JPER, Volume 16, Number 1, Fall 1996: Book Reviews

Planning Ethics: A Reader in Planning Theory, Practice and Education

Sue Hendler, Editor

New Brunswick, New Jersey, Center for Urban Policy Research, 1995. 394 pages. $19.95.

Reviewed by Richard S. Bolan

Collections of essays that make up a reader are always difficult to review, the editor’s judgments of what to include are nearly always at odds with what a reviewer would have preferred. For this reviewer, however, nearly all of the essays in Sue Hendler’s reader in planning ethics are winners. My own sense of ethics obligates me to state that this book is a must for all planners, whether practitioners or academicians. Almost every chapter in the collection directly addresses the concerns of planners with sound clear reasoning and mostly appropriate illustrative case material. No ethical dilemmas are resolved in the book, as they seldom truly are, but the approaches to reasoning about them are extremely well done.

As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into three parts. Each part is prefaced by introductions that are excellent original contributions in their own right. Part I begins with an introduction by Hendler followed by six essays covering different approaches to ethics in planning theory. Two are by Harper and Stein that provide clear and well-argued introductions for planners of what it really means to be a planner in a culture that embraces liberalism in its classic sense, with primary emphasis placed on equality, liberty, and the "autonomous" individual. They place in perspective classical liberalism as compared with the utilitarian tradition (they are quite different) or the contractual tradition as most recently exemplified by John Rawls.

Two chapters of Part I are devoted to the debt planners owe to Rawls. His two principles of distributive justness and fairness can be seen in planners’ long held concerns for the poor and the disadvantaged. Communitarian, environmental, and feminist approaches to planning theory and ethics round out the theory section of the book. The remarkable feature of Part I is how readable all of the essays are and how they are primarily on target in directly addressing planners, not always the case in the ethics literature.

Part II addresses ethics in planning practice with five chapters plus a remarkably fine introduction by Elizabeth Howe. Two of the five chapters, by Harvey Jacobs and Reg Lang, aim to provide practitioners with practical methods of ethical analysis: Jacobs with regard to agricultural land preservation and Lang with regard to introducing equity considerations up front in debates about siting solid waste management facilities (or NIMBYs in general). The remaining chapters are case studies. Probably already familiar to readers of this journal are Feld’s essay on school and housing segregation in Yonkers, and Throgmorton’s analysis of the use of rhetoric in the issue around the provision of electric power in Chicago. Randal Marlin’s study of neighborhood planning in Ottawa was new for me and I found it a splendid case illustration of John Rawls’ principles.

Part III consists of four essays about approaches to teaching planning ethics in graduate planning programs. Here Hendler has rounded up the usual suspects, Kaufman, Hoch and Beatley, with outstanding results that not only enlighten the reader about teaching planning ethics but also about the teaching craft itself. Jonathan Richmond is a relative newcomer to this literature but his unique experimental approach to teaching transportation planning was refreshing and a deserving addition to a reader on planning ethics.

Part III is led off by an introduction by Richard Klosterman that traces the history of planning literature devoted to ethics. An ethical responsibility for any reviewer is to provide critical commentary and I will try not to disappoint. My main concerns were inspired by Howe’s introduction to Part II. She makes the interesting observation that academics, in discussing ethics, focus on distributive justice; while practicing planners in their everyday concerns are more focused on issues of loyalty, honesty, and courtesy in relations with colleagues. Ironically, Howe’s fine introduction led off what I took to be the weakest section of the book. Marlin’s contribution, as I’ve already noted, was outstanding and Jacobs’ method for analyzing the equity of agricultural preserve programs was very convincing. Lang’s chapter on solid waste management, however, fell short of the mark. His ten principles for equity analysis sprang forth from very little preparation and the principles were never truly examined. This reader was not left with a confident feeling that solid waste management siting can now be confronted with any more assurance than before.

The essays of Throgmorton and Feld were somewhat disappointing as they appeared in this reader. These were reprinted from earlier publications with some, but not enough, revisions for this volume. Throgmorton’s paper, as many will remember, was about the use of rhetoric in planning. It included his imaginative framework for theorizing about this with the accompanying Chicago electric utility case. The original paper was not couched specifically in ethical terms and at the end of this version he attempts to make use of a deontological, teleological analysis that is quite weak. After the excellent groundwork laid by the essays of Part I, the article simply fails to take advantage of that material. While an excellent discussion of rhetoric in planning, it falls quite short of articulating or analyzing the ethical issues posed. The Chicago case study represents a gold mine for analysis in terms of the ethical use of language in public policy communications. The shaping of attention by strategic selectivity and by the use of exaggeration, hyperbole, or misleading use of statistics is more than mere rhetoric, it is charged with ethical implications and consequences.

Feld’s essay is reprinted from the symposium on the Yonkers case that appeared in this journal in 1989. The key revisions seem to be simply a factual update of how court orders to the City of Yonkers have been implemented up to 1993. In the original symposium, Feld’s condemnation of the Yonkers’ planners was counterbalanced with a number of alternative views. In this volume, the work stands alone and seems in strange contrast to the general tone of open inquiry that both precedes it in Part I and follows in Part III.

Part II could have profited from the work of Carol Barrett or Elizabeth Howe who are both very empathic with the ethical demands on the planning practitioner. Curiously, every essay in the volume was written by academics. My own earlier experience as a practitioner suggests that academics typically fail to capture the full range of conflicting ethical forces in planning episodes, public norms versus bureaucratic norms versus professional norms versus personal values. Especially insidious in my experience are the covert, unstated norms that permeate bureaucratic organizations (even those with a planning mission) and have the effect of squelching debate, making many important matters undiscussable, and encouraging conformity and routine. Practitioners (along with the rest of us) reside in multiple moral communities and are often forced to make real time decisions without the luxury of armchair quarter backing from the sidelines.

In general, however, these weaknesses are relatively minor compared with the overall high quality of the volume as a whole. For academics, not only are the final chapters excellent guides to different teaching approaches, but the book is a superb source of readings for students enrolled in either planning ethics or planning theory courses. In sum, this volume is one that should be in the library of every experienced planner and should be thoroughly explored by every student beginning in the profession.

Richard Sennett. New York, London, W.W. Norton and Company. 1994. 431 pages. $27.50 (Hardcover)

Review by Caroline Lavoie

Flesh and Stone relates body and city. Urban historian and sociologist Richard Sennett reviews western culture using select episodes to show how different city forms reflect changes in the way people experience their bodies. He hopes to awaken the reader to the current homogenization of contemporary urban spaces that deprives our senses of an exciting urban experience. For Sennett, the privatized home and self-contained automobile promote a passive individualism and social indifference. Sennett asks how we came to pacify such a stimulating environment. Might we find ways to use our technical powers to promote interest and tolerance towards urban diversity?

Sennett offers a challenging and extended narrative. He condenses the conventional periods of western civilization into three parts based on body images of urban form: senses (power of the voice and the eye for the Greeks and the Romans), movement of the heart (Medieval Period and Renaissance), and the circulatory system (Enlightenment and Modern Era). Sennett uses the parallelism between body image and urban form to challenge received notions of urban development that tend to underestimate cultural influences in the making and the use of urban space. He focuses on changing power relationships between sexes, classes, and a wide assortment of cultural factions and movements. For Sennett, the form of moral and physical experience in cities embodies a shifting architecture of power.

Sennett shows how for each historic period, city design tended both to reflect and to shape the way residents ex-perienced their bodies. Changes in the control of the body often show up in physical forms. These forms similarly shape the expectations of their users. For instance, one of Sennett’s most convincing chapters describes how the fearful Catholics of Renaissance Venice created the first ghetto. The commercial success of Venice created difficulties for the Catholic elites. They had come to rely on Jewish merchants to finance commercial relationships which they, as good Catholics, could not control. They feared the loss of political and economic power in this fast growing city of international trade. Sennett illustrates how the Jews, along with courtesans, represented shameful yet attractive services. The Catholic population believed that just as innocence lead to purity so too did seduction lead to infection. The governing elite used the ideal of Christian purity to justify the lawful physical segregation of the economically powerful Jews, just as influential courtesans were confined within a segregated residential district. The physical containment of the Jews in the ghetto satisfied the popular Christian desire for purity, while it curtailed the social ambitions of Jewish merchants. Most important, it enabled the elite to continue using the economic service of the Jewish merchants for their own advantage. This confinement was not total. Jews and courtesans alike found ways to resist the established rules of the Christian community. Courtesans found ways to mingle with other women by secretly obtaining and wearing wedding rings. The Jews did not identify with the limits of their imprisonment, but assimilated the ghetto into their own sense of community. The Jews might comply with the law, but they did not identify with its form and meaning. Like Michel Foucault, Sennett uses his detailed narratives to show that repression generates creative resistance as well as compliance. But the moral implications of uch an ironic assessment leaves the reader dangling. If we use state power to reduce the consequences of repression might we not pre-empt indigenous efforts to resist and rebel? If we recognize forms of repression to which we have grown accustomed and whose consequences perhaps favor our own way of life, then might we simply tolerate these as the most recent version of the inevitable play of power? Our own urban sensibilities remain tied to the conception of the body as a circulatory system. The anatomical categories of William Harvey have become guiding metaphors shaping what we expect of urban life. We desire a healthy urban environment with all its individual organs tied together in a centralized network of free flowing population and commerce. For Sennett, this efficient hierarchical order makes for apathy and indifference. Sennett avoids evolutionary metaphor. Today’s urban living with all its high-tech mobility and commercial glitz proves no better than earlier forms of city life. The powers of mastery and control exact a cultural price. Sennett believes that by gaining speed and security of travel and consumption, we deprive our bodies of the pleasures of agonistic uncertainty and civic encounter.

In the end, Sennett discusses the problems of individual apathy and social tolerance in New York City. He recalls his first encounter with Greenwich Village as one of diversity and tolerance where at first sight, there seems to be harmonious interactions between diverse ethnic groups of Italians, Jews, and Hispanics. But beyond this visual diversity, each group keeps their own turf with no verbal communication. Referring to Jane Jacobs and her book The Death and the Life of Great American Cities, Sennett raises another issue of diversity in the Village that Jacob did not envision and that is not necessarily desirable: the drug "supermarket" that exists in Washington Square. Childrens’ swings have become the space for selling heroin, or abandoned houses the headquarters for AIDS on Rivington Street. This diversity, however, carries with it indifference among the Village residents that evokes abandonment rather than security. Ironically, the visiting social workers who occasionally offer clean needles in the crack houses of Greenwich Village become symbols of tolerance. Sennett addresses a crucial question for modern New York: How do we exit our passivity and truly experience the culture of others?

For Sennett, the current efforts to free us from bodily senses and obstacles does not make for good urban living. With flexible and easily expandable grid systems, cities like New York started with no specific boundaries. The development of highways favored the individual experience of motorists whose compartmentalized travel helped create another type of individual Ghetto based on the fear of touching and freedom from resistance. William Harvey described the movement of human blood as stimulating and healthy, but when implemented by the vast circulation schemes of Robert Moses for New York the movement of automobiles encouraged a numbing monotony.

But Sennett seems to generalize too broadly. Take the case of Los Angeles. Here the application of William Harvey’s link between circulation and health fits better. Instead of the automobile sealing the driver off from the world of diverse urban life, it provides the driver with a way of escaping the provincial bonds of neighborhood. For instance, the car can be freedom, but not necessarily a freedom from obstacles leading to indifference and comfort. The car becomes a means of access. In his novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes describes how access to a car inspired resistance rather than indifference. As one character put it, "My car was proof of something to me, a symbol" (p. 31). The car helps the driver gain power and resist the impositions of ghetto life. Individual motion can promote contact across cultural divides and so yield an urban body much less like New York than Sennett imagines.

References

Himes, Chester. 1991. If He Hollers Let him Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Richard White

New York, Hill and Wang, 1995. 130 pages. $7.95

Daniel B. Botkin

New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995. 300 pages. $14.00

Review by Daniel W. Schneider

In these two books Richard White, a historian, and Daniel Botkin, an ecologist, both move from their original disciplines to explore "natural history," a common ground where history and ecology meet. Both want to understand how people’s long history of modifying nature affects how we plan change in natural systems. By examining nature as partially a social construct, these two books make clear that environmental planners need to understand the relations among people and nature as much as understanding nature itself.

Botkin’s goal is to develop a "new natural history." Botkin examines both aspects of the term "natural history," exploring what we conceive of as "natural", as well as the role of history in ecological studies. Ecological communities have their own history of change, independent of human interference, and Botkin emphasizes the importance of these changes. Botkin uses Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s journals of their 1804-1806 expedition up the Missouri River from St. Louis and down the Columbia River to the Pacific and back to examine the wilderness of the American West before large-scale settlement by European-Americans. He compares their journeys with his own over the same ground in the 1990’s. To reconstruct the West of 1804-1806, Botkin relies on a close reading of the minutiae of Lewis and Clark’s journals, noting all thirty seven instances of grizzly bear sightings, measurements of river lengths, descriptions of the landscape, etc. Botkin makes use of this material to illuminate ecological characteristics of the West, population density of grizzly bears, the shifting channel of the Missouri, patches of forest and grassland in the Pacific Northwest. Botkin stresses that many areas we might have considered "natural", have been profoundly influenced by humans. He notes how Lewis and Clark, returning across the Continental Divide, were in what we would consider to be untouched "wilderness"; in fact, they were searching for paths that Indians had already created.

The West that Botkin has revisited is, of course, different in many ways from that of Lewis and Clark: salmon are endangered species, agriculture has taken over the prairies, the Missouri and Columbia Rivers are blocked by numerous dams and levees, and vast amounts of timber are harvested from the forests of Oregon and Washington. But Botkin would not expect the region to be the same, even if humans had never intervened. As an exponent of a "non-equilibrium" theory of ecology, he rejects an older ecological view that nature is in balance or equilibrium. As Botkin sees it, nature is continuously changing, like the Missouri River that Lewis and Clark ascended. Only by understanding these patterns of change, the "natural history" of a site, can we understand how humans can manage the environment.

While Botkin argues for the importance of understanding natural patterns of change, he does not explain how this can inform environmental management. Does a clearcut mimic natural patches in Pacific Northwest forests? Are tree regeneration processes the same in clearcuts and clearings caused by fire or wind? These are critical questions for applying the non-equilibrium theories of ecology to environmental planning, but Botkin never addresses them. It is not enough to simply state that natural ecosystems change; one must characterize that change. For instance Alverson et al. (1994) discuss the relation between different forestry practices and natural disturbances and demonstrate that the natural spatial and temporal patterns of disturbances in Pacific Northwest forests are different from those of timbering. Without an understanding of the similarities and differences between natural and human-caused changes, non-equilibrium ecology can justify a policy of "anything goes." Already, the business oriented "Wise Use" movement is using these ideas to justify environmentally damaging development.

Richard White’s goal is to develop a metaphor that encompasses the complexity of the interaction between natural and social systems. He uses the term "Organic Machine" to describe the Columbia River, which "is at once our creation and retains a life of its own."

White identifies two intellectual sources arguing for the fusion of the natural and technical into an "organic machine", Emerson writing in the 19th century, and Lewis Mumford in the twentieth. Emerson’s philosophy reconciled the vast natural wonder and beauty of the American west with a simultaneous effort to develop and change it. Emerson saw nature’s greatest fulfillment in its transformation into a machine: "the mechanical was not the antithesis of nature, but its realization in a new form." Mumford extended Emerson’s thinking into a new century of changing the Columbia. Advising the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission in 1938, Mumford emphasized the integration of organic nature and the mechanical on the Columbia River, and tried to develop ways in which they could be properly balanced, how the earth could be brought up to the "highest pitch of perfection and appropriate use."

White uses energy, and its transformation into work, labor, or power, as a theme for studying nature and its link to humanity. As machines do work, so do rivers as they flow to the ocean, and people as they extract energy from nature. White sees the history of the Columbia as a history of the conversion of energy, the energy of the river, the energy in dried salmon, hydroelectric power, and finally nuclear power, all of which were intertwined with human labor and the Columbia.

White documents the interaction between humans and the Columbia River, and how the Columbia has been remade over the past almost 200 years. He starts and ends his history with the salmon fishery on the Columbia, describing the social organization of Pacific Northwest tribes and its relation to the fishery. White points out the Indians’ understanding of a non-equilibrium view of nature. The salmon populations were not constant, and the possibility of the salmon’s failure to return was part of their thinking. For the tribes of the Columbia, Salmon existed in a complicated network of geography, nature and culture. The Chinookans and Sahaptins regulated fishing by limiting access to fishing sites to particular family groups; yet fish were apparently freely available to other tribal members and even strangers who did not have direct access to fishing sites. This social control over common resources is being increasingly recognized by environmental planners as an important process in protecting natural resources while maintaining harvesting rights.

In contrast, European-Americans like Lewis and Clark saw the fishery and other natural resources as commodities, and began to claim private control over the river, and its fish, navigation and water power. The development of electric power on the river in the 1930’s, under the guidance of Mumford, represented an attempt to make this resource public again through the creation of public utility districts that could receive and market the power. The creation of electricity from the river, and the provision of this power through public utility districts would be, according to the regional planning commission "a weapon against monopoly and political corruption." The construction of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee and numerous other dams produced the power, but much of it went to investor owned utilities and industrial monopolies nevertheless. Democratic control of the power of the Columbia took another blow as the wartime development of plutonium processing at Hanford created secret spaces along the river. The emphasis on atomic energy by the Bonneville Power Authority ultimately spawned the nuclear power debacle of the Washington Public Power Supply System. Finally, White concludes with the impact of this transformation on the Salmon populations of the river. But despite the overwhelming impact of people on the Columbia, White does not view the Columbia, and nature in general, as an entirely social creation. Machines may be disassembled into their component parts and refashioned, but the Columbia River, despite the dams, power plants, and hatcheries, "is still tied to larger organic cycles beyond our control."

One of White’s accomplishments in this book is documenting that the actual transformation of nature must be understood historically. Motivations matter, and we have to understand the reasons people changed the river. Furthermore, he emphasizes, these changes were not without conflict. As the river has power, so relations of power in society are crucial to understanding the transformation of the river. People struggled to assert their vision of the Columbia. The remaking of the Columbia River had dramatic costs, not just for nature, but also all of the people who worked on the river: the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, immigrant fisherman and as they struggled for the right to fish from the river; New Deal planners and entrenched business interests as they fought over the future of hydroelectric energy, the workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, as they were exposed to radioactivity.

It is instructive to read these two books together. White and Botkin cross each other’s intellectual and geographic paths often, as they discuss salmon, Woody Guthrie, the Grand Coulee Dam, Lewis and Clark, and Pacific Northwest Indians. When they arrive at the same points, however, White’s book is generally more deeply thought out and researched. While Botkin provides insight into how ecosystems change, his book does not satisfy. For Botkin, our difficulties in solving environmental problems arise from outdated theories of ecological dynamics. Better ecology, he assumes, would lead to better management. White illuminates what Botkin misses: the complicated power relationships among people and between humans and nature. For instance, Botkin closes his book with the return journey of Lewis and Clark. On August 12, 1806, they returned to the Mandan village in present-day North Dakota where they had spent the winter two years previously, and noted how "a very obvious change has taken place in the current and appearance of the Missouri." Botkin uses this observation to emphasize how Lewis and Clark had become acquainted with "nature's variation," and how we, by extension, need to do the same. But Botkin fails to discuss another observation recorded by Lewis and Clark on that same day, one with as important an implication for the environment as an understanding of ecological variability. When Lewis returned to the village, he reported encountering "two hunters from the Illinois." These men were the first European-Americans to follow the trail first blazed by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, and represented the commercial development of the American West that was as much a goal of the expedition as was natural history.

In contrast, when White encounters Lewis and Clark, he uncovers the different ways in which Native and European-Americans thought about natural resources, and the impact of those differences on how the river was transformed. White has examined why people exploited these resources and the implications of the struggles over their goals. Without this kind of understanding, as well as an understanding of how the river changes on its own, we cannot solve either the social or environmental problems that White shows to be so closely connected.

Notes

1. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Bernard DeVoto, ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1953, p. 447.

References

William S. Alverson, Walter Kuhlmann and Donald M. Waller. 1994. Wild Forests: Conservation Biology and Public Policy, Island Press, Washington, D.C.

M. Christine Boyer

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 1994. 560 pages. $45.00

Dolores Hayden

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 1995. 296 pages. $30.00

Review by Robert Hodder

Can the individual and collective memories embedded in the American urban landscape be recaptured to nourish the revitalization of our public realms? And as communities engage in that process of restructuring and reinterpreting public spaces, will the individuals involved become more politically active, having gained a new critical perspective on the structural character of American urban development? Two recent volumes, The City of Collective Memory, by M. Christine Boyer, and Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place, rigorously explore these possibilities. Both authors propose that history and community memory have instrumental value and the potential to advance liberal and radical planning agendas; Hayden also shows the reader concrete examples of how such readings of the past can expand community consciousness and thus foster a more inclusive urban politics.

Boyer contends that the spatial composition of our cities almost wholly reflects the needs of powerful interests as urban spaces are restructured in the postmodern era to accommodate capital accumulation. This thesis is consistent with the perspective advanced in her previous works, most notably Dreaming the Rational City (1983). Observing how historical buildings and architectural fragments have increasingly been woven into urban projects of the 1970s through the 1990s, she identifies an important social aspect of such designs. She argues that although the "totalizing and "pictorial" effects of such urban redevelopment schemes generate compositionally refined and aesthetically attractive places, "the matrix of places that results encourages partial, piecemeal vision pushing interstitial spaces out of its view. The deindustrialized and deterritorialized, displaced and disadvantaged, have no seat in this constructed array" (p. 2).

The City of Collective Memory represents an important refinement of Boyer’s political economic concerns. In this volume she asserts that she is "interested particularly in the creation of meaningful and imaginative public spaces" (p.7). Such projects would illuminate the layered meanings inhering in place construction, and particularly the alternative interpretations of memories that are held by marginal community groups. This perspective brings forward a countervailing force in the art of city building, which Boyer views as dominated by "the perspective of white, middle-class architectural and planning professionals who worry in a depoliticized fashion about a city’s competitive location in the global restructuring of capital, and thus myopically focus on improving a city’s marketability by enhancing its imageability, liveability, and cultural capital" (pp. 4-5).

Boyer believes that urban space can be made to reflect more truthfully the past of the collective whole, but only if decision makers encourage participation from the entire community and are amenable to incorporating design elements that deal with controversial historical events or persons. Boyer asserts that the dominance of the design professionals, historic preservationists, and urban politicians in reshaping the urban landscape has quashed important resident memories, and that these memories deserve more consideration as the redevelopment/reinterpretation process moves forward. The City of Collective Memory adheres to this premise: "The public realm of the City of Collective Memory should entail a continuous urban topography, a spatial structure that covers both rich and poor places, honorific and humble monuments, permanent and ephemeral forms, and should include places for public assemblage and public debate, as well as private memory walks and personal retreats" (p. 9). Generating such urban patterns entails reconceptualizing the public sphere, an undertaking that Boyer hopes will result in a more inclusive open, and just society.

Boyer’s work clarifies the important distinction between objective history and subjective memory, and reaffirms the significance of diverse community values for the production of urban space. The text is replete with examples of how communities of special interests select architectural conventions and/or "reinvent tradition" to further their views of development and their desires for the social/economic order. Drawing on experiences from Rome to South Street Seaport, Boyer presents us with an expansive historical review; in fact, these analyses constitute the bulk of book. After citing numerous case studies of urban projects or reconstructions that limit citizen involvement and affirm the dominant political ideology, Boyer presents her conceptual model, the "City as Radical Artifice." She explains that adherents of that approach could develop urban spaces that would lend themselves to economic growth and development, while embracing a critique that redistributes material and "historical" gains to constituencies previously shunted aside by mainstream redevelopment schemes. Inspired by Fredric Jameson and Walter Benjamin, Boyer asserts that our national loss of hope and critical engagement has occurred as we face a profoundly alienating urban realm. Many observers would concur, finding the urban realm uninspired at best, fascistic at worst. What Boyer responds to is the undifferentiated urban texture. She is lured by "the margins and the preface of the contemporary city, [where] lies a carnival of possibilities and critical discriminations that every city provides, liminal spaces just outside the ‘city walls’ enclosing official reality, just beyond the stretch of the hand that rushes to replicate the sensational" (p. 474).

Boyer’s critique of both ancient and contemporary urban spaces is intriguing, and most planning academicians and practitioners will be sympathetic to her progressive, restructuralist agenda. She articulates important, but frequently neglected dimensions of oft-used terms in our postmodern grammar: the past, heritage, tradition, public and private space. Yet, the book's own postmodern grammar and frequently stilted style often obscures its meaning, as well as perhaps making it inscrutable to those practitioners who most need to hear Boyer's call for change. And despite her acute conceptualization of the urban change model, this reader came away from the book unsatisfied. That discontent stems from Boyer's unsubstantiated confidence in the utility of the City as Radical Artifice, the assertion that a restructured understanding and interpretation of urban artifacts and patterns holds promise for political and social change. For nowhere does the book present a comprehensive analysis of actual projects that further the goals associated with its paradigm of urban change. Boyer is correct in noting the structural impediments to such a reinterpretive scheme; she documents those precisely in the narrative. But the opportunity to document the feasibility of the suggested practices, as well, is allowed to pass; no contemporary examples are cited that might illustrate the proposed reordering of public and private priorities. Yet the hope for such a perspective lies in the vitality of such projects. In the absence of discrete illustrative experiences, the book’s polemic remains at the level of critique and hence loses some measure of intellectual vibrancy. The book’s disregard of the functioning redevelopment projects and interpretive programs capable of supporting its case diminishes its provocative character, while reinforcing our cynicism and pessimism about the urban scene, not to mention reinforcing the familiar charge that political economic writings are often arcane and irrelevant.

Boyer’s text provides a sound conceptual foundation for more inclusive urban redevelopment practices; Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place builds on that conceptual basis by elucidating public history projects that enrich the physical texture and narrative complexity of urban spaces. Hayden's attention to the theoretical underpinning for such concerns is clear, in a discussion drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, but her own concern is essentially pragmatic, prompting attention to individual projects that embody the values under consideration here. Like Boyer, she believes that the material details, as well as who is represented and what past stories are communicated are essential elements of public memory, and that collective memory resonates within and informs the process of social reproduction. Absent any acknowledgment of the roles that women, laborers, people of color, and other marginalized groups have played in shaping urban spaces, mainstream interpretations of the past will continue to shape community consciousness, limiting our structural understanding of the uneven development so characteristic of metropolitan regions.

In contemplating a restructuralist approach to the urban built environment, Hayden views the "politics of identity" as central. Clearly, she recognizes the community development effects of urban planning, as well as the meanings and interpretations that inhere in urban landscapes, and therefore seeks to reorder public priorities in line with equity objectives as she defines shared spaces for American communities. Clarifying her central premise, Hayden writes, "The power of place, the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens" public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory, remains untapped for most working people’s neighborhoods in most American cities, and for most ethnic and most women’s history. The sense of civic identity that shared history can convey is missing" (pp.10-11). To revivify civic identity and purpose, Hayden would relate people’s attachment to place to the political economy, offering a structural perspective on social change as well as a framework for judging the aesthetic and narrative qualities of urban patterns. This approach overlaps Boyer’s, particularly in its focus on the production of urban spaces and the meanings associated with those contested territories. It differs, however, by supporting the critique with a series of examples that show what the contours of time-specific and area-specific projects can be.

Hayden begins by reviewing a set of interpretive projects encompassing the fields of public history, architectural preservation, environmental action, and public art. From a history of brass workers in Waterbury, Connecticut (Brass Valley: The Story of Working People’s Lives and Struggle in an American Industrial Region) to a community history project that documents the lives of Chinese in New York City through oral interviews and video (The Eight Pound Livelihood), Hayden finds a common impulse, communities' attempts to recover memory and reclaim history. She also looks at the programmatic roles of the National Park Service and of local and state agencies in highlighting the contributions of African-Americans and women to development of the American landscape. Her conviction that these retrieval efforts yield evocative readings of place that affect social awareness is borne out by example. The prospect that such landscape histories can be the framework allowing people to insert social and cultural memory into contemporary urban life promises a restructured urban fabric, new physical and social patterns, and perhaps a greater measure of human and social empathy.

The Power of Place proceeds to a series of case studies in Los Angeles, many of which Hayden helped to shape. These cases, the bulk of the book, are highlighted by analysis, ethnographic data, and graphics that support its primary thesis. Particularly compelling is the example of the Biddy Mason project, which included photomurals and assemblages in the commercial development of a vacant lot, to honor the woman who had lived there, an ex-slave who eventually became a trusted mid-wife and pillar of the community. Assessing the contributions made to Los Angeles physical and social development by Native-Ameri-cans, African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans and Latinos, as well as Anglo-Americans, Hayden deems this ethnic past worthy of documentation and analysis. The book demonstrates how museums, public parking facilities, community buildings, and open spaces can be altered to include signage, art, and exhibits embodying alternative histories of past community members’ actions. That these readings of diverse histories must deal in a serious way with issues like slavery, internment, deportation, and economic exploitation is the most controversial aspect of Hayden’s project; the community resistance to such messy and unpleasant reminders of past inequities can be substantial. But the text argues forcefully: "It is the controversial history Americans need to reclaim as our own, in order to give meaning to the contradictory urban landscapes of cities today, where wealth and neglect, success and frustration, often appear side by side" (p. 96).

Hayden's exploration of the complex and powerful relationships among history, place-specific memory, and urban landscape preservation should prove to be a landmark text. For the last thirty years, historic preservationists, planners, designers, and public historians have been involved in restructuring and reinterpreting urban space. But, until now, no one has been able to synthesize those numerous concerns to yield a coherent yet pragmatic framework. Hayden's approach rectifies the loss of community by demonstrating how it is possible to unearth the past and use it to reestablish individual and community attachments. Her work is truly about new cultural possibilities, a new urban America. The saliency of this perspective, however, depends on the willingness of Americans to em-brace our distinctive histories and learn from them. Hayden asks, "Can Americans learn how to respect and nurture a diverse urban public?" (p. 246). Whether the political will exists to transform our American democracy into a more inclusive and humane one is an open question. One thing is certain: In the finest tradition of progressive planning, Hayden provides us with the techniques for advancing such grassroots change.

Both The City of Collective Memory and The Power of Place revolve around the same set of concerns; their political agendas are similar and their theoretical frameworks consonant. Boyer’s text succeeds as pure aesthetic critique and political economic theory; Hayden’s work advances beyond the polemical, astutely blending theory with practice in the best tradition of progressive planning. Together, the two volumes make a case for reconceptualizing American urban spaces so that the spirit of the past can be the nexus for our present community organizing and debate.

Planners are beginning to reassert their claim to the shaping of the physical domain, by blending the social agenda embraced in the 1960s with more traditional land use and redevelopment projects. The hybrid planning that results may look very much like the cases presented in The Power of Place. Planning academicians and practitioners would be doing very well if they were to replicate such successes locally.

Helen Liggett and David C. Perry, Editors

Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995.

264 pages. $22.95

Review by Teresa Cordova

The editors of Spatial Practices have assembled an array of essays to demonstrate how "space, ideology, and representation" are key elements in the production of space. Our actions, the authors suggest, are embodied with ideologies that are detectable through an analysis of representations. This book is most valuable for its examples of how ideology functions in planning practice as seen through analyses of various representations. How we market a city, how we depict the future, and how we fortify our housing developments, are examples of ideological representations that serve particular power interests. Liggett and Perry, borrowing a term from Lefebvre, urge us to conceive of our work as "spatial practices" suggesting that how we construct meaning through representations has implications for social policy.

Thus, as we make meaning, Fischler suggests that we pay attention to "the symbolic structures that frame what is being said, written, and shown during planning processes; and the political structures that frame interaction during those processes" (p. 23). This postmodern attention to how symbolic and political meaning flows to and from the organization of space, focuses explicitly on the practice of planners as an exercise of power. All the articles in this book assess how planning texts, techniques, and processes deploy power to pursue specific purposes and values, despite claims of neutrality.

Perry, in "Making Space: Planning as a Mode of Thought," uses ideas of French analysts Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Foucault, to demonstrate how practitioners, through the technologies and discourses of planning, have participated in the shaping of space, most typically by legitimating dominant power relations and therefore the inequalities that stem from those relations. According to Perry, we should view planning as a dialectical, recursive "spatial practice" whereby we engage in self reflection and dialogue to ask questions about how planners don’t just make plans, but "make space." This book contributes to planning theory by reinforcing the view that the production of space is a political process and that the behavior of planners has significance in how that process unfolds. The key is in sharpening our tools to detect ideological maneuverings, even, or especially, when they are our own. This book is most successful in providing us examples of how to conduct this ideological decoding.

Planners shape space by shaping meaning. Fischler, like Perry, argues that the allegedly neutral arguments of planners are, in fact, political. Planners interpret the findings of their inquiry about urban problems into plans that use persuasive visual and rhetorical concepts. In his essay, "Strategy and History in Professional Practice: Planning as World Making," Fischler presents case studies to demonstrate how planners exercise power in the ways in which they represent the city. "Analyzing the form of representation used in planning practice can reveal both the structural biases of planners’ interventions and the strategic value of their statements in particular circumstances"

(p. 14). Such analysis will, he argues, helps us bridge the gap between planning theory and planning practice.

Fischler emphasizes that it is not just the content of plans that can reflect bias, but how they are communicated. Planners adopt a language and style that fits their own training and outlook and in the process, privilege certain interests over others. Claiming public legitimacy using the voice of professional neutrality favors the interests of the planners in public settings organized to acknowledge this advice as valid. Competing voices appear irrelevant, divisive, or self serving in comparison. Fischler points out, however, that planning techniques are not the problem, but warns that planners consider the social and political implications of their communication.

In her chapter, "The Great Frame-Up: Fantastic Appearances in Contemporary Spatial Politics," M. Christine Boyer demonstrates how the creation of architectural images renders meaning that fosters uneven regional development. As capitalism restructures, (described in the article by Walker) argues Boyer, so too does "spatial and aesthetic politics." She examines the "dynamics of the imaginary geography of contemporary urbanization," illustrating how the production of cultural meanings made disruptive economic shifts more palatable, if not nourishing. For example, municipalities increasingly compete for industrial investment using public sector resources packaged into public relations schemes. The creation of imageability, argues, Boyer, is a "battleground" where cities are packaged as commodities to be sold, making planners "city beauticians and marketers." The act of packaging cities, involves the creation of meaning, that entices citizens to view themselves facing an inevitable and relentless economic force to which they must accommodate willingly, and even happily. Unlike the old city boosters which urged on speculators with images of endless riches, contemporary image makers produce a more unsettling image of disorder and competition. Security replaces speculation. Citizens seek to identify with the power of the multinational corporation, even as they are subjected to it.

The problem, argues Boyer, is that images of cities are replacing "actual appearances" where the selected imagery comes to replace the reality of the whole. While the virtues of spatial restructuring are exalted, the negative impacts are ignored. As a community identifies with its self-promotional material, despite the fact that the content of that material was not a matter of public debate, it comes to accept the inequality engendered by corporate subsidies. "Instead of constructing restructuring as a public issue, the spectacle of global capitalism and the power of multinational corporations capture our imaginations, even as they condition our everyday lives and bypass political accountability." Boyer wants to poke holes in this imagery and find ways to subject the powerful to more democratic means of control.

Other authors describe how urban symbols shape everyday life. Clark, in "Black Politics on the Apollo’s Stage: The Return of the Handkerchief Heads," makes the connection between cultural and political practice in his account of race relations. Dennis Judd, provides in his chapter a chilling account of "The Rise of the New Walled Cities." Suburban segregation has intensified qualitatively. Residents use common interest developments to build physical walls and authoritarian land use policies that not only keep out the poor and minorities, but impose an antidemocratic order onto the details of everyday life.

It is the "incursions" into our imagination, says Beauregard, that should be of most concern to us and alert us to the insidious potential of symbolically laden representations. In his article "If Only the City Could Speak: The Politics of Representation," Beauregard suggest that how we envision a city and its future, will impact the possibilities we create in the present, including what we consider effective political action. Without alertness, we become "prisoners of discursive representations whose weight anchors the status quo" (p. 71).

Beauregard and the authors in this book, provide a compelling case for taking seriously the representations of the city and the impact of those representations on our "spatial practice." The readings in this collection serve to dispel any disingenuousness about the political impact of planning practices. We can no longer proceed with the illusion that planning practice is neutral. Once we accept this, our next decision involves conscious choices about whether we will contribute to the processes of domination or the efforts for social justice. The analysts in this volume argue that planning and planners are caught up in cultural and meaning making activity which enhances the legitimacy of the powerful. If the planner is genuinely concerned with questions of equality and justice, s(he) must engage in a self reflective deconstruction of symbols that heretofore have been taken for granted. This volume of essays is a call to discursive vigilance. Its strength is in making this point and in providing us important examples of how this is done.

The biggest disappointment of the book is its failure to live up to its promise to more fully connect theory and practice. While the potential for this connection is clear, most authors stay primarily at the level of postmodern analysis without taking the next steps to make practical suggestions. Despite the absence of a final chapter that weaves the articles together, the book remains a useful compendium of essays to remind us of the potential significance of our choices.

Thomas Angotti, New York and London,

Routledge, 1993. 276 pages, $ 14.95

Review by Nico Calavita

The number of world metropoli is rapidly escalating posing huge urban welfare, infrastructure, housing, poverty and management problems. Urbanologists and planners have too often overlooked the metropolis as an appropriate level of analysis and provided scant attention to what might be considered its most insidious problem, inequality of wealth, power and resources. Some recent books such as Cities without Suburbs (Rusk, 1993) or New Visions for Metropolitan America (Downs, 1994), have detailed the uneven costs of metropolitan fragmentation in the US advocating metropolitan solutions to fiscal imbalances, socioeconomic segregation and uneven distribution of public facilities.

The problem of metropolitan inequalities exists in most metropolitan areas, and especially so in third world countries. What accounts for such widespread and persistant disparities? Do the diseconomies of large scale outweigh the benefits? If we compare the record for first, second, and third world metropoli, what lessons can we learn? How might these lessons inform and guide a new approach to the planning and managing of the metropolis in a global world? Thomas Angotti’s Metropolis 2000 seeks to answer these questions by conducting a comparative analysis of metropolitan areas, including those in socialist countries. The book synthesizes "the collective experience and ideas of those who share the vantage point of people living in neighborhoods in metropolitan areas that are unequal, unplanned and polluted." Writing in a provocative and concise style, Angotti draws upon a wide range of theoretical and empirical materials. Most important, he does not preach despair, but hope for a more equitable world.

Angotti begins stressing the qualitative differences between the differentiation of the industrial city and the complex integration of the late twentieth century metropolis. He offers a spirited defense of the concentration of resources and power, attacking "doomsday theories of metropolitan growth." Angotti claims that the anti-urban bias of the West has now taken form as an anti-metropolitan bias. He admits that access to metropolitan opportunities are unequal, but within the metropolis "there is an unprecedented range of choices, when compared to smaller settlements" (p. 3).

Angotti compares metropolitan development in the United States, Soviet Union and the Third World. If the US metropolis is characterized by segregation of land uses and fragmentation of social groups and political institutions, the Soviet metropolis seems almost its opposite with planning following a centralized administration, a social and political structure that is relatively integrated with little social mobility. While "The U.S. metropolis is an example of diversity without integration...The Soviet metropolis was an example of integration without diversity" (p. 204). Angotti describes the European metropolis existing somewhere between the Soviet and U.S. types, expressing "mixed economies and both pre-capitalist and socialist influences". The dependent metropolis of the Third World, even with its wide variations in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, suffers from acute forms of poverty and dependency on the developed capitalist world.

Angotti explains why metropolitan planning has failed and what needs to be done. He ascribes planning failure mainly to a mismatch between the complexity of the twentieth century metropolis and the utopian idealism of planning ideas and methods shaped by a response to the iindustrial city. Angotti finds renewed inspiration in Jane Jacobs’ ideas, most importantly the need for both integrating the variety of land users within settlements, as well as enhancing their social and functional diversity. But this integrated diversity cannot be achieved as long as metropolitan economic and social inequalities prevail. In the meantime Angotti urges metropolitan level planning coupled with neighborhood empowerment.

While the integrated diversity principle is not being actualized in its entirety anywhere, Angotti includes examples of metropolitan planning and government, as well as progressive urban reform movements. He covers examples of neighborhood development and control movements in several countries. Angpotti swims powerfully against the current tide of post-modern despair. His faith in human progress remains unshaken:

The thrust of all historical development is toward the fullest expression of human consciousness... which gets expanded as we expand our control over nature.

Many readers will likely disagree with his modernist beliefs, especially as evidence of the oftern perverse consequences of our rational control mounts. The modern metropolis may represent the most successful effort so far to tame and control nature, but it has also unleashed powerful destructive forces in doing so. Still Angotti is no Polyanna. He acknowledges the evidence that challenges his claims and writes: "It is hard to imagine how the potential of urban planning can be fully realized, however, without a new international economic order", an order he admits that remains a long way off.

References

Downs, Anthony. 1994. New Visions for Metropolitan America. Brookings Institution: Washington D.C. and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: Cambridge MA