Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia

it true that housing markets can never provide poor people in any society with enough decent, legal, affordable places to live? The answer surely depends on how many people we count as ‘poor’, how much housing is ‘enough’, and which housing we are willing to characterise as ‘decent’ and ‘affordable’. The book does not commit to any particular definitions of these key terms. The result is ambiguity. Some passages, for example, appear to assert a particular, substantive conception of ‘decent’ housing, comprising not only rights to certain quanta of safety, health, and personal dignity, but also the right to form autonomous families (see 214). Other passages appear to retreat to the much weaker assertion that some standard of decent housing is minimally necessary, but that the specific content of this standard should be left to local norms (70). The difference between the strongest and weakest versions of this claim could matter a great deal for how we interpret the book’s argument. At one extreme, we might read Broken Cities as implying the bold thesis that large-scale social housing will be necessary to ensure the reproduction of the human species in our urban future. At the other extreme, we might interpret it as implying merely the claim that some people have less income than middle-income people, and therefore cannot afford housing that is up to the standards that middle-income people would set for themselves. These critical remarks notwithstanding, I found Broken Cities to be a stimulating read. It is a book that I will re-read for the case studies, and that I would consider assigning to students as a comparatively jargon-free introduction to an important radical perspective on housing. I would recommend Broken Cities to anyone studying housing or urban settlement processes anywhere in the world.