JPER, Volume 16, Number 2, Winter 1996: Book Reviews

Designing the City: A Guide for Advocates and Public Officials

Adele Fleet Bacow

Island Press, Washington D.C. 1995. 304 pages.

$27.50.

Reviewed by Kheir Al-Kodmany

Assistant Professor

College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs

University of Illinois at Chicago

Adele Fleet Bacow describes the urgent need for "good" urban design and details what must happen for our cities, towns, and neighborhoods. She invites citizens to participate in the design of the urban environment to improve efficiency, enhance accessibility, increase security, and inspire awareness and appreciation of beautiful form. In her early chapters, she offers a pragmatic assessment of the relationship between urban designers and their collaborators: planners, administrators, community groups, and public officials. The bulk of the text considers cases in which designers played an active and central role in planning and creating beautiful public facilities and buildings. Bacow deplores the engineering mentality with its unimaginative approach to construction, while she urges her fellow designers to put their often ego-laden expertise aside for a more collaborative approach. Instead of waiting for a commission, designers should become active participants in the many committees that prepare for and review proposals for regional, city, and neighborhood facilities and advocate an inclusive design approach. Bacow strongly advocates an inclusive design approach that will correct the stereotype of design as expensive frill, while offering greater opportunity to lace design issues on the public funding agenda.

Bacow strongly believes in separating the design from the designer: The built environment usually lasts longer than those who design it. The issues of form and style must be mediated through a citizen planning and review process whose participants bring to bear a variety of other important issues. Bacow believes good design includes creating and improving buildings, landscapes, transportation facilities, and public spaces considering form (e.g., color, texture, orientation), function (e.g., scale, density, use) and environmental context (e.g., wind, transport, access, à). For Bacow, "good" design is good planning. A beautifully designed city will likely attract more gainful industry, commercial, and entertainment facilities than an ugly one. The result will produce prosperity and enough tax revenue to offset the marginal costs of design.

What Bacow gravely underestimates is the range of differences in design perceptions among citizens, public officials, lenders, and developers. Designers not only disagree strongly among themselves about what constitutes a "good" design, but their training often intensifies a competitive and elitist orientation to design practice. Furthermore, the jargon and conventions of design professionals do not favor inclusive communication with amateurs and clients. Her many examples favor small towns and suburbs where the participants are likely to share overlapping interests, and local public officials are not engaged in adversarial contests. Her strategies make sense in community settings where participatory design can fill a vacuum of public life. In larger cities, with contested public agendas, Bacow’ s formula for participatory design will likely prove less attractive as a means of consensus building and could prove vulnerable to cooperation or cynical patchwork.

She underestimates the political difficulties of creating partnerships and finding funds. It is one thing to obtain lip service for good design and quite another to convince city engineers, private builders, irate taxpayers, and election-oriented politicians to make long-term commitments to improved public designs. Her cases tell stories of collaboration where the parties are separated more by ignorance and worries than by conflicting interests and long-standing mistrust. Her view of public partnership may seem sensible, if a bit too idealistic.

The author is no theorist. Her practical emphasis skips over any theoretical discussion of participatory design or planning. She presumes agreement on the meaning not only about the concept of design, but "good" design. If she had tapped some of the rich, if contested, literature on these topics, her claims could have gained credibility. For instance, Bacow offers an especially benign version of design-driven neighborhood improvement. The narrative goes something like the following: Artists move into old neighborhoods with large unkempt buildings. Structures are renovated to make room for art production, storage, and galleries. These activities improve the attractiveness of the neighborhood, which attracts gentrifiers who then conduct neighborhood revitalization on a much larger scale for reasons of real estate gain. Young affluent residents move to the now trendy residential area. Land values skyrocket. Poor people are displaced. Eventually, even the artists must leave in search of cheaper rents. Bacow treated this as a natural process rather than as a kind of specific cultural legacy of big-city, baby-boomer artists. Few communities possess artists in sufficient numbers to stimulate such major spatial shifts.

Bacow imagines a broad participatory design process. She writes clear and accessible prose in an effort to attract the sorts of readers who participated in the cases she reviews: officials, planners, activities, managers, builders, and investors. Design advocates are urged to speak to this broad audience and do so by integrating art, design, and public policy in their proposals. Her book provides tangible and tested cases of effective advocacy for quality design that others might emulate. She offers many practical tips about how to place design on the local public agenda including fundraising, collaboration, financing, public education, design awards, soliciting support, administrative procedures, and communication strategies.

Bacow places public education through participation at the center of successful urban design efforts. She hopes exposing children to "good" design will plant the seeds of critical design thinking and problem solving activities. But Bacow says little about how educators who are already pressed to meet the basic curriculum find the time and support to conduct labor-intensive design education. Despite her practical bent, Bacow’s advice often comes up short precisely because she substitutes an imaginative design process when confronting messy or adversarial political settings. This is understandable, but risky for the politically inexperienced reader.

W. Dennis Keating, Norman Krumholz, and David C. Perry, Editors

Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio. 1995.

402 pages. $35.

Reviewed by John J. Betancur

Assistant Professor

College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs

University of Illinois at Chicago

Cleveland, A Metropolitan Reader is a unique collection of studies about the City and Metropolitan area of Cleveland. It covers in great depth the history of the region from its initial development into a mercantilist center, through its subsequent emergence as one of the main U.S. industrial cores, to its decline and the ongoing process of redevelopment. While focusing on Cleveland, this analysis presents a situation that is shared by many U.S cities. As such, it provides invaluable knowledge and lessons for planners, historians, political scientists, and other analysts of the urban experience. It discusses the dynamics that regions such as Cleveland confront today, including economic transformation and its differential impact on the city and the suburbs, the housing crisis, economic polarization, the growth and concentration of poverty, discrimination, and minority politics.

The editors did a great job in putting together so many topics and authors within such a unified publication. Particularly interesting are the analyses of the contradictions between the private and the public sector over control of some public utilities and the efforts of the progressive governments of Mayors Tom Johnson (1901-1909) and Kucinich (1977-1979) to establish a populist agenda.

The book is written in a language that is highly accessible to different audiences, without sacrificing the rigor and standards of the discipline. It combines passionate essays and historical pieces with statistical descriptions and planning proposals. Although some chapters overlap, each adds a new dimension or angle to the others. This book is a prototype that would be worth replicating for all cities.

The overall tone of the book is realistic and, at the same time, optimistic. The book conveys the message that the American city through the leadership of its people has the ability and the will to continuously transform itself in response to the challenges of the time. Cleveland is presented as an example of the effectiveness of the unified intervention of the corporate sector and of the need for a strong public-private partnership in the rebuilding of a city. This is not to say that all authors coincide on a single diagnosis or vision of development. They, in fact, introduce different views from a strong call for advocacy planning and neighborhood development through the claim that there is limited room for redistribution at the city level to a vision of regional development.

The book is limited in proposals. The insights presented, however, suggest several paths that can be developed into specific planning initiatives for the future. For instance, while recognizing the limited possibilities for redistribution in a local economy, Todd Swanstrom claims that there is some room for it and calls for research to determine this in detail. Based on his experience as director of Cleveland’s Planning Commission for ten years, Norman Krumholz claims that equity planning works and strongly proposes it as a strategy to direct opportunities to the groups most in need. Thomas E. Bier, meanwhile, sees the need to approach problems such as housing regionally. Finally, Christopher Warren calls attention to the creativity and resourcefulness of neighborhood residents and their ability to develop solutions. He also argues that a more comprehensive effort is required to make a difference in their lives.

Even though the book is highly descriptive of the situation in Cleveland, it points continuously to the unresolved dilemmas of cities and their metropolitan areas today. An in-depth discussion of their significance for the future of cities and their metropolitan areas is far beyond the intent and scope of the book. These dilemmas are at the heart of the urban question today, however. In closing, this review will pose three questions whose discussion and possible resolution may determine the future of our cities today. First is the control of development by the corporate sector. As the book indicates, this process has led to highly uneven development between downtown and the neighborhoods. Neighborhood activists have called attention to it throughout the country to little avail. Should the government concentrate on neglected areas and let the corporate sector take care of itself? Is this possible? Should we look for comprehensive efforts to direct the benefits of downtown development to the neighborhoods? Should the citizenry sit back and celebrate corporate development while their neighborhoods and their lives fall apart?

Second, and closely related, is the seemingly excessive power of the private sector and its ability to hold city administrations hostage. The bitter disputes between the private sector and the city over ownership and control of some public utilities, described in great detail in the book, illustrate this very vividly. Moreover, the efforts at redistribution of the populist governments of Johnson and Kucinich were blatantly opposed by the private sector, which did its best to make them fail. This experience has been repeated in many cities throughout the nation when legitimately elected, progressive governments tried to represent the interests of the low-income population and of minorities. The experience of Cleveland and those of many other cities seem to suggest that local governments can only succeed when siding with the business establishment and that they can only marginally represent the needs and interests of the lower classes of society. Is this a necessity of the economy or can do we do better?

The third issue is the extreme polarization between the central city and its suburbs that the book illustrates. As planners know, this is a clear case in which governments lack the instruments for any significant intervention, for instance, in the location of new housing, the establishment of mixed communities, or the distribution of economic activity throughout the metropolitan area. Should we give up and hope that the situation will eventually correct itself? Should we initiate a search for policies of the type that facilitated suburbanization? By presenting these matters so powerfully, the book calls for a renewed effort to examine them from multiple perspectives and to intensify search for new directions. After all, the fate of our cities is at stake.

John P. Blair

Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, Cal. 1995. 352 pages. $42.00.

Reviewed by Charles M. Hotchkiss

Professor of Urban and Regional Planning

Coordinator of Economic and Community Development California State Polytechnic University

John P. Blair’s purpose in writing Local Economic Development: Analysis and Practice is straightforward: "to present the economics of economic development in a manner accessible to both economists and non-economists" (ix). The author perceives an expanding gulf between the practice of economic development and the interests of academic economists. "It was," Blair writes, "as though academic economics had become so insular that it failed to examine the economy" (ix-x). Readers are likely to conclude that Blair has succeeded in his purpose. They may also conclude that he is correct in his assessment of academic economics.

Local Economic Development begins with a review of basic concepts in economics. Subsequent chapters give an orderly and readable treatment of a wide range of topics including location theory, site selection, market areas, and central place theory. Blair explains economic structure largely by means of agglomeration economies, and regional growth via circular-flow, export-base, and supply-side models. The volume is notable for its breadth of coverage, which far surpasses most economic development texts: economic base theory, the gravity model, models of trade and migration, rent theory, simple models of urban form (concentric ring, sector, and multiple nuclei), filtering and other models of housing, and basic concepts of public finance are all surveyed.

In turning from economic theory to economic development practice, Blair describes a wide variety of analytical tools: location quotients and export estimation techniques, shift and share analysis, econometric analysis, input-output models, cash flow analysis, and fiscal-impact and benefit-cost techniques. Economic development issues, pro- versus slow-growth, jobs-to-people versus people-to-jobs strategies, ghetto dispersal versus ghetto improvement, and others, are interwoven with theory and methodology. Midway through the book, Blair begins introducing economic development strategies and tactics, including cost minimization and human capital approaches, targeting specific industries, flexible land-use regulations, and commercial development techniques.

Blair’s motivation is laudable, and his writing is clear and logical. This would be a good book for undergraduates new to economics, graduate students of economic development looking for preparatory reading, or planners seeking a survey of economic development concepts and tools. It would be a useful supplemental text for several kinds of courses, but it has significant limitations as a stand-alone text on economics, analytical methods, or economic development practice.

As a text on economic concepts useful in understanding economic development, the book’s breadth and the author’s desire to reach non-economists necessarily limit its depth. Coverage of individual topics is superficial: Despite seven pages of fine-printed references, important authors such as Allen Scott and Ann Markusen are absent. This is understandable, as the book is not intended as either a comprehensive literature review or a survey of cutting-edge thinking on the subject, but the result is that knowledgeable readers may find little of interest here. Sophisticated noneconomists (students or practitioners) may also desire more detail on particular topics.

Moreover, the literature and material presented reflect a decidedly conservative view of economic development. Radical perspectives are relegated to a single paragraph in the opening chapter, and the "liberal-conservative framework" used by Blair seems skewed to the right. Efficiency, not equity, is generally the focus of discussion. Many urban policies are described in ways that make them sound ineffective or perverse. Houston is cited as evidence that zoning might better be replaced by deed restrictions (although Houston now has zoning). Linkage programs are described as "attempts to require developers to provide support for unrelated development as a condition for permission to develop their original project" (239), a characterization that, if upheld in court, would invalidate programs throughout the country. In describing redlining and blockbusting, Blair asserts that "the extent to which they actually affect neighborhoods is unknown" (247); similarly, he argues that using filtering to improve low-income housing conditions may be at least as effective as addressing those conditions directly. After reading this text, thoughtful novices may doubt the merits of any government intervention in the workings of urban employment, land, and housing markets.

As a quantitative methods text, the book has other shortcomings. Blair does a good job of describing and critiquing a wide range of analytical tools and makes effective use of simple, hypothetical examples. This works well for tools such as location quotients and shift and share analysis. In the interest of accessibility, however, Blair assumes a minimal mathematical background that is inadequate for more sophisticated techniques. Descriptions of econometric models without reference to regression, or input-output models without reference to matrix algebra, are necessarily general and non-operational. (One might also question their inclusion in a book on local economic development, when their usefulness is principally regional.) Also, there is little discussion of data sources for any of the techniques, a deficit that most methods instructors would feel compelled to remedy.

Finally, as a text on the practice of economic development, the subject of many useful, recent books (such as Blakely 1994), Local Economic Development suffers from problems of organization and emphasis. The book focuses on how economics can inform economic development practice, not on practice itself. Although the book addresses what practitioners do and why they do it, much of that material is imbedded in Blair’s discussion of the underlying economics. For instance, "fiscal improvement," the primary motivation for economic development programs in many cities, doesn’t surface until Chapter 8, and tax incremental financing, the leading financial tool for economic development in California, receives a single brief mention in Chapter 11.

Another problem with the text as a guide to practice is a failure to distinguish local, regional, and federal points of view. A discussion of optimal city size, for instance, or of leading economic indicators (both of which Blair addresses) has few implications for most local practitioners. On the other hand, federal, state, and judicial mandates are presented parochially, as impositions that increase the cost of local government. The absence of a consistent or clearly identified point of view may confuse some students.

Finally, there is the issue of the degree to which academic economics is relevant to economic development practice. Blair’s view seems to be that academic economics is not currently relevant, but could and should be, that a better understanding of basic economics would help remedy existing inefficient programs and reduce a current oversubsidization of the market for jobs. At a dozen points in his book, however, Blair points out the limitations of economic theory in understanding economic development, and it is those limitations that may seem most pronounced to practitioners. Implicit in Blair’s disclaimers is an understanding of economic development as a subset of broader, more comprehensive community development, building on social and political as well as economic perspectives, but it is unclear from this book that many other academic economists hold that view. Given that there is little new material in this book, and that the "relevance gap" has been around for years, one wonders to what extent the gap springs from the failure of mainstream economics to capture what is really happening in communities.

References