for instance, Poul Bæk Pedersen’s history of the Danish welfare city) and its somewhat uneven English- language editing (though credit is owing to the editors for making the selection available to English-language readers). Readers will find in here some statements of belief but no overall clarion call. The volume accepts that the management, through design, of the contemporary urban landscape is a challenge of such magnitude that it is best approached with a cool head: before we do anything, the title of the book tells us, let’s step back and plot the mutation of the urban. When did it begin? (The book’s short answer: with the relaxation of European and Scandinavian welfare state principles, and the adoption of neoliberal maxims.) What is its scale? (It is regional, national, international — ‘XL’, to borrow architect Rem Koolhaas’s shorthand, as several contributors do — but it equally affects small spaces and everyday life, and the welfare state bears a responsibility for increasing the political and physical scale of the urban footprint in the first place.) What is its nature? (Mobility — physical, social, economic — which apparently threatens traditional, fixed, concentrated cities.) Essays by political sociologist Bob Jessop and urban geographer Stephen Graham are notably helpful in getting the lay reader up to speed on these problems. An urban specialist might read the above abstract and contend that these phenomena have been known for a fair time now. Nonetheless, the serious literature on the politics and economics of the city is ever-more vast and dispersed, and there are few formats in which it is concisely connected, as it is here, tentatively, to the problems faced in the studio. When contemporary urban theory and practice are bridged it is usually as a supermodern eruption, headlines converted through CAD into mega-projects. Urban Mutations has dalliances with such projects, though their authors (like Jan Willem van Kuilenburg) will likely be unfamiliar to readers from American conference and publishing circuit, and more importantly, some chapters, like Morten Daugaard’s, provide a commendably systematic account of pressing spatial issues (like ‘after-sprawl’). Urban Mutations is actually of immediate interest to an architectural historian like the present reviewer. How long, one wonders, will the legacies of three successor waves of avant-garde architects who tackled urban mutations — Team X in the 1950s, Archigram in the 1960s, Rem Koolhaas and the ‘Superdutch’ school since — provide Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.