LAUSR

T oday’s reader of urban scholarship should be granted some sympathy if feeling cynical regarding the state of urban justice in the world. Much of the scholarship on urban justice, and the plight of marginal urban citizens in particular, has conveyed a rather dystopic view of the contemporary urban condition, a view in which the working class are unceremoniously washed away by a tsunami of gentrification and those left homeless and clinging to the last vestiges of public space are spatially corralled, institutionally micro-managed and in some cases legally banished (Smith 1996; Mitchell 2003; Beckett and Herbert 2011). Couched in understandings of urban neoliberalism, and the more recent conjuncture of ‘austerity urbanism’, this view has been rather ambivalent of what remains of the welfare state. Its remnants are either reduced to ‘roll-out’ mechanisms facilitating the further marketization of everyday life or trivialized as ‘stop-gap’, crisis-management mechanisms securing the legitimacy of existing urban regimes. Seen from this vantage point the neoliberal city appears as a rather harsh, punitive and unjust constellation within which there is little room for resistance let alone transformation. Geoffrey DeVerteuil’s recent book, Resilience in the Post-Welfare Inner City, tempers this urban orthodoxy. The book is concerned with what critical urban scholars have too quickly dismissed or failed to register altogether: the stubborn spatial persistence and critical social resilience of the servicerich inner city in the face of gentrificationinduced displacement and ongoing welfare state restructuring. Resurrecting the concept of the ‘service hub’—spatial agglomerations of human services typically offering sanctuary, care and support to marginalized populations in the inner city (see Wolch and Dear 1993; Dear, Wolch, and Wilton 1994)—DeVerteuil endeavors to show how these residual leftovers of the welfare state have not only been critical to the survival of vulnerable urban citizens; they have also comprised a seedbed of potential resistance against urban neoliberalism. DeVerteuil’s account of the ‘resilience of the residuals’ fills a gap in our understanding of urban neoliberalization and in doing so constructively inflects contemporary debates regarding the ‘just city’, the ‘right to the city’ and urban spatial justice (see Marcuse et al. 2009; Fainstein 2010; Soja 2010). Resilience in the Post-Welfare Inner City does so by chronicling the spatial and social resilience of service hubs in three global city-regions, each of which have been reshaped, in unique and similar ways, amidst a confluence of postwelfarism, neoliberalism, gentrification and austerity. DeVerteuil (3) is explicit about his interest in ‘how’ service hubs have endured in these contexts