Reviews / Comptes rendus Tourism and Sustainability: Development and New Tourism in the Third World (2d ed.), by Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt JUDITH CUKIER Tourism and Sustainability: Development and New Tourism in the Third World (2d ed.) 411 Ecotourism. An Introduction (2d ed.), by David A. Fennell JUDITH CUKIER 412 Military Geographies, by Rachael Woodward SIMON DALBY 413 Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis, by Katharyne Mitchell JIM GLASSMAN 414 Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, by Katie Pickles JEANNE KAY GUELKE 415 A Companion to Feminist Geography, edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager LINDA PEAKE 416 Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960, by Richard Harris BRIAN RAY 418 The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 49, no 4 (2005) 411–419 ª / Canadian Association of Geographers / L’Association canadienne des géographes by Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, xiii þ 338 pp., paper US$38.95 (ISBN 0-415-27169-X) This book is the second edition of one of the most relevant books dealing with the impacts of tourism in the developing world. Despite claims in the foreword that this edition is significantly different from the original, the two editions are quite similar. Both editions are comprised of ten chapters, and although some wording and subheadings have changed, the structure of the two editions is very similar. However, it is worth noting that the font has improved in the second edition, as have the graphics and figures, making this edition more readable than the first. Although some have criticised the first edition for being over-pessimistic of tourism development in the Third World, it is important to present tourism in a realistic manner. In the face of numerous books that deal with sustainability and tourism, this book presents a realistic and critical analysis of the changing face of global tourism. The book is divided into two main sections: the first (chapters 2–4) sets the context of global tourism, critically analysing the often ‘fuzzy’ concepts of sustainability, globalisation, environmentalism and development. Central to the understanding of these issues is the underlying question of power—a topic that is treated extensively in the book. The second part of the book (chapters 5–9) explores the themes identified in the first part through detailed 412 Reviews / Comptes rendus examinations of the tourists, the industry and governments. The concluding chapter reviews the main themes and presents possibilities for ‘new’ forms of sustainable tourism for the developing world. Chapter 1, in addition to providing the reader with the structure of the book, introduces the concepts of new tourism and sustainability and the Third World and attempts to structurally link these for the reader. The second chapter presents a brief history of tourism and its role in development and details issues surrounding tourism and globalisation. Also, this chapter introduces the inequalities and power relations inherent in the concept of globalisation. The concept of power is treated in greater detail in Chapter 3, which also questions the relevance and success of alternative forms of tourism as a means for development. Chapter 4 ends the first part of the book with a detailed discussion of tourism and sustainability and links theory with practice by presenting specific tools used to measure sustainability. The second part of the book begins with Chapter 5. Here, the authors present a detailed description of tourists and their motivations for travel. More importantly, they discuss the new tourist—one who is an elite, non-altruistic traveller. The issue of power is returned to in Chapter 6, particularly as it relates to the predominant Western environmental movement and its efforts to ‘develop’ the environment of the Third World. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 present the supply side of tourism and focus on the tourism industry itself, the hosts at the destinations and governmental roles on tourism and development. This book would appeal to anyone with an interest in tourism and its impacts in developing countries (academics, undergraduate and graduate students as well as non-governmental organisations and tourism planners working in the Third World). Throughout the book, the authors insert ‘boxes’ or case studies that help to illustrate the points made—an effective way to link theory and practice. The diversity of concepts presented in the book will undoubtedly contribute to lively debate in the classroom. If the authors are considering publishing a third edition of the book, perhaps that would be the time to re-structure the book more fully to distinguish the various editions. JUDITH CUKIER University of Waterloo The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) Ecotourism. An Introduction (2d ed.) by David A. Fennell, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, xviii þ 256 pp., paper US$38.95 (ISBN 0-415-30365-6) Over the past ten years, a plethora of books and journals dedicated to ‘ecotourism’ have been published. Surprisingly, despite this trend, the term ‘ecotourism’ remains a contentious one, without a clear definition. David Fennell, in the second edition of Ecotourism, provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic. The introductory chapter sets the context for ecotourism within the broader tourism industry, and although Fennell acknowledges the difficulty of understanding what is meant by ecotourism throughout the book, Chapter 2 is devoted to this issue. Chapter 3 links the concept of ecotourism to the broader issues surrounding natural resource conservation and protected areas. Chapter 4 on ‘The Social and Ecological Impacts’ of tourism is one of the most important chapters in the book. It links theory with practical means and tools for measuring impacts of tourism and provides relevant case studies to illustrate the points. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 all relate to the implementation of ecotourism including marketing, management, professionalism and ecotourism program planning. Fennell has co-edited a book that deals exclusively with this topic: Ecotourism Policy and Planning (2003). In his discussion of ecotourism marketing, Fennell presents a realistic view of the potential of ecotourism as a panacea for the world’s problems. Chapter 8 sets ecotourism in the international context and it is here that Fennell presents the strengths and weaknesses of ecotourism as a means for development. The case studies included in this chapter highlight the challenges faced by ecotourism as a means for development. The ethics of ecotourism is the subject of Chapter 9, and while this is an important area that has not received sufficient treatment (particularly at the implementation level), there is a danger of becoming too ‘preachy’ and taking the fun out of tourism. Butcher (2003), in his book The Moralisation of Tourism, argues that ultimately, tourism should be fun—‘tourism need only be about enjoyment, and requires no other justification’ (p. 142). ‘New Moral Tourism’, argues Butcher, is imposing a ‘moral high ground’ on tourists who are Reviews / Comptes rendus encouraged to travel with a sense of personal mission—to save the world. While this view may be extreme, it is important to maintain a balance when considering the role of ecotourism as more than an economic activity. This second edition incorporates new material on eco-labelling, environmental management and guiding, program planning, environmental impacts and community-based management. Also, it incorporates new developments that have arisen from the 2002 World Ecotourism meeting in Québec. The use of photographs, figures and case studies enhance the text, and although the font is small, the book is highly readable. Fennell’s passion and commitment to the topic is evident throughout the book, which would be suitable for both graduate and undergraduate students, academics and, despite the author’s Western focus, practitioners of ecotourism in both developed and developing countries. References BUTCHER, J. 2003 The Moralisation of Tourism: Sun, Sand . . . and Saving the World? (New York and London: Routledge) FENNELL, D.A., DOWLING, R.K. (eds)2003 Ecotourism Policy and Planning (Oxon, UK: CABI Publishing) JUDITH CUKIER University of Waterloo Military Geographies by Rachael Woodward, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, xii þ 196 pp., paper US$39.95 (ISBN 1-4051-2777-5) This book is an explicit attempt to fill what the author identifies as a lacuna in the disciplinary literature, one concerning ‘ . . . how the continual preparations which states make in order to be able to wage war and engage in military operations shape wider economic, social, environmental and cultural geographies, and produce their own ordering of space’ (p. 4). Woodward thus suggests that while many other geographers have written about the use of geographical knowledge for war, the geopolitical thinking concerning war and foreign policy, militarism and conceptions of armed conflict, they have neglected to look in a The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) 413 systematic way at what she summarises as ‘military geographies’. This well-written volume, one in the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers book series, sets out to fill this gap and in the process offers at least a preliminary survey of the multiple facets of military geography. It mixes field work and documentary sources with some telling anecdotes and theoretical reflections about geography, all to make the point that military geographies do matter; landscapes are changed and spaces appropriated by military institutions in many ways, and the discipline ought to pay much more attention to these frequently hidden or ignored practices. To make this case, the seven chapters that make up this volume deal with the control of space, including accounts of the considerable landholdings by armed forces in many countries. Simply itemising the landholdings, and recognising that these are subject to particular management regimes, suggests the importance of the military use of geographic space. Militaries are also substantial spenders of public finance but in ways that matter to economic geographies too. Military landscapes, from bases to barrack architectures and statues in prominent places, also shape cultural landscapes. Discussions of national and gender identity are also included; these relate to matters of militarism directly. The destruction of environments in test ranges, national parks and elsewhere and the pernicious use of polluting chemicals in numerous training and military operations are also detailed here in depressing detail. Chapter 6 explicitly focuses on challenges to military landscapes, which include protests and the construction of peace camps. This is not just a matter of political geography because while militarism is an aspect of state control, it is also a social phenomenon in and of itself, with obvious geographical consequences. Many of the examples and quite a few of the photographs in this volume are of sites in the United Kingdom. This is not surprising given the author’s nationality, but it does work to emphasise the importance of military activity in contemporary Britian where training and preparation for war continues despite the usual disciplinary concerns with other matters. Other examples concern the Anglo-American world—nuclear weapons testing by Americans on Pacific islands, the 414 Reviews / Comptes rendus destruction of parts of the American west and even the use of parts of Canada for NATO’s training exercises. Examples from the rest of the world are less represented, not least because they are infrequently documented. This easy-to-read volume might serve well as supplementary reading in many courses dealing with a variety of human geography themes. But despite the author’s demonstration of the case that military matters shape landscapes in many ways, and hence are a matter of obvious importance to contemporary geographical scholarship, the volume never really answers the important question, implied in the premise for the book, of why the discipline has not paid much attention to these matters over the last few decades. Future geography scholars might all reflect usefully on this omission and what it tells us about how we select what we choose to study. SIMON DALBY Carleton University Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis by Katharyne Mitchell, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2004, xiii þ 280 pp., US$24.95 (ISBN 1-59213-084-4) As a recent US transplant to Vancouver, and one with an ongoing transnational existence, I read Katharyne Mitchell’s new book with both a sense of discovery and a certain feeling of familiarity, even though the migrants to Vancouver who are at the centre of Crossing the Neoliberal Line are primarily from Hong Kong rather than the United States. However, Crossing the Neoliberal Line is not just another foray into the increasingly appealing topic of border crossings. It is both the story of a very unique urban conflict over transnationalisation and an interesting theoretical read of this conflict. At the core of Mitchell’s theorisation is the claim that hegemonic British-Canadian understandings of identity and proper social order came under assault in unexpected ways from a combination of neoliberal Vancouver property developers and Hong Kong immigrants who began to arrive in the 1980s in anticipation of the island’s reversion The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) to the mainland Chinese control. The influx of new and mainly affluent Chinese into (at that time) predominantly white Vancouver ended up pitting an idealised neoliberal vision of capitalist property relations and globalisation-friendly cosmopolitanism against an older Canadian social liberalism that endorses market forces but also values specific forms of social protection against them. Mitchell is clearly not an advocate of the neoliberal vision, but what her story powerfully exposes is the weaknesses and contradictions of the older social liberalism as a basis for critiquing neoliberalism. Building on postcolonial theory’s recognition that classical liberal ideals have typically meant one thing in the centres of colonial power and quite another in the colonies, Mitchell shows how Canadian social liberalism—its high ideals notwithstanding—concealed an exclusionary process that was deeply racial. What exposed it in the Vancouver instance was a unique set of events. By the 1980s, the Canadian government wished to encourage increased in-migration by talented, educated and wealthy foreigners, and Hong Kong residents who were uncomfortable with the prospects of life under the mainland regime fit the bill nicely. The active recruitment of Hong Kong entrepreneurs under the Canadian government’s Business Immigration Program, along with many other specific state policies that Mitchell outlines, gives the lie to neoliberal claims about the inexorable working out of free market forces, but the process nonetheless provided ideological fodder for developers promoting a neoliberal, global cosmopolitanism of the privileged. The problem, however, was that as the influx of monied Hong Kong immigrants to Vancouver grew, property values exploded (not only due to purchases by Hong Kong immigrants, as Mitchell indicates), and the character of various neighbourhoods began to change, as the immigrants built new and often quite elaborate ‘monster houses’ that involved felling trees and filling up lots with living space. This process not only aggravated various Vancouver residents but began to make it difficult for some—especially single, older women—to purchase property or otherwise remain in neighbourhoods where they had long lived. As Mitchell notes, such displacement is a routine feature of capitalist urban property development, but what made this case unique is that those being affected Reviews / Comptes rendus were from among the more privileged classes, such as wealthier residents of Vancouver’s westside neighbourhood of Kerrisdale. When such processes happen in Vancouver’s poorer, downtown eastside, little notice is taken, but westside homeowners could readily make their voices heard. By contrast, their opponents were better positioned, given that the liberal perspective to which the westside homeowners themselves adhere does not serve as a powerful tool for combating the routine exercise of capitalist property rights. Thus, the conflict brought forth the racism implicit in the exclusionary property development practices that had ensconced westside homeowners in positions of privilege—but now, rather than being implicit and focused on excluding others, it came forth as the defensive reaction of white Canadians whose privilege was being overturned by Asians. Despite the fact that the conflict is one between two relatively privileged groups, Mitchell tells the story sympathetically, using her interviews with people on different sides of the conflict to great advantage. To be sure, I was sometimes left wondering what stake residents of the downtown eastside should feel in this conflict over things beyond their reach—like expensive neighbourhoods with colonial British character that are being culturally transformed by gaudy ‘monster homes’—but that is perhaps a story for another book. Those who want to understand this story will find Mitchell’s account most illuminating. JIM GLASSMAN University of British Columbia Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire by Katie Pickles, University of Manchester Press, Manchester, 2002, 209 pp., cloth US$69.95 (ISBN 0-7190-6390-6) This book is a solid contribution to the geography of women. Feminist geography has advanced significantly from a time twenty years ago, when one could confidently state that ‘little has been published’, until today, with the emergence of many mainstreamed books and articles. Pickles’ book nevertheless addresses a major gap in The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) 415 publications on the geography of women in the western world, namely women’s involvement in volunteer work and community service. As Milroy and Wismer (1994) point out, women’s local volunteer work bridged the ideological divide between private domesticity and masculinised public space during the decades when the Doctrine of Separate Spheres was a dominant gender creed. Spain (2001) demonstrates how organised community service legitimised women’s activities in shaping the North American city c. 1860–1920. Pickles takes us to the local community and beyond in showing how The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) operated at a range of scales since the organisation’s founding in 1900 until today: whether lobbying on the British Empire’s foreign policy, sending books to schools in Canada’s Arctic or offering English classes to new immigrants within members’ home communities. Service organisations are an important expression of Canadian values today for both men and women; hence, Female Imperialism and National Identity is also important in bringing this aspect of Canadian culture to geographers’ attention. Pickles notes that little has been published on the IODE, despite its prominent role in socialising new immigrants and forging a patriotic Canadian identity for women. While a lot of information in IODE archives remains to be mined by future scholars, Pickles delineates key themes in the organisation’s history in chronological order. Her primary objective is to show how mainly Protestant and middle-class Anglo-Celtic women promoted a hegemonic Canadian identity through the discourse of Canada as a proud standard-bearer in the British Empire. Raising sons for military service, knitting for troops in wartime and promoting cultural exchanges with Britain were some of the ideologies and activities of the IODE chapters. The book’s opening chapters introduce the IODE as a women’s patriotic organisation. Pickles focuses on IODE’s ‘Canadianising’ work with new immigrants and sponsorship of a British schoolgirl’s tour of Canada during the 1920s. During 1920–1940s, the IODE promoted emigration from Britain, memorialised Canada’s war dead through public monuments and ceremonies and volunteered on behalf of Canadian troops. As Canada’s Britishness diminished in the 1950s and 1960s, the IODE turned to a more distinctively Canadian nationalism that entailed fighting communism 416 Reviews / Comptes rendus and anglicising First Nations people in the North. Achieving the IODE’s seamless vision of Canada as British Empire space resulted in practices that typically marginalised Catholics, francophones and the notion of Canada as a cultural mosaic. Female Imperialism and National Identity is well organised and well written. Its primary contribution is empirical rather than theoretical, but the book is theoretically well informed in showing how the IODE women advanced the cause of imperialism in distinctly feminine ways. References MILROY, B.M. and WISMER, S. 1994 ‘Community, work, and public/private sphere models’ Gender, Place, and Culture 1, 71–90 SPAIN, D. 2001 How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) JEANNE KAY GUELKE University of Waterloo A Companion to Feminist Geography edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, USA; Oxford, UK and Victoria, Australia, 2005, xviii þ 617 pp., paper US$124.95 (ISBN 1-4051-0186-5) I like this book. I think it speaks about where Western feminist geography is and the constituencies and sensibilities that it should be addressing. This book has finally moved internationally published texts of feminist geography beyond a focus solely on the work of Anglo-American feminist geographers, and this is a long overdue and most welcome addition. It signifies a coming of age to some extent. With thirty-nine chapters divided between six sections (Contexts, Work, City, Body, Environment and State/Nation), the book certainly seems to be attempting to be comprehensive in its coverage, although the editors claim that given the diversity and vibrancy of feminist geography, this is an impossible task (p. 7). In addition, there are a total of fifty authors. No other feminist geography text has come close to such far-reaching coverage. The editors also provide a chapter that gives a brief The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) overview of the history and major themes of feminist geography.1 The first section—‘Contexts’—sets the stage with chapters on situating gender (Bondi and Davidson), antiracism (Kobayashi), the bodily (Moss) and transnationalism (Yeoh). As might be expected from such accomplished authors, the reviews are thorough and insightful (although Bondi and Davidson restrict their review to Anglo-American geography). The emphasis (of Western feminism) on the body, the critiques of whiteness that suffuse the discipline, and its practitioners, and the pervasiveness of transnational practices to so many geographical categories of analysis easily justify the choice of these topics to introduce readers to the chapters to come. In addition, the majority of the sections have opening chapters that give instructive overviews of the literature in the field (England and Lawson on ‘Work’, Preston and Ustundag on ‘City’, Longhurst on ‘Body’ and Kofman on ‘Feminist Political Geographies’). The chapters on the section of ‘Work’ range from a variety of studies highlighting the role of women’s work in globalisation processes, such as the global assembly line in Mexico (Cravey), Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver (Pratt), Indonesian migrants in Saudi Arabia (Silvey) and an overview chapter on women and sex trafficking (Samarasinghe). There are also county case studies of shea butter production in Burkina Faso (Elias and Carney), female employees in the clothing industry in Istanbul (Eraydim and TurkunErendil), female entrepreneurs in Massachusetts and an evaluation of a women’s development project in northern India (Raju). In the section of ‘Cities’, there are a number of comparative studies: senses of gendered belonging of men and women in London and Jerusalem (Fenster), women’s negotiations of urban space in Helsinki and Edinburgh (Koskela) and grassroots struggles in India and South Africa (Nagar and Lock Swarr). The remainder form case studies 1 I have a small quibble here. Nelson and Seager (2005) claim, ‘The earliest feminist geographical work focused on mapping (literally and metaphorically) the spatial constraints facing women’. Some did and some did not. The analytical work on gendered spatial divides between public and private and urban processes, which they say did not emerge until the 1980s, was taking place contemporaneously with the earliest work. For example, see Burnett (1973) and Breughel (1973). Reviews / Comptes rendus based on various cities: female clerical workers in early twentieth century Montréal (Boyer), daycare provision for working women in Japanese cities (Hiroo) and a study of the effects of welfare reform in relationship to accessing information technology for women in Philadelphia (Gilbert and Masucci). There is also an overview chapter on the sexual life of the streets in western cities (Hubbard). Although the section of ‘Body’ has fewer chapters, they are closely connected, each focusing on racialised and sexualised bodies of women in the Global South: the performance of gender in a South African prison (Dirsuweit), the impact of HIV/AIDS on widow inheritance in Kenya (Agot), the bodily performances of young Muslim women in Britain (Mohammad) and the performance of transnational sexualities in Trinidad (Puar). In the section on the environment, the concentration is on the following case studies: feminist political ecology in the Dominican Republic (Rocheleau), gendered forest perception in Sri Lanka (Wickramasinghe), gendered and racialised attitudes towards marine creatures in Los Angeles (Wolch and Zhang), the use of GIS in studies of the environment and breast cancer in New York (McLafferty) and the activities of women environmental justice activists along the US–Mexico border (Di Chiro). There is also an overview chapter on ecofeminist perspectives on animal biotechnology (Emel and Urbanik). The final section of ‘Feminist Political Geographies’ has three chapters on the United States with a historical chapter on the role of gendered and racialised discourses of the family in processes of economic imperialism in turn of the twentieth-century United States (Domosh) providing useful background for the two contemporary studies on the culture of masculinity and of the American frontier in the US ‘War on Terrorism’ (Hannah) and a feminist geopolitical analysis of security issues of September 11th (Hyndman). The final two chapters turn attention to the Global South and are on the contradictions surrounding the creation of segregated gay spaces in Cape Town (Elder) and women’s struggles for peace in postconflict Peru (Hays-Mitchell). Certainly, it is all too easy to pick holes in such a large compilation; there are gaps in content, in geographical coverage and so on (and the editors themselves note this on p. 7). In such a trend-setting The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) 417 book, 2 the lack of comprehensiveness is problematic. There are no authors from Central and Southern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, South America, the Caribbean and most of Africa. There are feminist geographers working in these places, and it behooves us to know their work and discover their concerns; is it worse to be ignored than to be incorporated into Anglo-American feminist geography agendas? Perhaps the institutional structures within which we all operate are too entrenched for even feminist geographers to overcome the hegemony of Anglo-American geography. We tend to operate in informal networks of colleagues and friends that become as solidified as the institutional structures. Hence, notwithstanding that there are fifty contributors, over half of these based in the United States (n ¼ 26) and with eight from Canada and four from the United Kingdom, then nearly 80 percent of the authors are situated in Anglo–American geography. The other authors are based in Kenya, South Africa, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, Finland and Israel. The focus—the editors, the publisher and the whole process from instigation to dissemination—is still in and on the West. The story of feminist geography from outside-in still has to be told. It is beginning. For example, there are plans for a Spanish-speaking feminist geography conference in Barcelona in 2006 that will debate the limiting use of the English term ‘gender’ and strategies for its destabilisation. The need for dialogue with those outside Anglo-American geography is now well established. Western feminist geography is an incredibly vibrant thread in this reaching out of geography, but if in doing so we do not step outside our own networks, we run the risk of going no further than incorporating ‘others’ into our agendas. References BREUGHEL, I. 1973 ‘Cities, women and social class: a comment’ Antipode 5, 62–63 BURNETT, P. 1973 ‘Social change, the status of women and models of city form and development’ Antipode 5, 57–62 LINDA PEAKE York University, Toronto 2 Blackwell claims, in its listing of books in this series of Blackwell Companions to Geography, that it is ‘a blue-chip, comprehensive series covering each major subdiscipline of human geography’. 418 Reviews / Comptes rendus Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960 by Richard Harris, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2004, x þ 204 pp., cloth Cdn$45.00 (ISBN 0-8020-3556-6), paper Cdn$19.95 (ISBN 08020-8428-1) In the early twentieth century, Canadians became urbanites and, more importantly, suburbanites. Creeping Conformity is a commanding analysis, synthesis and critique of the processes that underpin Canada’s suburban transformation, with an emphasis on change in the form and function of suburbs, as well as the experience of everyday ‘urban’ life. How did suburbs and suburbanisation become the normative urban experience in Canada? The prominence of conformity in the book’s title is a little misleading because much of the study emphasises a diversity of processes, actors and objectives that have constructed the physical form and social geography of Canadian suburbs. By adopting a relatively long sixty-year time horizon, the diversity rather than homogeneity of suburbs emerges as a key theme in Harris’ treatment of suburbanisation. But the subtler argument woven through the text and brought to a full statement in the final chapters is that conformity in processes, architecture, transportation and lifestyle over time has steadily whittled away the once heterogeneous qualities of suburban landscapes. Built form, economics and lifestyle, Harris argues, encourage significant conformity because suburbs themselves demand such high levels of consumption and have steadily promoted behaviours that lead ‘people to define themselves through what they purchased by acquiring debt’ (p. 173). Postwar corporate-led suburbanisation and the shopping mall were born as if twins, and as a consequence, suburbs have become increasingly synonymous with the production and consumption of a limited set of products and social environments. The ubiquity of suburbs means that they are the physical and social landscapes upon which the life of virtually every Canadian unfolds. Harris emphasises, however, that over time an enormous number of different processes have constructed the suburbs and imbued them with an array of cultural meanings. If we were look beyond the sprawling and uniform neighbourhoods developed by The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) corporations in the post–World War II era, a rich history of diverse social groups, motivations and housing becomes apparent. A tremendous amount of Harris’ research over the last fifteen years has uncovered the social class and ethnic diversity of Canada’s early twentieth-century suburbs, and this work lies at the core of Creeping Conformity. The rise of industrial suburbs, self-building among the working classes on the city’s periphery, and public policy instruments such as the ‘Build Your Own Home’ scheme launched in 1949 that indirectly encouraged owner-builders to emphasise the social heterogeneity and varied housing styles of early suburbs. By carefully describing the processes at play during different moments of twentieth-century suburbanisation, Harris also demonstrates that there is nothing predetermined about the shape, form, density or meaning of today’s suburbs. If self-building instead of corporate suburbanisation had been encouraged in the post–World War II decades, if more control had been exercised by the state on urban growth, if housing policies other than those encouraging single-detached home ownership had been pursued and if some early innovations in public transportation had been encouraged, today’s suburbs might look and feel quite different. The history of Canadian suburbanisation is in part about missed opportunities. Creeping Conformity is strongest in describing the suburban transformation of Canada and in dissecting processes, motivations and innovations in building technology, transportation and public policy that have created today’s suburbs. Less well developed and investigated is the affect of the suburban transformation on the lives of Canadians, and this reflects a distinct absence of interest by many scholars in the everyday social geographies of suburban people. This lacuna in scholarship is one that Harris readily acknowledges, and asides about suburban teenage boredom only serve to emphasise the need for research about the intersections between place and identity constructions among young and old suburbanites. A number of feminist scholars have made major contributions to understanding gender roles and the construction of gendered spaces, but we know relatively little about the experiences of growing up in, or indeed growing old in, the suburbs. Reviews / Comptes rendus Creeping Conformity is a meticulously researched examination of Canada’s suburban transformation that draws on the author’s considerable scholarship, as well as that of many other Canadian researchers examining similar questions in different cities. It is also an extremely well-written work that should be appreciated by both academics and the general public. The clarity of writing, creativity and research precision of Creeping Conformity The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadian 49, no 4 (2005) 419 make the intersection between urban geography and history shine, and it will quickly become recognised as a major statement about the complex history, architecture and lifestyles of these social environments that are far too frequently overlooked because they seem so familiar. BRIAN RAY University of Ottawa