In Demanding the Land, Paul Dosh provides a detailed account of the land invasions in Quito and Lima that began in the 1990s, following their trajectories up until 2005. Land invasions as a form of urban popular movement have received relatively little attention since the heyday of academic interest in the 1970s and 1980s. This book is a welcome reminder that the lack of adequate housing and service provision are still important humanitarian and political issues in Latin American cities. In the contemporary period, changes in economy and administration complicate the living arrangements of the poor as restrictions on the urban land market are reduced, opening it up to commercial development; as utilities such as electricity are privatised; and as decentralisation empowers local government, but usually without adequate financial resources to meet demand.

It is against this background that Dosh traces over time the organisational characteristics of ten invasion communities and the strategies of their leaders, comparing three cases of invasions in Quito and seven in Lima. He divides the organisation types historically by the dates of their establishment, labelling their leadership ‘Old Guard’ and ‘Next Generation’. Among the more recently established he makes a further distinction, based on strategy, to create a third category of ‘Innovators’. The differences in context between Quito and Lima are nicely brought out, ranging from the relative ease with which public land can be invaded in Lima compared with Quito and the stronger tradition of democratic local politics in Lima to the climatic differences that require more durable building materials in Quito. The author points out that Lima's invasion rates are double or triple those of Quito.

Dosh analyses the strategies and their relative success or failure in securing the invaded land, demanding services and gaining land titles. He also considers the organisational factors that differentiate the invasion communities, examining the degree of participation and power-sharing in the communities and the flexibility of the leadership. Broader political factors are also considered, such as the electoral cycle and the ideology of the mayor of the local municipality. Also discussed is the availability of external allies, such as the foreign governments, international agencies and NGOs that have become increasingly visible urban actors in the contemporary Latin American city. Dosh provides tabular data categorising the strategies of the leaders, the characteristics of their organisations and the sequencing and outcomes of their demands for services and titles in ten invasion communities with between eight and 18 service demands per community. The result is a great deal of valuable information on the working of local-level urban politics in both cities, showing the ability of grassroots organisations to continue to make demands even in politically hostile and authoritarian environments. It also shows the pragmatism of most organisations, especially the more recent ones, in using strategies opportunistically – confrontational, clientelistic or market-based – depending on the opportunities provided by the political and economic context.

For this reader, there are two major drawbacks to the book. The first is its failure to place the land invasions in their overall urban context. We are given no sense of the overall importance of these invasions in obtaining housing for the poor. In both cities there have been extensive programmes of titling of settlements that are irregular, whether by invasion or the semi-legal sale of lots. This expansion of the market for low-income housing and rentals, combined with government programmes to construct or promote low-income housing, usually on the periphery, is likely to diminish the pressure for invasion. Also, population growth and urban growth are less than they were in the 1970s. This may mean that the demands of invaders for recognition and services have less resonance than in the past with the vast majority of the urban poor, for whom other types of collective action may be more significant. These demands are also likely to conflict with the perceived interests of the rest of the local population, further complicating local politics. Dosh provides some sense of this in the case of Villa El Salvador, but tells us little about the politics of the district.

The second drawback is the restricted disciplinary focus of the book. Despite much useful information, this reader could not help feeling that this was a book written by a political scientist for other political scientists. The data are organised in terms of fixed categories derived from resource mobilisation theory with the intention of making the findings potentially comparable to studies of local-level urban popular movements elsewhere. However, some of the major components of resource mobilisation theory are given short shrift, notably the focus on the processes of mobilisation through social relations between leaders and followers, the nature of their interactions and the framing of movement identity. We are given little information on the actual social relationships and appeals made by leaders to mobilise their followers. There is no information on how invaders were first recruited. We have no sense of the characteristics of those invading, whether they are migrants or city-born, what types of jobs they have and what their income levels are. The people in the invasion communities do not figure in this narrative; it is only their leaders that appear. Ameliorating this drawback are James Lerager's photographs, which bring to life an otherwise dry text.

This means that Dosh's analysis cannot do justice to one of the most interesting issues that he raises in a table on identity traits and invasion organisation, where he shows that recent invasions are based more on a sense of entitlement than those of the past. A sense of citizens' rights may well be developing among the urban poor in Quito and Lima, but it is obscured by Dosh's concentration on tabular data and their description. An exception is the case study on the Quito community of Itchimbía, whose leadership successfully established an invasion community that protected a fragile environment and allied with city-wide and country-wide movements for women's and indigenous rights.

The overall conclusion that emerges from the book is that urban popular movements act today as they have always acted, blending pragmatism with a sense of the justice of their demands, and Dosh's schematic emphasis on differences in strategy and organisation did not convince me otherwise. The conclusion is, as it was in the earlier period, that it is difficult for urban popular movements to produce broad changes in urban or national politics when they are based on demands that are relatively easy to meet within existing economic and political structures.