Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives
Katz, Cindi (2004).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 313 pages. ISBN 0816642095 (hardcover) 0816642109 (paperback).
Cindi Katz is a well-known intellectual in the fields of geography, anthropology and critical theory. She has a much-deserved reputation for telling things as they are, but with a poetry of expression that makes her talks exceptionally engaging and her writing a pleasure to read—even when what she tells may include much that makes us angry. I have had the pleasure of reading parts of Katz’s longitudinal work with children and young people of Howa in the Sudan and Harlem, New York. Finally, the whole story has been written in Growing up Global, which brings Katz’s work full-circle as she returns to Sudan to meet the children of her 1970s study as adults in the 1990s.
This is a book for anyone who wants to try to make sense of what globalization is doing to states, regions, rural farming communities and inner-city residential areas. This book explores what global processes, in particular the relentless march of economic restructuring, mean in different spaces and places and what they can do to young people and their families. It provides powerful insight into the machinery of globalization as it works its way through the so-called “poor South” and the “rich North,” and provides detailed critiques of “development” and “(dis)investment” practices in Sudan and New York City, respectively.
What Katz elegantly shows is that for the young people in these two geographies, the differences are not nearly as great as might have been imagined. The eroded ecologies of Howa and New York City (specifically Harlem), created by the particular forms of capitalism and development strategies that form part of the current neo-liberal hegemony, impact heavily on children’s lives and life chances. In Sudan, the agricultural development project named Suki was, among other negative practices, bringing a monetary economy to Howa and thus dissolving older community relations of reciprocity and exchange. The very land that children were learning about as places to farm in their adult futures was being eroded and damaged, put beyond use or access. In Harlem, children faced intense overcrowding and poor resources in schools that could provide them with little of value in their local economies. This lack of space to learn was replicated in the outside areas as reduced investment resulted in possible play spaces becoming no-go danger zones. In discussion about the book, Katz pointed out that the money flowing into Sudan that created the problematic development programs was the same money flowing out of New York that left the poor of that city in a form of structural poverty (Katz 2005).
One of the great strengths of this book is the way in which elegant description of everydayness is interwoven with critical and analytical commentary on economic structures and globalization processes. Drawing upon anthropological methodologies of being in a community, Katz spent hours and hours with the children in Sudan. She provides a fascinating insight into their game playing, their mimicry of adult lives and the ways in which they use their time—sometimes in conflict with adult expectations. Chapter 1, “A Child’s Day in Howa,” is wonderful read. Chapter 6, “New York Parallax; or You Can’t Drive a Chevy through a Post-Fordist Landscape,” is equally rich in detail but will incite anger for those concerned about global social justice. In Harlem and New York City, Katz’s methodology is based on a structural analysis of global economic restructuring, urban disinvestment and the erosion of educational resources and open/ green spaces. Her description of what city authorities can do to their own children is harrowing and is epitomized by the story of the bulldozing of the Children’s Garden of Love in full view of the children in their classrooms.
Despite the devastation wrought by development projects that destroy local water and land ecologies (Howa) and disinvestment and greed for land that denudes educational and green spaces (Harlem), Katz determinedly talks of people’s responses. She examines the ways in which young people and their communities are involved in resilience, reworking and resistance (the three Rs) to make sure their lives continue and that there are positive opportunities for children both in the here and now and when they grow up. This three-way analysis is an excellent approach to examining the diverse and inventive ways that ordinary people cope with the intrusions of different forms of capitalist structures into their everyday lives. An examination of the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (p. x) that constitutes social reproduction is placed in a useful dialectic relation with production. In this way, space is created for an insight into children’s lives, experiences and geographies in particular.
This is book of despair, but also of hope. Katz describes a “fourth R”—revanchism—as “the vengeful social, cultural and political-economic policies and practices of ruling groups and nations” (p. 241) that are very largely responsible for the situations the book describes. This is the despair. However, there are stories of hope, namely those of the lives of the young adults who had been children in Howa in 1971. They have learned and adapted and are living their adult lives in ways similar and yet different from their parents. Their lives are far from easy, but they cope by demonstrating aspects of resilience, reworking and resistance. Similarly, direct community action in Harlem has created some better and enduring open and green spaces for children and adults. This is not to romanticize the three R’s; utilizing and participating in such practices is extremely hard work. The book shows that there are spaces of hope but that a great deal of work still has to be done (through theory, research, policy and practice) in order to capture and secure some degree of social justice in a globalized world.
Reference:
Katz, C.(2005). Response to “Critics Meet Author” panel. Association of American Geographers Annual Conference, Denver, April 5.
Reviewer Information
Department of Geography, Loughborough University
Tracey Skelton received her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography, Newcastle upon Tyne. Her dissertation presented a feminist and cultural geography of Montserrat in the Caribbean. She is currently a Reader in Critical Geographies at Loughborough University. She teaches, using critical approaches, development studies, geographies of social and political difference and geographical theory and methods. Her interests include children's and young people's geographies, the social and cultural impacts of living with natural hazards (especially in Montserrat), and critical debates about methodologies and research.