Jerome Krase's Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class is an invaluable contribution to the field of visual sociology and urban studies. Interested in how we see cities and negotiate the multiple and dramatic changes taking place in small neighborhoods and large cities, Krase offers important methodological and theoretical interventions that explain how ‘Visual, spatial, semiotics allows one to see how ordinary people have the ability to create meaning by affecting the appearances of places and spaces’ (p. 25). Krase's interest in how we ‘create meaning’ within and among urban spaces through the visual influences drives much of his research and analysis. He is, as he writes in the last chapter, ultimately interested in how ‘the physical appearances are imbued with moral or normative qualities’ (p. 215). His use of key urban theoreticians, in particular, Lefebvre, Harvey, De Certeau, Castells and Bourdieu, as well as scholars working in gentrification, urban anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, lends his work complication and rigour.

From his introduction we learn that Krase is a scholar-activist who has spent close to 20 years working with local communities in Brooklyn and in New York. His insider and local knowledge of New York serves the book well. Krase clearly understands the city and effectively explains the history of different immigrant communities, the politics of spatial change, the distinct local policies that have led to those changes, and the impact of certain decisions and solutions. This is evident in his discussion of gentrification where he simultaneously employs complex theoretical ideas with a more ‘grounded view’ of the process involved in gentrification. Employing his experiences as a scholar-activist in the 1970s when he ‘focused on urban blight and its symbolic relationship to white flight’ (p. 188), Krase incorporates race, ethnicity and migration into a field that tends to emphasize class and economic policies as central organizing principles. This is critical, since it is also through white flight, the displacement of populations of colour, and of businesses that cater to those communities, that individuals witness and process major shifts in the urban landscape.

Krase has organized his book into eight different chapters that can also be seen as distinct case-studies: ‘Seeing diversity in New York’; ‘Seeing Little Italy change’; ‘Chinatown’; ‘A visual approach to ethnic spectacle: visualizing American cities’; ‘Polish and Italian landscapes’; ‘Seeing ethnic succession in Big Italy’; ‘Gentrification in Poland and Polonia’ and ‘Seeing community in a multicultural society’. Krase's decision to compare certain New York neighbourhoods with certain European cities is both a strength and weakness of the book. On the one hand, such comparisons make it possible for Krase to expand his analysis, his lens if you will, to include various global and transnationalist factors and effects. It documents to what extent changes in cityscapes, gentrification, economic globalization, racial marginalization and displacement are global phenomena currently affecting a number of major cities. This approach extricates New York, and by extension United States cities from being seen as exceptional or as Krase notes, as ‘spectacle’. It also allows the reader to understand better the global implication on translocal policies and mobility. On the other hand, it is not clear why Krase chose these cities, both in the United States and abroad, for his comparisons. There are a number of cities that are currently undergoing extensive urban dislocation and change: London, San Francisco, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Chicago to name a few. This was a curious omission, since Krase is careful to explain his methodological approach and reasoning throughout the book.

Krase does a good job of including race, ethnicity, culture, immigration and assimilation throughout his study. Yet, he includes very little in regards to gender and sexuality. Do women see things differently? How does the gay and lesbian community create and articulate spatial meaning? As works by Doreen Massey and Christina Hanhardt argue, spaces are gendered and rarely neutral. Hanhardt for instance, examines how the gay and lesbian community use and reconfigure definitions of violence and safety to access and privilege gentrified spaces in San Francisco and New York. One of the most pressing issues when it comes to urban change, redevelopment and gentrification is how safety is defined and understood by different communities.

Seeing Cities Change is an important and necessary intervention in how we ‘see’, understand and negotiate cities. What we tell ourselves as a community and what we choose to remember and forget as individuals. Krase has done an excellent job of not only providing a theoretically and methodologically rigorous explanation of why and how cities change, but also in how we create meaning and discourse around changes we often have so little control over.