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Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference |  | Author: David Harvey
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Category: Book
List Price: $48.95
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Rating:  4 reviews
Media: Paperback
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 1557866813
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.372
EAN: 9781557866813
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Product Description
This book engages with the politics of social and environmental justice, and seeks new ways to think about the future of urbanization in the twenty-first century. It establishes foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature - the material frames of daily life - are constituted and represented through social practices, not as separate elements but in relation to each other. It describes how geographical differences are produced, and shows how they then become fundamental to the exploration of political, economic and ecological alternatives to contemporary life.
The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes the problematic nature of action and analysis at different scales of time and space, and introduces the reader to the modes of dialectical thinking and discourse which are used throughout the remainder of the work. Part II examines how "nature" and "environment" have been understood and valued in relation to processes of social change and seeks, from this basis, to make sense of contemporary environmental issues.
Part III, is a wide-ranging discussion of history, geography and culture, explores the meaning of the social "production" of space and time, and clarifies problems related to "otherness" and "difference". The final part of the book deploys the foundational arguments the author has established to consider contemporary problems of social justice that have resulted from recent changes in geographical divisions of labor, in the environment, and in the pace and quality of urbanization.
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference speaks to a wide readership of students of social, cultural and spatial theory and of the dynamics of contemporary life. It is a convincing demonstration that it is both possible and necessary to value difference and to seek a just social order.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Excellent Review of the Concept of Justice in Postmodernism April 3, 2000
Noah J Toly
11 out of 27 found this review helpful
Harvey presents an excellent review of the concept of justice (both social and environmental) and its survival in postmodern context. Also a nice treatment of dialectical reasoning.
An Eye-opener October 22, 2005
Tusar N. Mohapatra (Indirapuram, India)
3 out of 12 found this review helpful
This book is a spectacular down-to-earth attempt to trasnscend positivism as well as Marxism. The very logic of the erudite author's argument alights in a blind alley, where the Heideggerian ambivalence remains the only saviour. This daring milestone in the history of thought would always be an inspiring read.
 ambitious but uneven November 3, 2008
ingonyama (Berkeley, CA USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is a big, sprawling book; I put off buying it for years b/c of the price but could never get very far in a library copy b/c it seemed like such an undertaking. It's not a book one could assign in a typical book-a-week grad school course. As academic reviewers have pointed out, Harvey is pulling together LOTS of different strands and theorists here--Leibniz, Haraway, Bourdieu, Whitehead, & many others. If you've read a lot of these folks before, Harvey has a lot to say, but if you haven't, this should definitely not be your introduction to Harvey's thought (I'd recommend Condition of Postmodernity, or maybe The New Imperialism). Some sections are fantastic - part I ch. 2 on Dialectics for example is a fantastically clear, lucid explanation of a dialectical approach. But it just keeps going, with a lot of material that might have been better published as separate critical articles on particular theorists, or relegated to footnotes, so that the overall argument gets diluted. All that said, it's a book that anyone working on space and place in the social sciences should read eventually, and one that offers lots of ideas for thinking about how to integrate or form alliances between various types of identity and locally-grounded politics on one hand, and a larger critique of neoliberal capitalism on the other. But I think Harvey's more recent books -- shorter, tighter and more topically focused -- while still theoretically and analytically brilliant -- probably reflect a welcome response to critics of this book (and if you're serious about the book, it's well worth reading the special issue of Antipode in 1998 devoted to it -- it's a work of such complexity that most readers will probably want some other opinions and a bit of guidance in making sense of it all).
 very painful March 10, 2010
Veronica Taylor
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The author seems to jump around subjects and I don't think his aim was clarity of explanation at all. I think his goal was to fit as many extra words and unrelated babbling as he could. The book was just way too much of everything and not at all focused. I don't know how else to explain this. It was a required read for a class and I would say that it was excruciatingly painful, hard to follow, and I got absolutely nothing for my time. I can't tell you a single thing that I got out of it.
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