JPER, Volume 16, Number 3, Spring 1997: Book Reviews

A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area

Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss

Washington, D. C. : Island Press

1996. 265 pages. $35. 00 (PB).

Los Angeles Citywide General Plan Framework: A Citywide Long Range Comprehensive Strategy.

Envicom Corp. for Los Angeles City Planning Department

1996. Length unavailable. $13 (PB).

Available from: Publications Division, Los Angeles City Planning Department, 221 North Figueroa, suite 1650-A, Los Angeles, CA 90012; Tel. (213) 580-5249.

Greater Toronto Area Task Force

Toronto, Ontario: Queen’s Printer for Ontario

1996. 269 pages. Can$25. 00 plus GST (PB)

Available from: Publications Ontario, 50 Grosvenor Street, Toronto, Ontario M7A 1N8; Tel. (416) 326-5300, Fax (416) 326-5317.

Review by Seymour J Mandelbaum

Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

This is my third foray into reading plans in public. In my first venture, I described how I read the newly published plan for Philadelphia’s Center City (Mandelbaum 1990). Though I did not recognize their provenance clearly when I wrote the essay, I later came to understand that the interpretive practices I sketched were connected to my personal engagement in the text. I fussed over The Plan for Center City with a series of overlapping reading tactics because it would affect my life directly and because, as a resident of Philadelphia, I was (in some vague way) in complicity in the Plan and, therefore, morally obligated to form an opinion about it.

My sense of the political urgency that informed "Reading Plans" was only articulated when I began to think about a second essay, "Reading Old Plans. "I read old plans for several different reasons: to bowdlerize them, to stigmatize them as obsolete, to create or sustain a tradition, or to reconstruct the worlds in which they were launched. My reading practices are adapted to those different purposes though they share a set of stylized concerns. I worry over the ways in which the meanings of (sometimes quite ordinary) terms change, my ignorance of the intertextual setting of an old plan, and my vulnerability to the authority of authors. (In the here and now, in contrast, I am imperiously confident of my communicative competence and my ability to detect and, if need be, resist an idealized role in which the authors have cast me. ) While I don’t entirely put aside the interpretive probes of the citizen reader, their urgency is diminished. I am not (even vaguely) responsible for these old plans and my approval or disapproval will not change their implementation by one iota. Retrospectively, the construction of the implementation narrative in the text is much less interesting than the history of implementation and obsolescence on the ground (Mandelbaum 1993).

This third foray, opportunistically embracing a request to review plans from Los Angeles, the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area (hereafter "New York"), and the Greater Toronto Area ("Toronto") extends the typology in my mind: these plans are current but they are not from my city or region. Political distance does not, of course, require a whole new kit of reading practices. As stakeholders in the system of cities, as migrants and potential migrants, and as members of far-flung networks of friend and kin, each of us may engage a distant city’s plan with the same critical apparatus as the resident.

I choose here, however, to read as a member of a set of overlapping and sometimes fractious communities of professional planners and urbanists extending across political spaces and policy domains. These communities inform and discipline tacit and local knowledge by articulating broad representations of the planning environment and principled conceptions of good practice. There is, of course, an inevitable tension between explicit and tacit talk and between local and cosmopolitan knowledge. When the members of these extended communities of planners act locally in settings rich with implicit meanings and discursive constraints, they must find a way to reconcile this tension. I’ve read these three plans with an eye searching for the modes of reconciliation; more concerned with the norms of discourse than with the cogency or feasibility of any particular component of the plans.

At one extreme, planners may resolve the tension by completely subordinating "what everyone knows around here" to cosmopolitan concerns; at the other, by so fully adopting local discursive norms that they violate the moral obligations of the extended communities. As you might expect, none of these three plans is written in an extreme mode. They occupy, however, quite different places in the middle ground. The authors of the New York and Toronto plans are engaged by great cosmopolitan themes in contemporary planning debates: the global economy, regionalism, cultural diversity, immigration, institutional competence, privatization, fiscal federalism, and the reconciliation of economic growth, environmental protection, and equity. (The French version of Greater Toronto is au courant even in its title: La Nouvelle Ville-Region De Toronto. ) On all these matters, the Los Angeles text is remarkably silent, even though in other settings Los Angeles’ voices and images radiate through those debates. (This review was written in the same week as the New York Times published a two-part series on development patterns in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, and Denver. In each of those areas Los Angeles frequently appears as the negative referent: the city we do not want to be. )

The Los Angeles plan, read in a late but not quite final draft, is silent in another way. The New York and Toronto authors reflect on past failures, argue against opposing views, explain their compromises, and struggle in a world of well-articulated and (almost certainly) persistent conflict. Though I am not always persuaded, I sense that the authors are attempting to reason with their readers: to draw them out of their ordinary selves and their conventional narratives. In contrast, the Los Angeles plan is obscure. Its guiding principle, as I read the draft, is that nothing will be done in a district that violates the preferences of district representatives on city council or the will of local planning boards. In contrast to the elaborate treatment of institutional designs in the New York and Toronto plans, this design is unexamined and unjustified. (That is not to say that it is wrong; only that the plan does not recognize a major institutional practice and give reasons for and against it. ) There is very little substantive meat on a plan that is principally an inventory of technical reports yet to be written. What little there is, notably to promote economic development and protect "single family neighborhoods" (meaning, I assume, zones of buildings occupied by only one family at a time) from denser land use initiatives, conveys no sense of policies designed in a pluralistic arena, of risks addressed, or reasons offered and denied. Even as technicians, the authors are equivocal, unable to decide whether the city is at the beginning of a long decline in population or poised for a sharp increase and, in practice, unwilling to teach the reader how to deal "strategically" with such stark uncertainties. In the same way, the larger region, with three times the population of the city, is a bloodless shadow that cannot be understood as either adversary or collaborator.

Three plans does not a theory make, but I suspect (he says cautiously) that the differences between these texts rest somewhere in the intersection of stable institutional designs and shifting rhetorical moments. The Los Angeles Citywide General Plan Framework is a product of a legal mandate to prepare a comprehensive, long-term general plan that purports to guide future development. The process was initiated without provocation; without an unsettling sense in the political classes (to use an old-fashioned term) that something was terribly wrong and must be remedied. With no pressing crisis, the terms of the California mandate and the rhetoric of professional planning combined to obscure conflict, and to push conflictual issues such as taxation, governance, immigration, and welfare outside the arena of comprehensive planning.

In contrast, both the New York and Toronto plans began with considerable disquietude in those classes. The central cities of the two regions had both come back only slowly from the last recession. The loss of manufacturing jobs continued, and it was not clear whether the regions could retain their global status without that base. Continued deconcentration of population threatened fragile environments and vital natural resources while imposing overwhelming burdens on the public purse. The tax system could not create revenue streams that were widely understood as both fair and as adequate to collective needs and demands.

Any plan that responded to such perceptions was launched into a sea of contesting claims. Even the least persuasive portions of A Region at Risk , the self-serving praise of the region’s special genius, the weakly argued analysis of the national stake in New York’s primacy, and the dire choice between growth and crumbling decline, provoke counter-arguments that cannot be avoided. Greater Toronto seeks such major changes in taxation and political boundaries that its instant success would be remarkable: It is not so much a plan as an expedition intended to reframe political arguments and set discursive standards that inhibit the expression of self-serving hostility against the metropolitan center.

I do not know whether a similar sense of crisis in Los Angeles might have produced an open, argumentative text rather than one that is obscure and defensive. Without that sense, however, the process of plan writing seems to have assured the rhetorical and, I suspect, substantive strategic banality of the Framework. The text was prepared for the Los Angeles City Planning Department by the Envicom Corporation in association with thirteen consulting firms, then approved by the planning commission and submitted to a committee of city council for close review before going to the council as a whole for approval. I suspect that planning within that complex setting made argumentative candor a difficult standard to maintain. Indeed, on shakier grounds, I wonder whether it made it difficult to develop a richly conceived and broadly shared sense of the state and prospects of the city and of serious strategic options.

Greater Toronto was the product of a quite different political process. It was prepared by an ad hoc task force of five distinguished citizens commissioned by the Premier of Ontario to address the sense of institutional and fiscal malaise. (Readers who participated in the Toronto ACSP/AESOP meeting may remember the compelling presentation of the plan by Anne Golden, chair of the task force. ) A short life, a powerful client, and a confident sense of a politically sophisticated audience shaped a text that is the most public of any in this trio, even to the provision of submissions and background papers in a CD-ROM format, the most intellectually and politically demanding, and (it almost certainly follows) paradoxically the most narrowly accessible.

The title page of A Region at Risk lists two authors and an organization, the RPA. However they managed their relations, the repeated "we" in the text speaks with an identifiable voice. The text is a "private" plan but that rubric does not capture the differences between the Regional Plan Association and the Los Angeles Department of City Planning or the city council. Like the public agencies and legislatures, RPA is deeply concerned with "political realities. " The plan, for example, seeks to sustain and enrich current inter-jurisdictional links without promoting a new (and deeply threatening) form of metropolitan governance. The central image of the compatibility of environmental, economic and equity goals is an attempt to create a political coalition that spans ordinary interest divisions.

What distinguishes the RPA is not its private character but its sense of an identity that stretches over time: It invented the region and it is not going to allow it to decline without a struggle. A Region at Risk is a plan for five "campaigns" (designated as "greensward," "centers," "mobility," "workforce," and "governance") and a promise to persist in them over the long haul. The plan is a guide to those campaigns and a resource for the RPA campaigners. (For a sense of the campaign in progress, check the RPA homepage: http://maestro. com/~rpa/rpa. html. ) While the text is studded with particular schemes, at the end they all appear as illustrative and educational, allowing political and civic leaders to practice a region-regarding sensibility, rather than necessary. The success or failure of the RPA effort will not be measured on a checklist but in a record of the ways in which its symbolic hero, The Region, is realized in planning practices within those complex fields that link jurisdictions, agencies, and communities.

What distinguishes the Los Angeles and New York texts is the absence in the "public" Framework of an abiding planning identity, a concern with institutions, and a belief in the possibilities of education.

Author’s Note: Dowell Myers shared several of his papers on immigration in Los Angeles with me and confirmed that my reading of the Los Angeles plan was not an East Coast fantasy.

References

Mandelbaum, Seymour J. 1990. Reading plans. Journal of the American Planning Association 59: 350-356.

Mandelbaum, Seymour J. 1993. Reading old plans. Journal of Policy History 5: 189-198. Reprinted in Urban Public Policy: Historical Modes & Methods, ed. , Martin V. Melosi. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 189-198.

Exploring Uran America: An Introductory Reader

Roger W. Caves, editor

Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications

1995. 499 pages. $58. 00 (HB), $27. 50 (PB)

Readings in Urban Theory

Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell, editors

Cambridge, Massachusetts:Blackwell Publishers

1996. 435 pages. $69. 95 (HB), $24. 95 (PB)

Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times

Philip Kasinitz, editor

London: Macmillan

1995. 470 pages. $50. 00 (HB), $17. 50 (PB)

The City Reader

Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, editors

London: Routledge

1996. 506 pages. $74. 95 (HB), $24. 95 (PB)

Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, editors

Oxford: Blackwell Publishers

1995. 264 pages. $57. 95 (HB), $22. 95 (PB).

Review by Robert A. Beauregard, Professor

Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy

New School for Social Research, New York

When manuevers to occupy the center or to re-draw the boundaries of an academic discipline cease, the discipline is effectively dead. Such actions are part of the robust intellectual debate that confers prestige and scholarly rewards and that marks a discipline as healthy.

In this light, collections of readings are both intellectual and political projects, particularly so when they wrap themselves in the global concepts of the discipline. By selecting specific readings, by highlighting certain theoretical arguments and relegating others to the shadows, collections crystallize the contest for scholarly dominance. Consequently, they signal either the continued hegemony or the impending decline of particular theorists, researchers, and texts.

Taking such an institutional perspective, this review explores the extent to which these five collections signal their political intent. Rather than commenting on the quality of the readings and each collection’s inclusivity, I am more interested in whether they assert the existence of a foundational literature (i. e. , a canon), the degree to which they consider the city a viable theoretical or practical object, and whether or not they portray the discipline as robust. Of the five collections under review, The City Reader makes the most explicit and boldest political claims. The editors write that their collection "brings together the very best on the city. " The readings are described as classic, essential, and enduring. The goal is to "expose students to great scholarship. " The endorsements use such phrases as "basic text," "authoritative," and "definitively complete reader. " One blurb notes the "wise selection of ageless scholarship" and offers the book as an indicator that urban studies has "come of age. "

In addition, the editors fix the boundaries of the discipline. Through the use of prefaces, each chapter is related to the basic questions that have perplexed the discipline’s practitioners and connected to the writings of other scholars and researchers. The author’s scholarly output is also noted. In this way, the reader is exposed to seminal readings and key debates and made aware of the intellectual breadth and depth of urban studies. Designed for students, The City Reader presents them with an urban canon.

The contrast with Metropolis is striking. The editor’s claim here is unassuming and simple: this is "a book of readings about the modern city. " The fact that it addresses a crucial contemporary issue, the changing nature of social life in the metropolis, serves as its justification. The writings that comprise the collection are not characterized as classic or "best and new. " Although sections of the book are introduced with short essays that frame the debates, no mention is made of the intellectual lineage of the authors. Self-confident, the editor’s intentions remain implicit.

Between these two poles sit the other three collections. Exploring Urban America is closest to the political intent of The City Reader. The City Reader, though, is focused on the theoretical underpinnings of urban studies, whereas Exploring Urban America is more interested in urban problems, with sections on housing, community development, education, and economic development among others. Like The City Reader, it is an "introductory" text and, like a basic reader, each group of chapters is prefaced by an essay that places the chapters in the context of current debates and suggests further readings.

Exploring Urban America is unique in its selection of articles. Only readings from journals published by Sage Publications were used. This obviously prevents the editor from touting the book as a "true" survey of the field.

Readings in Urban Theory and Postmodern Cities and Spaces take political economy and postmodernism, respectively, as their terrains, and are not presented as surveys of the field or compilations of canonical writings. Instead, they are alternatives to the mainstream.

The Fainstein and Campbell collection offers a set of readings that reflects theoretically on the key dimensions of recent urban restructuring in the U. S. and Western Europe. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that one of my publications appears in this collection. ) Unlike The City Reader and Metropolis, which draw on articles from across the 20th century, Readings in Urban Theory confines itself to those written after 1980, as does Exploring Urban America. It offers an historically specific literature addressing contemporary urban issues. Consequently, it makes no concerted move to connect to an enduring intellectual project.

Readings in Urban Theory is meant for theorists and policymakers, but its policy contribution is quite unlike that presented in Exploring Urban America. The readings reflect on policy from a broad theoretical perspective. The focus is neither specific urban problems nor governmental programs but the consequences of collective and institutional interventions in urban restructuring. Although the readings address the "fundamental underpinnings" of urban theory, and thus draw an "essential" status from such a connection, the editors do not declare this to be a definitive collection, only a useful one.

Postmodern Cities and Spaces treats these political issues much differently. Arguing that cities are too complex and unstable to tame or synthesize, the editors reject "boundary-making" and any attempt to define or adjudicate what a postmodern (or any) approach to the city might be. The collection is meant to be open-ended rather than closed and complete. The highly contested nature of the city, and knowledge generally, make unequivocal statements, comprehensive collections, and the declaration of a canon highly suspect.

Watson and Gibson’s introductory essay does not draw connections to related readings or, as did The City Reader, note what status the authors have in the discipline. The intent is to avoid the tyranny of essential readings and a false sense of conceptual control.

By contrast, the other collections exhibit little skepticism about the knowledge we have of the city. Instead, as part of a move to establish the city’s legitimacy as an intellectual object, they assume a tight epistemic correspondence between the city and knowledge of the city. Watson and Gibson, on the other hand, are seemingly unconcerned with this issue. Yet, their denial of the legibility of the city is also a dismissal of non-postmodern approaches and thus itself a political move toward displacement and dominance.

Unlike The City Reader and Metropolis, then, Postmodern Cities and Spaces and Exploring Urban America are agnostic on the existence of an urban canon. Neither one includes or references foundational readings. The latter trades relevance for the weight of intellectual history and the former looks outside the discipline to Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard for basic ideas. In the urban problems literature, it is not ideas that form the canon but the enduring litany of socioeconomic problems. In postmodernism, an urban canon can only be derivative.

Even if a theoretical object exists and a canon can be identified, a collection of readings will be less well-received if the field itself has become moribund. The presence of new and interesting work that challenges dominant paradigms and opens new avenues of research signifies an intellectually vital and contested discipline.

All of the collections under review believe this to be true of urban studies. The City Reader, and less so Metropolis, place the field’s current vitality in an historical context, that is, as part of a continuation of a long 20th century fascination with the city and a relentless re-thinking of how it is to be understood. The implication is that the progressive elaboration of knowledge will continue.

Readings in Urban Theory and Exploring Urban America use relevance rather than history to demonstrate robustness. Postmodern Cities and Spaces ostensibly takes the position that urban theory is healthy because it is subversive.

As important, then, as what the readings in these collections say about the city is what these collections say about the socio-politics of urban studies. Neither space nor discretion, however, will allow a serious assessment here. Rather, my goal has been to show such collections in a different light so that as we contemplate their purchase or course adoption, we reflect also on how such decisions reproduce the city.

Seymour J. Mandelbaum, Luigi Mazza, and Robert W. Burchell, Editors.

New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, Center for Urban Policy Research 1996, 543 pages, $44. 95 (HB) $21. 95 (PB)

Scott Campbell and Susan Fainstein, Editors.

Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell

1996, 543 pages, $26. 95 (PB)

Review by Linda C. Dalton

Interim Associate Provost for Institutional Planning

and Professor of City and Regional Planning

California Polytechnic State University

San Luis Obispo, California

How should planning educators respond to the two planning theory collections that appeared in 1996? How can planning theorists incorporate this material into existing conceptual frameworks? How do these works challenge us, offering novel perspectives and structures? How can planning educators use the collections for instruction?

In Explorations in Planning Theory, Beauregard cites historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. : "[a] well-marked anthology functions in the academy to create a tradition, as well as to define and preserve it" (105). The editors of both volumes aspire to the first role.

Mandelbaum describes Explorations in Planning Theory as a set of essays that "capture . . . the talk of the community writing in English about planning theory" (p. xi). He stresses the importance of "writ[ing] in a community of active readers that is sustained by the creation of new texts and the maintenance of old ones" (p. xvi). The editors see Explorations as a complement, although not a sequel, to Planning Theory in the 1980’s (Burchell and Sternlieb 1978).

Readings in Planning Theory appears to be less ambitious. Nevertheless, Campbell and Fainstein have a clear purpose in selecting readings that address: "What role can planning play in developing the city and region within the constraints of a capitalist political economy and a democratic political system?" (11). This approach parallels the editors’ companion, Readings in Urban Theory (1996), which similarly addresses questions about the social, political, economic, and spatial context of urban policy.

Explorations presents much previously unpublished material with explanatory introductions and rich commentaries, while Readings reprints selected chapters and articles with only brief introductory comments to each section. Both sets of editors set the tone for their collections in thoughtful introductory essays. As a collection intended to stimulate discussion among scholars, Explorations contains more contemporary and abstract pieces, which are not as accessible to master’s or undergraduate students or to lay readers who do not follow theoretical developments in planning or related fields. In contrast, Readings is clearly marketed as a textbook, so the editors have selected some chapters and articles originally published as long ago as 35 years (although most are from the 1980s and early 1990s) to develop their case regarding the role of planning.

Intellectual Contributions

Through careful selection and organization, the editors of a collection offer a conceptual framework to the reader. But such a structure is also a potential weakness because by packaging a set of articles the collection implicitly defines the field. Thus, the publication can deny the continuous creative dialog that explores the edges of the field and expands its boundaries.

In this regard Explorations faces a more serious challenge than Readings because of its explicit purpose of stimulating discourse ("active reading"). Ironically, the volume was initiated almost a decade before being published, drawing from conferences in 1987 and 1991. While the authors revised earlier versions of their papers, the real discourse continued unabated. Indeed, advances in thinking about communicative practice in planning outstripped the pace of book publication, with commentators like Beauregard turning to recent journal articles for confirmation of these intellectual developments (105).

As a result, Explorations is more effective at capturing and archiving a state of discourse in planning theory than at setting the stage for discussion because planning theorists find more time-sensitive ways to "writ[e] in public" (xv). Nevertheless, planning educators and doctoral students not so close to the center of the dialog will find the collection particularly useful in tracing and documenting recent discussions of communicative action and practice in planning theory. Further, by making sense of a decade of work, Explorations offers an interpretation based on interactions among the authors and commentators that is more ordered and sophisticated than a reader could obtain by tracking the earlier versions through conference papers and disparate publications. While one might wonder whether a timely review article could do the same, a collection offers the advantage of compiling the articles and commentary.

"Designing a Domain for Planning Theory" opens the volume ambitiously, reprinting Friedmann’s intellectual overview (1987). Then, Alexander and Faludi reassess the role of rationality in planning, and Hoch and Mandelbaum discuss power and community in planning. Beauregard appropriately interprets this section as setting the stage for the emergence of communicative action as the dominant paradigm (recognized as well by Innes, 1995).

"The Latitude of Planners" introduces institutional and structural constraints in which planning operates in different societies. While most of the entries are sobering, Innes’ analysis of growth management cases also illustrates potential openings for planners to attain results through group processes.

Next, the editors submit several analyses of planning practice, demonstrating the fundamentally communicative, behavioral, and judgmental dimensions of professional work and the importance of reflection to the improvement of practice. In this context, both Forester and Hoch include stories that raise some considerations of race in planning; and Hillier argues for gender-sensitive planning that "aim[s] at radical restructuring of power relations within the planning process" (295). Hillier’s criticism of the discourse in plans sets the stage for the next section, "The Status and Use of Knowledge," where additional cases explore planning rhetoric. In particular, Baum asks communicative theorists to consider the implications of their preferences for abstract analyses, even as they try to reconcile the messy world of politics and planning. Flyvbjerg’s closing commentary underscores the likelihood of distortion, even deception, in the telling of planners’ stories, as the theorist selects what to report. (Forester’s final chapter in Campbell and Fainstein’s Readings offers a complementary perspective for interpreting planners’ experiences. )

Next, Hendler, Harper and Stein, and Mandelbaum struggle with the definition and application of ethics to planning situations. While each takes a different approach, all attempt to find some common ground to guide practice. In his commentary, Verma sees "professional ethics [as] a synthesizing function" (453), particularly as a counterbalance to postmodern claims of incommensurability.

Finally, "Designing Planning Processes" returns to some of the structural issues raised in the second section of the book, but with a more explicit focus on how planners not only work effectively within existing institutions, but actually shape them constructively. Bryson and Crosby, and Bolan are particularly energetic in suggesting how to make change, including even "responsible scheming" (516) to advance planning processes and ends.

Overall, Explorations offers a wide variety of approaches to linking theory and practice, knowledge and action, structure and agency; at times acknowledging the issues and constraints on practice, at others becoming more optimistic, especially through consensus-building and communicative action. The volume not only offers new insights, but several authors and commentators simultaneously challenge these emerging views, reflective of the dialog in which they are engaged.

Pedagogical Implications

Teachers of planning theory can use a monograph or collection in two ways: The instructor can construct her own framework, and draw from books as well as other sources to cover the desired topics. Alternatively, she can follow the implicit course outline embodied in the table of contents of a collection. The editors save the instructor the trouble of following the literature closely and of obtaining permission to reproduce photocopies in "course packs. " The endurance of the 1973 Faludi Reader offers ample evidence of the value of this convenience (Klosterman 1992).

However, by reducing a series of articles to a common typescript and format, a collection removes them from their origins. Worse, citations henceforth refer to the year of the edited collection, not the date of original publication. As a result, students can easily overlook the context in which an author wrote an article or chapter.

Selection and disembodiment are more important issues for Readings than Explorations, primarily because the editors and commentators of Explorations provide the context for that collection and I expect it to be used by doctoral students and other scholars. On the other hand, Readings is likely to replace Faludi’s 1973 collection as the text for graduate (and perhaps undergraduate) planning theory classes for the next decade or so. This potentially wide usage occasions close scrutiny of this collection. I proceed with a review of its approach and contents, suggesting some complementary material, and later address other issues about what the collection does and does not encompass.

Campbell and Fainstein organize Readings to fit their explicit focus on the role of planning within capitalism and democracy. They use the sequence and selection of contributors to build their case for a critical perspective about planning: The opening "Foundations" section features excerpts from critics Jane Jacobs and Richard Sennett, following reviews of the seminal work of Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Daniel Burnham. Klosterman’s overview of "Justifications" for planning introduces the second section, which also covers Marxist and postmodern critiques.

Under "Planning Types" Campbell and Fainstein replace common material about procedural theory and its emphasis on rational decision-making with a section on alternative approaches to planning. The lead chapter is an important revision of Susan and Norman Fainstein’s 1971 "City Planning and Political Values. " This section also features Davidoff’s classic on advocacy planning. Checkoway’s 1994 retrospective would be complementary. Also, Healey’s discussion of "the communicative turn" fits better here than earlier with the "Justifications. " Campbell and Fainstein reprint Lindblom’s original 1959 article about "muddling through. " I disagree that the 1979 update is too complex (262); and would include it for completeness. Similarly, Forester’s explication of bounded rationality is helpful to this discussion (1984). (Further, chapters by Alexander, Faludi, and Baum in Explorations, and Baum 1996 suggest why planners remain interested in rationality. )

Next, Campbell and Fainstein take the refreshing step of including a small set of practice cases in a theory reader. Combined with Krumholz’ reflections on equity planning (in the previous section), these discussions of local economic development planning, London’s motorways, and the Port Authority of New York provide a context for understanding the politics of planning. This selection is convenient for instruction, especially as other cases can require reading entire volumes, e. g. , Jacobs (1980), Krumholz and Forester (1990). (See also Dalton 1989 for other case material; and contrast the selection of cases in Explorations. )

"A Discussion on Gender" represents another innovation in Readings. However, the very shortness of these pieces, previously published in the International Planning Theory Newsletter, limits their authors’ ability to explore the richness of feminist analyses as applied to planning. Students without any background in feminist literature need supplementary material to fully engage in this discussion, available in other work by the same authors: Ritzdorf (1994), Milroy (1991), Sandercock and Forsyth (1992). Also, the appearance of the gender section implicitly makes one wonder why issues of race are never directly addressed in Readings, despite the editors’ clear concern with social and economic issues (e. g. , p. 149). While Fainstein and Campbell’s companion volume addresses racial issues in the city, including Mier, Grigsby, and Cordova (1994) would challenge myths of racial neutrality for planners as professionals (as does Hillier for gender in Explorations). Checkoway, Potukuchi, and Finn (1995), Liggett (1991), Sandercock (1995), and Tett and Wolfe (1991) would represent other voices.

Readings concludes with a section on ethics and practice. Forester’s advice on how to learn from planners’ stories underscores the importance of experience to theory. The remainder of the section is disappointing. First, Lucy critiques the American Planning Association’s statement of ethical principles prior to its revision and incorporation with the American Institute of Certified Planners’ Code of Ethics (1992). While many of the comments still apply, readers cannot easily trace them directly to the present language in the codes. Also, while environmental values certainly resonate with many contemporary planners, this section suffers from the limited attention to diverse perspectives already noted. Why not address the Yonkers case for its ethical dilemmas (Feld 1989), or include some of Howe’s empirical work on values and ethics (1994; Howe and Kaufman 1979, 1981)? Elsewhere Hendler (1994) and Spain (1995) link feminism with ethics, and, as noted above, the chapters on ethics in Explorations offer a broader assessment of how professional ethics serve planning.

In addition to considering how to supplement Campbell and Fainstein’s Readings as designed, one can consider other planning theory topics the book might address. Campbell and Fainstein’s selections do not readily correspond with some of the topics Klosterman found most commonly taught during the 1980s. I have already noted their consciously different approach to procedural planning theory. In addition, for all the editors’ interest in the role of planning as a form of intervention, Campbell and Fainstein do not include any contributions about social change, a criticism Bolan levied at planning theory courses in 1981, which has not been remedied (Klosterman 1992).

Similarly, Campbell and Fainstein do not incorporate other aspects of professional behavior in their material about what planners do, communicating, mediating and negotiating, advising, analyzing, plan-making, working in public organizations, exercising political influence. Only Healey’s and Forester’s chapters hint at these. One needs to turn to other work, such as Explorations; or other writing by Baum (1990), Checkoway (1986), Forester (1989, 1993), Hoch (1994), or Innes (1995) to expand on these aspects of practice.

Indeed, identifying these omissions reminds us that Campbell and Fainstein envision planning theory as focusing on the role of planning as an institution; while Mandelbaum, Mazza and Burchell conceive planning theory as stressing planners as individual professionals, what Friedmann calls theory about good practice (1995). Thus, just as Hightower (1969) and Klosterman (1981, 1992) found wide differences in planning theory courses, a single collection is unlikely to satisfy expectations for what one might teach.

In sum, Explorations and Readings fill complementary needs in the planning literature. Explorations documents and advances the discussion about communicative planning practice, while Readings establishes the basis for a critical, institutional perspective on planning as part of any planning theory class. Both volumes should see wide use and stimulate further discourse among planning theorists and educators.

References

American Institute of Certified Planners/American Planning Association. 1992. Ethical Principles in Planning and AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

Baum, H. S. 1990. Organizational Membership: Personal Development in the Workplace. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Baum, H. S. 1996. Why the rational paradigm persists: tales from the field. Journal of Planning Education and Research 15 (2):127-35.

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Burchell, R. W. and G. Sternlieb, eds. 1978. Planning Theory in the 1980’s: A Search for Future Directions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, Center for Urban Policy Research.

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Margaret Crawford

London and New York: Verso

1995, 248 pages, $19. 95 (PB).

Review by Terry Plater

Graduate architect, visiting assistant professor

City and Regional Planning

Cornell University

Margaret Crawford’s Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns is a comprehensive study of the evolution of this distinctive urban form over some 150 years (1790-1940). The book traces the planning of company towns from its beginnings as a vernacular building activity to its culmination as professional design task, and explicitly locates the design of such towns within the social and economic constraints that existed at the time. Crawford portrays the company town as the product of dynamic and specific processes, such as welfare capitalism, industrial transformation, class struggle, and the efforts of reformers to control and direct the effects of those forces in significant years of this country’s history.

Crawford defines the company town as "a community inhabited chiefly by the employees of a single company or group of companies which also owns a substantial part of the real estate and houses" (1). This distinguishes the company towns of Margaret Crawford’s analysis from other uses of the term: locales with a dominant industry such as Detroit and Washington, D. C. , privately developed industrial communities that depended on a single employer, or the set of experimental and communitarian settlements based on industry economically but developed separately from industrial facilities. To the satisfaction of the curious reader, a surprisingly large number of cases fit this deceptively narrow definition. Crawford documents the first company town in America (established by the Braintree Iron Works in 1645) and the first American model town (proposed by Alexander Hamilton in 1792). She covers settlements as distinct as the towns of Pullman, Illinois, George Pullman’s 1883 answer to the growing rift between capital and labor; Indian Hill in Worcester, Massachusetts, designed by Grosvenor Atterbury for the Norton Company as an early (1915) corporate attempt to modernize industrial life; Tyrone, New Mexico, the picturesque mining town designed by Bertram Goodhue for the Phelps-Dodge Copper Company (also 1915); and Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority (1932), planned by Earle Draper in what was "the most ambitious claim of public control over private territory in the nation’s history" (195).

Crawford’s goal for this work is "to bridge the gap between those who look at the company town as a physical environment and those who address its economic, labor, and social aspects" (4). In pursuit of that goal, she divides the book into two sections of five or four chapters. The first describes the transformations of the industrial landscape into the "new" company town (quotation marks hers) marked by the dramatic conflicts of a fully capitalist economy. The second presents detailed studies of four designers of "new" company towns. These designers (Grosvenor Atterbury, Bertram Goodhue, John Nolen, and Earle S. Draper) represent the three design professions that built company towns across America: architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning.

Building the Workingman’s Paradise falls logically into the broad category of work that investigates the relationship of housing type, or form, and social practice. Since 1980, that work has included studies focusing on the domestic workplace such as New Space for Women (Wekerle 1980), The Grand Domestic Revolution and Redesigning the American Dream (Hayden 1981, 1984), as well as those treating the social history of housing with a broad and effective brush, of which Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Wright 1981) is an outstanding example. Ideologically, Building the Workingman’s Paradise refers to an intellectual territory bracketed by such classic works as Gottdiener’s The Social Production of Urban Space (1985) and Logan and Molotch’s Urban Fortunes (1987) both of which articulate important contradictions in the political economy of space.

Like those works, this is the product of a fluid mind, one which, by drawing the reader’s attention to details that normally fall into several discrete areas of study, sheds light on the subtleties of complex social and artistic processes. Margaret Crawford in an accomplished scholar, and Building the Workingman’s Paradise is a well researched and articulate book, soundly conceived and ambitious in its mission. Reconfirming the value of (photo) archival research, the text is full of drawings and photographs that satisfy the designer’s appetite for visual information. It is also well positioned to challenge the imagination of the social theorist or critic unfamiliar with the analytical potential in the study of built environments.

However, several shortcomings, harmless in their singular presence, combined to distract this reader from the overall effectiveness of the work. In the introduction, Crawford emphasizes her intention to produce a work that is both comprehensive and critical. This sets up the reader to expect more than a nod to the task of reconciling equity issues with aesthetics. Yet wherever one hopes to find a structured and structural critique of, say, social process as expressed in urban form, one finds only a gesture in that direction. Moreover, in its introductory attempts to be thorough in elucidating the challenges posed to social theory (or to design), language is invoked abstractly as an instrument of an analysis that is not forthcoming. Consequently, the written text is, in places, more exacting than informative. Finally, the author seems to have missed the opportunity to confront the contradictions in a world of work, and time in American history, characterized by egregious racial segregation and ethnic discrimination (as well as class division and gender bias), all of which had profound effects on the social and aesthetic economy. The book takes only dispassionate notice of discrimination and segregation as constituent factors of the local and national economy: "In Tennessee and Alabama . . . a large local supply of black workers enabled employers to offer low wages and poor housing . . . " (30); and " . . . like all of US Steel’s housing projects, Fairfield was restricted to skilled workers who could afford to purchase houses, for US Steel had no interest in housing lower paid, mostly black, and recent immigrant workers who were forced to rent accommodations in neighboring towns, such as Ensley, which Graham Taylor compared to an industrial barracks" (85). My reading of this book was bracketed by two relevant personal events, my first trip to South Africa and my finding the Maryland plantation where my ancestors were probably enslaved during a time period covered in Crawford’s book. These events made me keenly aware f something that this competent book starts to describe but fails to fully express: the peculiar nature of places that, in pursuit of progress and development, are at once beautiful and terrifying.

Building the Workingman’s Paradise reaches a comfortable rhythm, and even a vitality, only in the sections that deal more traditionally with the conventional domain of architectural history. Those sections, and the story of the evolution of the professions, when seen through the lens of this urban form, make for compelling reading. In those sections, and fortunately, they make up most of the book, the writing is complete and fulfilling. Whether detailing incidents such as the Ludlow Massacre, which focused national attention on living and working conditions in the isolated company town (81), or describing Goodhue’s preoccupation with exotic imagery in the design of the model mining town (143), Crawford works the more and less familiar details of history so well that the reader releases the book from the demands it has made on itself to be (or to need to be) more than a thoughtful and studied chronicle.

Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns responds to a passion for architectural knowledge, an appreciation for case studies, and a respect for work that bridges disciplinary perspectives. When Margaret Crawford began this study some years ago, it was her doctoral dissertation. Read during its evolution by noted scholars in several subdisciplines, the book was in part to counter the overspecialized studies [of company towns] that characterize the current literature. While it courageously takes on that challenge and draws on a wider range of material than a narrow study, it fails to weave the separate areas of knowledge together into a seamless whole. It is, however, a welcome addition to an area that needs wider acknowledgment. It will be useful to researchers in architecture and planning history who depend on comprehensive and precise treatments of the built environment and of this urban form in particular; to educators who might use sections of the text to develop a comprehension of a subject area as well as a research style in students; and to social theorists who might, in the references Crawford makes to the tension between equity and aesthetics, find ammunition for future investigations.

References

Gottdiener, M. 1985. The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas.

Hayden, D. 1984. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

Hayden, D. 1981. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Logan, J. and H. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California.

Wekerle, G. , et al. 1980. New Space for Women. Boulder: Westview.

Wright, G. 1981. Building the American Dream A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, Editors

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

1996. 594 pages. $55. 00 (HB), $24. 95 (PB).

Review by Marsha Ritzdorf

Professor, Urban Affairs and Planning Department

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

I am a strong believer that in the roots of the past lies guidance for the future. Therefore, each new addition to the lexicon of planning history excites me with its potential to help inform the challenging questions and answers we face in planning and policy making. Planning the Twentieth-Century City is a valuable addition to the planning history literature that can be drawn on by student, faculty, and practitioners to elucidate many contemporary problems. The volume adds many interesting new accounts to the traditional readings in planning history. It is most valuable, however, to the reader who already is familiar with the planning profession’s evolution in the U. S. ; it does not provide any framework of that story to the reader.

Sies and Silver succeed in bringing some new faces and new analyses of planning issues to the table. They are less successful in bringing in the diversity of the marginalized populations and their human needs in the metropolis, although they emphasize the importance of doing so in their outstanding introductory historiography chapter on planning history. They write: "planning history can best inform planning practice when it captures the past in its full measure of complexity . . . " (Sies and Silver 1996, 33). In the closing paragraphs of this review I will discuss why I, as a reviewer, feel they fail to meet their challenge.

I find the two strongest chapters to be the introduction and conclusions written by the editors themselves. The first, as mentioned above, is an excellent historiography, and the latter summons up many issues yet to be addressed in planning history. The volume provides a broad array of information about people, places, and events of importance. It provides information on several lesser known actors in the historical evolution of planning (i.e., Mary Simkhovitch (in an article by Wirka), J. Hyde Pratt (written by Ireland), and the works of Olmsted Jr. , not just Olmsted Sr. (a piece by Peterson)). As the editors themselves note, several authors provide detailed case studies that enhance our micro-scale knowledge of planning endeavors in specific geographic locales. Draper’s piece on small park planning in Chicago and Sandweiss’s piece on early St. Louis neighborhoods are examples of this approach. Several authors provide political histories of major places and actions, notably Hancock’s work on San Diego and Fairbank’s on The Trinity Reclamation Project in Dallas.

Finally, a substantial portion of the book provides the reader with a focus on "contemporary" planning history. This plethora of information about the post World War II era is one of the book’s major strengths. Since many of the planning decisions grappled with daily both in the planning classroom and, more important, in the planning office are rooted in the massive growth of federal initiatives begun in the depression but brought to fruition in the post World War II era, these chapters are very significant contributions to our understanding of contemporary debates and agendas in planning. These chapters range from an analysis of freeway formation (Ellis) to the impacts of federal policies related to planning on various locales (Connerly on Birmingham and Thomas on Detroit are two examples). They focus on a broad array of policies including urban renewal, historic preservation, downtown revitalization, and new town planning to name some of the topics covered in the reader.

In all my reviews, I address the question: Is this a good text to use in the planning classroom? My answer here is an unqualified yes if the class is a full-term planning history course and a more qualified yes if it is not. I used this text with my "Theory and Practice of Planning" class this past term (a required first class for master’s students that includes history in the class curriculum) and had to provide the students with additional materials to frame the essays. As a stand-alone textbook for a planning history course, this volume needs a summary introduction to each section, and I encourage such introductions in any future editions. I would find this a more valuable adjunct to the articles than the summaries of each author’s work now included at the beginning of each chapter. While I appreciated the editors’ suggestions for further readings, I did not find the summaries of the chapters necessary for the reader. They had already commented on each chapter in the book’s introduction. For a planning history class I would order it again, supplementing it with both more and less traditional materials. For my theory class described above, I will use selected chapters, most likely the contributions of Hanchett on the roots of federal incentives for urban planning, Abbott on strategies for downtown development, and editors’ concluding chapter on the relationship between planning history and the modern metropolis, which brings me to my final comments.

While this collection does indeed expand our knowledge of planning history in many of its complexities, I would argue it carefully limits itself to uncontested and uncontroversial terrain. In other words, it is very much a traditional planning history, albeit, one that covers a broad array of topics. The editors do acknowledge that planning has differential impacts on people based on their race and class, but the volume does little to enhance our knowledge, for example, of the impact of planning on the varied communities of color. It does not address the different tasks or the approaches that black communities define as planning and community building (as examined, for example, by Fitzgerald and Howard 1993) or fully discuss communities-of-colors’ logical resistance to planning actions intended to harm them. Nor does it discuss the complex role of women as actors and recipients of planning decision making, with the exception of the piece on the city social by Wirka. These are examples of only two of the groups invisible from the pages of planning history. In a 1995 special topics issue of Planning Theory titled "Making the Invisible Visible: New Historiographies for Planning," editor Leonie Sandercock asserts (and I agree) that "mainstream historians have seen their subject as the profession, and their object as describing/celebrating its emergence. One consequence of this is the absence of diversity in their texts" (Sandercock 1995, 14).

Many readers might ask why it is important that the lens of planning history be broadened or argue that I am asking too much of this reader. Silver and Sies actually provide the answer to the need to broaden our investigations in their own concluding remarks to Planning the Twentieth Century American City. They end their book by quoting a recent speech by James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and now a professor at Mary Washington College in Virginia. The last sentences of the longer quote in their text state: "We must do more to uncover how a broader range of metropolitan residents interpret their problems and how they imagine workable solutions. Planning historians can provide the knowledge and the insight that will assist planners and policy makers to create a more civilized metropolitan environment. To do so, they must acknowledge that an urban place is more than a sum of its formal components, it is also the sum of the lives lived there" (473).

References

Fitzgerald, J. and W. Howard. 1993. Discovering an African American planning history. Paper presented to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference, Philadelphia.