JPER, Volume 16, Number 4, Summer 1997: Book Reviews

Planners on Planning: Leading Planners Offer Real-Life Lessons on What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why

Bruce W. McClendon and Anthony J. Cantanese, Editors

San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

1996. 344 pages. $29.95 (HB)

Review by Terry S. Szold

Lecturer, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

There has been a general deficit in the literature of our field relating to personal and professional effectiveness in planning practice. As a practicing planner who has only recently joined the academic community, I have thirsted for a collection that would convey the rich texture of the challenges of professional practice in the public realm. I also hoped to find a primer that would offer insightful and practical advice to help students avoid the pitfalls common to rapid immersion in the public arena. This void has now been filled by a collection of essays and prescriptions from an array of successful practitioners, drawn from, throughout the United States. The collection is divided into four parts: lessons on personal success, lessons on politics, lessons on effectiveness, and lessons on customers. Each attempts to provide advice animated through real-life examples on what works, what doesn’t, and why.

In part one, seven planners share their perspectives about the personal skills and habits that are likely to ensure success in the profession. Success is defined in various ways, ranging from longevity in a planning position, usually at the municipal level, to the ability to influence some aspect of community life. The section is filled with do’s and don’ts, as well as prescriptions to ensure both political survival and effective management. Much of the guidance offered involves a commitment to implementation and upholding public trust, with suggestions related to political pragmatism and the need for flexibility. Many contributors emphasize the need for planners to reinvent themselves and creatively adapt. Other contributors offer management-oriented prescriptions, borrowed and exported from other organizational frameworks and concepts.

Contributions from Paul Zucker and Jim Reid help enliven the close of this first section. In a departure from the observation of most of the other contributors here, Zucker introduces three "Leadership Styles of Planning Directors" (79); including the Bureaucrat and Boat Rocker (you can easily imagine the traits of each of these planner icons), and finally the Bravo director who, in addition to leaping tall buildings in a single bound, is a great thinker and change agent, and possesses excellent political acumen. Zucker cautions us not to blindly embrace the empowerment paradigm that seems so much in currency with the other contributors to this collection. Empowerment, as defined in this collection and in other texts, is the process of enabling citizens to build and nurture their own planning programs and solve their own problems. Insightfully, he warns us that empowerment can also lead to single-purpose interest lobbies, and a rationale for a lack of leadership at the local level. In a small but important side-bar discussion, Reid reminds us to watch the market and be cognizant of the financial feasibility of planning programs. He ends with a call for a focus on implementation and "people skills," generally absent from planning curricula.

Part two of the collection focuses on political lessons and includes a survival checklist from experienced planners. Politics, a ubiquitous feature of community life and planning, is an ever present force for change, requiring us to constantly make adjustments to all plans and programs, both large and small. Some of the sage advice offered includes familiar variations on previous themes, such as knowing community values and constituencies (including knowing who you work for as well as your adversaries), and the importance of not personalizing events and unhappy outcomes. Other advice involves ensuring the alignment of visions and goals with resources, so that anticipated results can be achieved.

In a refreshing departure from the prescriptions and stories offered by other contributors in this section, Norman Krumholz provides several examples of how planners can integrate equity concerns into the development and infrastructure decision-making process (to benefit those, who all too often, are not adequately represented). Briefly described are some tactics and strategies for equity planners, including eschewing ideological regalia and nomenclature in favor of sober, professional dress and tone (even as one adheres, with integrity, to the fundamental principles of social equity).

Part three of the collection, lessons on effectiveness, advances core principles and values that should be held by the profession, including a commitment to broad participation by citizens, the use of the visiting process in community planning, the role of other professions in the field, and the influence of women in the field. In some ways, this section seems a potpourri of practitioner insights (including more survival guidance from the trenches). The section offers useful advice, but is less coherently anchored to the rest of the collection.

Part four, lessons on customers, provides a selection of contributions relating to the recent and growing focus in the field on customer service and entrepreneurship, and improving the management of planning agencies. Bruce McClendon and other contributors provide suggestions on how to improve the effectiveness and credibility of the public planning office, by employing and adapting the business practices and customer service ethic of successful corporate organizations.

Overall, the virtue of this collection is that it brings together so many perspectives and insights about what is required to be an effective practitioner and to deliver effective programs. The emphasis is placed not on what planners do, but how we can be effective, particularly if we are willing to reexamine past dogmas and embrace new approaches. The liability of the format is that too many contributors say the same thing, sometimes in much the same way. Good advice is often redundant. When there is little variation in the themes, however, the suggestions lose their punch and resonance.

Many of the contributors urge us to make what we do less complex and cryptic. Their logic is as follows: If the public is better able to understand what planners do, then our services, similar to the services offered by a police or public works department, will be viewed as more essential. The perspective, however, is sometimes taken too far. This is particularly true in Chapter 19, where the mission of a fast food restaurant in feeding its hungry customers, is equated to the necessary mission of planners in helping customers solve their own problems. Most practitioners will not be persuaded that the services offered by a planning organization can be condensed to fit within the simplicity of a McDonald’s menu board.

None of the above shortcomings, however, should eclipse the overall value of the collection, to both practitioners and educators. Educators may want to assign selected sections of the book within a course or curriculum focused on practice. The chapters with "war stories" may be more illuminating for students than those with repetitious lists of do’s and don’ts. The collection also does not fully explain why things don’t work. These mysteries are left for each of us, in our own professional journeys, to discover.

Peter Marris

London: Routledge

1996, 186 pages, $55.00 (HB), $16.95 (PB)

Review by Karen S. Christensen

Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning

University of California at Berkeley

The Politics of Uncertainty is elegant, insightful, and compassionate. Its elegance stems from beautiful writing and structure; the book begins with the infant; extends into the neighborhood, city, nation, and global economy; and returns the cycle to nurturing. Its insights stem from Marris’s probing analysis of the inequitable distribution of uncertainties. And its compassion stems from his lucid argument and his sensitivity to the needs and longings of the people affected.

Marris’s account of the chain of passing uncertainties, ending with those most vulnerable, is intellectually compelling and, especially, emotionally moving. The burden of uncertainty is the book’s core issue. For Marris, uncertainty is something undesirable, which the powerful pass to the weak. Uncertainty is not knowing what will happen to crucial supports.

Risk, in contrast, is less unknown, as the variables are known and probabilities of outcomes can be assigned (Schon 1967). Some writers, such as Michael (1973), La Porte (1975), and Christensen (1985), see uncertainty as a condition to be acknowledged and addressed. Others, such as Kiel (1994) and Giarini and Stahel (1993) in their Centre for Uncertainty, embrace uncertainty as a source of creative opportunities. The Politics of Uncertainty presents uncertainty as a burden displaced onto the weak.

Marris’s arguments about the distribution of uncertainty are critical to planning thought and practice. Marris shows planning, itself, to be caught in the chains of displaced uncertainty, on the one hand trying to reduce uncertainty and on the other hand creating uncertainty. Moreover, planning practice that analyzes the chains of displacements of uncertainty, can address those inequalities with more insight and sensitivity. The following summarizes The Politics of Uncertainty’s argument.

Part I uses psychology to examine individual development of meaning and attachment. It begins by explaining how infants develop meaning through attachment with parents, learning how to communicate with each other. Meanings derive from these relationships and thus are uniquely personal.

Different self-contained, self-sustained systems create public meanings, such as those found in legal codes, and scientific meanings. People communicate within these systems of meaning and move among them according to what is appropriate to the situation. The meaning of marriage, for example, depends on whether a woman is thinking to herself or talking to her husband, to her friends, or to the Internal Revenue Service. The interactions between the personal and public context of meanings pose a dilemma: Meanings must be consistent, yet each person has a unique way of making sense. Therefore meanings are negotiated, and enter the realm of power relations and planning.

Part II, on controlling uncertainty, addresses "the way the power to control relationships affects the [unequal distribution of uncertainty and the] kind of meaning people can give to their lives" (83). To manage uncertainty, people need reliable relations and freedom of action as events unfold. Accordingly they compete to secure commitments from others without having to make reciprocal commitments of their own. This competition generates inequalities in uncertainty. Large firms and national governments buffer themselves from uncertainty by contracting out, international dispersion, shifting responsibilities to lower levels of government, and privatizing. The displaced uncertainties from several systems are heaped on the disadvantaged, for whom virtually everything, job, neighborhood, shelter, child care, is unstable.

When people cannot defend themselves against uncertainty they withdraw psychologically, and create self-defeating defenses. For example, streetcorner men with sporadic or no jobs disparage themselves and express the only kind of self-assertion left: irresponsibility. Such defenses tend to compound social prejudices, making the victims of unequal uncertainty collaborators in their own exploitation. Research on grief provides more evidence that the unequal distribution of uncertainty tends to leave those people and communities most vulnerable with the fewest resources to cope.

Many, not just the least fortunate, feel insecure, and the "greater their anxiety, the more they will be drawn to political reactions which turn away from the sources of their insecurity in the structure of power, which seem beyond their reach, and transpose blame onto any vulnerable group that seems to threaten their own fragile autonomy. Families on welfare become surrogates for all threats to social stability;..." (129).

Marris uses the persuasively detailed case of the Docklands to show how government protects its freedom of action, changing its interventions according to political and economic winds. "This happens even when planners are genuinely striving to reduce uncertainty, because they cannot address underlying inequalities of autonomy and control (100).

Ideally, planning creates "reciprocal actions, involving all the relevant actors, so as to protect the purposes most vital to people, organizations or communities" (131-132). Thus planning substitutes collaboration for competitive management of uncertainty. "A comprehensive plan ... demonstrates ... how all the legitimate interests of a community might be reconciled and balanced equitably, productively and without pre-empting individual rights" (136).

Nevertheless, the city is weak compared to the large corporations it is trying to retain or attract. Moreover, as it collaborates with other local agencies to make the location more attractive, it too becomes a source of uncertainty for the existing neighborhoods and businesses it is trying to protect. Furthermore, implementation of the plan is subject to political expediency and scarce resources, and, accordingly, more uncertainty.

Even though competition over management of uncertainty seems to run rampant, reciprocity may be seen as effective in business (e.g., contracts) and between business and government (e.g., Japan). The management-of-uncertainty situation is like the "Prisoner’s Dilemma," which offers advantages to reciprocal actions and penalties for trusting the untrustworthy. Cooperation depends on the likelihood of repeated interactions and perceptions of relative resources.

Every act of self-protection has consequences for the freedom of others, generating chains of uncertainties that stretch into poor neighborhoods throughout the world. For example "uncertainties for the poorest families in the most marginal economic situations have to be taken into account as much as uncertainties for workers in wealthy countries facing global competition" (151). Even the humane proposal for international constraints on child labor could endanger the survival of the poorest of the poor.

Marris sees some hope in United Nations treaties. But to be successful, he says they must start with the most marginal to reveal the chains of interactions through which burdens of uncertainty are displaced; make threats clear so collaboration looks attractive; and have non-governmental organizations monitor performance since governments may understand consequences, but still operate in the short term.

The Politics of Uncertainty concludes that the competitive (non-nurturing) male work culture makes it difficult to articulate the moral consensus to sustain a politics of reciprocity. Despite this depressing conclusion, some planners are beginning to develop consensus building processes for grappling with uncertainty (e.g., Innes 1996). They need not begin with nurturing moral consensus. Indeed they often begin with hostility and suspicion (Gruber 1994). Motivated by self-interest, all actors in such uncertain and interdependent conditions are somewhat vulnerable. Thus, even the more powerful may be willing to cede some of their old competitive strategies (the necessary but unlikely first step, according to Marris). Perhaps they participate only out of fear that the others will fashion an agreement without them (Susskind 1981). Through lengthy negotiations aided by facilitators, participants build social, political, and intellectual capital that enables them to create cooperative plans (Gruber 1994). Consensus building may generate joint learning similar to the reciprocal strategy for managing uncertainty Marris advocates.

References

Christensen, K. S. 1985. Coping with uncertainty in planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 51:63-73.

Giarini, O., and W.R. Stahel. 1993. The Limits to Certainty. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Gruber, J. Coordinating growth management through consensus building: Incentives and the generation of social, intellectual and political capital. Working Paper # 617. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California.

Innes, J.E. 1996. Planning through consensus building: A new view of the comprehensive planning ideal. Journal of the American Planning Association 62:460-472.

Kiel, L.D. 1994. Managing Chaos and Complexity in Government. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

La Porte, T.R. 1975. Organized Social Complexity: Challenge to Politics and Policy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Michael, D.N. 1973. On Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Schon, D. 1967. Technology and Change: The Impact of Invention and Innovation on American Social and Economic Development. New York: Dell.

Susskind, L. 1981. The importance of citizen participation and consensus building in the land use planning process. In The Land Use Policy Debate, ed. J.I. deNeufville. New York: Plenum Press.

Gideon S. Golany

New York: John Wiley

1995. 272 pages. $49.95 (HB)

Review by Kheir Al-Kodmany

Assistant Professor, School of Urban Planning

University of Illinois at Chicago

In Ethics and Urban Design, Gideon S. Golany examines the past, present, and the future of urban design with particular regard to culture, form, and environment. In seeking to understand "the inherent complex social values" on which societies rest and to gain insights into human interaction with the environment, Golany fastidiously tracks the origins of the city from the earliest known collective living arrangements to the ancient metropolis of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Indus Valley. This history, coupled with existing technology, informs Golany’s vision of an ethical design paradigm for the future. However, while Golany’s discussion of the history and development of cities is thorough and sometimes even compelling, his conclusions and vision for the future suffer greatly by his near total omission of social justice issues of the past, present, or future.

I believe that the contradictions and omissions in the first thirty-nine pages of the book constitute an amazing bit of intellectual contortion. Golany criticized Western society for its devotion to technology, but proposes urban design development in outer space. He praises Sino-Japanese beliefs that the face of the land should not be changed, yet he praises extensive and intensive irrigation systems for desert areas and devotes a significant portion of the book to discuss Geospace (underground) design and development. He praises the "social ethics of the combined rules and values used to maintain the collaborative system of agricultural production" in ancient Egypt (slavery), for example, and decries the lack of such ethics in modern society. The primacy of the environment in his ethical framework is clear, but the role and status of the individual, society, and the species are not. These significant incongruities beg the question: What is the role of man to serve the environment? Are issues of equity in society so trivial in the face of environmental concerns that they should be omitted in a discussion of urban design? I think the answer to both of these questions is no.

Each of the Golany’s four ancient urban civilization was characterized by a very high degree of inequity. The various cities of the Indus Valley civilization saw the advent of the Indian caste system, which Golany declines to mention. He speaks almost admirably of the ancient Egyptian’s "tight social order that essentially subjected a mass of people to a year-round slavery system developed in order to retain the irrigated-agriculture society[and] ensure the continuation of monumental building projects" (81). In both Mesopotamia and China, labor was conscripted by the king or emperor to build lavish monuments to their power and hegemony.

Golany suggests that the past should inform present urban designers. In his ethical discussion, however, there is no indication whether he means that design themes reflective of more unjust past societies should be replicated or corrected. In older cities especially, many design elements of a restrictive, hierarchical, even immoral past are still evident. Most of the societal inequities of the past consisted of segregation of persons based on immutable circumstances of birth (sex, ethnicity, caste, rank, etc.). In modern Western societies and increasingly in other parts of the world, societal differentiation and segregation is based on wealth or income. In many cases, urban designers contribute to the inequity by designing "public space" that is only accessible at the pleasures of private ownership. These are ethical considerations that Golany implicitly leaves for the planners and policy makers. As an urban designer, he suggests, one’s highest ethic is to "consider primarily, but not exclusively, the three-dimensional physical forms of the city (width, length, and height) along with the forces that shape its social and physical environment" (101).

Nearly the entire second half of the book is devoted to Golany’s vision for future geospace urban design, including a lengthy and extensive study of the energy efficiency of underground dwellings and habitats. Golany emphasizes the connection to the earliest human shelter, the cave, and criticizes the modern urban landscape as "psychologically oppressive." In my view, it is hard to imagine a more psychologically stifling environment than sustained underground living. The author touches upon the human aspect of living underground, addressing it as a minor lifestyle change. I do not foresee an underground, encapsulated society; there are too many who fear structural failure and natural disasters and would resist living without a natural environment, i.e., fresh air and sunshine. Geospace is a good option for storage, dense mass transit, and limited habitat development, particularly on slopes, but, essentially, that is the current extent of the use of geospace. Land use conservation and more efficient densities can be achieved by building up rather than down, with the added benefit of pleasing vistas.

Moreover, while Golany pushes the development of geospace with a study of soil thermal performance, he does not conversely investigate slope erosion due to development runoff, wind, and rain. The hillsides of the hot and dry southwestern United States, particularly in coastal California where the development of hillsides would be most needed, experience a cycle of long dry periods followed by brief but heavy rain. The manifestation of these cycles is often a drying of the hillside brush during summer, followed by the hot Santa Ana wind, which fuels brush fires in late fall, and a heavy winter rain that results in mud slides and erosion on the barren hillsides. Similar patterns are observed in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. All of this is to say nothing of seismic volatility in mountainous areas, particularly foothills.

But again, Golany’s fascination with geospace development is a non-sequitur in the discussion of the ethics of urban design. In ceding the territory of the ethics of social equity and public good to urban planners, and by concentrating exclusively on the efficacy and efficiency of the design in aesthetic and civil engineering terms, he begs the same question that persists in the ethical framework of Immanuel Kant (1958). A categorical imperative of devotion to duty cannot exist in a vacuum; this argument was universally discredited at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials.

Golany’s care and attention to environmental ethics are clear and laudatory, but lost in the many contradictions and inconsistencies in the book. Even his most cogent arguments are undermined by the numerous contradictions, and no clear universal philosophy of ethics emerges in the book. By contrast, ethical guidelines for urban planners are clearly codified by a number of professional organizations. The field of urban design would do very well to emulate the broader vision of planners.

Nevertheless, throughout his book, Golany provides interesting and well illustrated urban design examples. His research approach of studying ancient urban environments to inform present urban designers is sound. Finally, Golany is successful in communicating why a comprehensive knowledge of different fields is crucial to effective urban design.

References

Kant, Immanuel. 1958. The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated and analyzed by H.J. Paton. 3rd. ed. New York: Hutchinson University Press.

Buffalo, NY: Epoch Books

1996. 545 pages. $71 (HB), $49.95 (PB)

Review by Alan H. Peters

Associate Professor, Urban and Region Planning

University of Iowa, Iowa City

One of the most useful skills first-year planning students (typically) learn is how to deal with the Census. "The Census" always refers to the decennial Census of Population and Housing, not the various economic censuses. The Census is a massive beast, with its own history, political economy, and sociology. Moreover, a huge scientific edifice has grown up around it, this structure covers everything from survey design and administration to the language used to describe the individuals living in the U.S. One result is that if planners are to use the Census successfully they must know about various details such as the standard occupational and industrial codes; Census geography; the changing classifications of race, ethnicity, and ancestry; changing classifications of families and households; and the difference between an employee and an employed person. Without this detailed knowledge, use of the Census often leads to public embarrassment. Planners need also to hone their Census data access techniques. In the bad old days of mainframes, this meant managing computer tapes, writing programs to access data, and, for the truly gifted, operating microfiche machines. These days it means downloading from CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web, and displaying the results using a GIS package.

Unfortunately, until recently there was almost nothing to help students get acquainted with the Census. The Bureau of the Census published some useful guides, but these were limited and usually aimed at the specialist user. The few books available were, by the early 1990s, out of date or aimed at limited audiences. Then in 1992, Dowell Myers published what has become the standard text and reference book for planners on the Census, Analysis with Local Census Data. So when I was given a copy of Michael Lavin’s Understanding the Census: A Guide for Marketers, Planners, Grant Writers and Other Data Users to review, I wondered whether another Census textbook was really necessary. Page through the book and you will soon realize that this is a "must have" reference for professional planners, planning students, and academies.

Unlike the Myers book, Understanding the Census is not concerned with how Census data should be analyzed and presented, but instead focuses entirely on the nuts and bolts of Census use. It also benefits from being written more recently than the Myers book. As a result, its discussion of the 1990 Census is considerably more complete, and Lavin has been able to include data access technologies not in existence or fully implemented when Myers wrote his book.

The first section of the book concerns Census fundamentals, including a short history of the Census and a long discussion of how the 1990 Census was planned and conducted (though some of the early polities of the 1990 Census are left out). Section two is particularly useful and covers taxonomy (terminology and Census geography) and the questionnaire itself. Students will find this particularly beneficial, each Census question is explained in some detail. Section three is concerned with data access and discusses CD-ROM products, data access software, printed reports, maps, and microfiche, with various addenda covering topics such as the Tiger map system and county-to-county migration flow files. The final chapter of this section focuses on using the Census to answer questions and covers such topics as Census search strategies, error and the treatment of error, and so on. The final section of the book covers a range of additional topics. This includes a chapter on using the Extract software that comes with many of the CD-ROM products. Even "old Census hands" should find this chapter useful. Other chapters cover data access through the Internet and other electronic media, including the tape files. There is a longish and very helpful chapter explaining the rules governing the establishment of MSAs and urbanized areas, and a less beneficial chapter explaining congressional apportionment.

Throughout the book there are inserts explaining or giving examples of what was new to the 1990 Census (for instance, in 1990 the definition of veterans included, for the first time, persons who had served with the United States Merchant Marines during World War II), or giving tips on how to handle data, or giving answers to questions that students new to the Census typically ask (for instance, is the distinction between tracts and BNSs really necessary?). The book has many tables, charts, flowcharts, and figures, and although these tend to render a certain typographical clutter to almost every page, students will almost certainly find the additions useful. As I indicated earlier, this book does not pretend to be a book about analyzing and presenting Census data. Readers who want a discussion of these issues would do better keeping to the Dowell Myers text. Lavin’s book excels at presenting most of the basic Census information the students must master, and that practicing planners and academics must continue to re-master. Although I have been a near constant user of the Census for the past decade, I found new and often quite diverting facts on almost every page.

Nevertheless, I have a few quibbles over content. The discussion of computer tape, still necessary for some analyses, is very limited. PUMS is covered fairly well, but there is only passing reference to the Current Population Survey. Although the CPS is not a by-product of the Census in the way that PUMS is, planners still tend to use the CPS as the annual update to the census. The Census Transportation Planning Package and the School District Data Book, two now widely used CD-ROM sources, are also given short shrift. Some topics important to planners, the Post-Enumeration Survey, special population counts, the political debate over the under count, and so on, are treated with insufficient detail.

Finally, and this is certainly not the author’s fault but a result of the rapid pace of technological change, Census access technology has changed massively over the past eighteen months. The widespread use of GIS technology in planning offices and the equally widespread availability of Tiger files has transformed the use of Census data. Even the Bureau of the Census’s Web page now has a few mapping engines. Lavin mentions GIS in passing, mostly the elementary mapping program LandView and connecting Tiger files to LandView; however, the thematic mapping of Census data has gone well beyond this point.

Overall this book is very useful and well thought out; I recommend it for both classroom and personal use. My hope is that Lavin will produce a similar volume on the economic censuses.

Reference

Myers, Dowell. 1992. Analysis with local Census Data. Boston, MA: Academic Press.

Jay M. Stein, Editor

New York: McGraw-Hill

1995. 592 pages. $34.05 (PB)

Jay M. Stein, editor

Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute.

1996. 474 pages. $29.95 (PB)

Review by Tridib Banerjee

Professor, Urban Planning and Development

University of Southern California, Los Angeles

A common frustration for many of us is to find a reader that will include the exact readings that we want our students to read. In the absence of such a possibility, we all compile our own readers, with the help of overworked secretaries and teaching assistants, and keep local branches of Kinko’s and other copy services solvent. These two volumes edited by Jay Stein are designed to meet this need for a good reader, at least as "a main or supplementary textbook for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate-level introductory courses" (1996, iii) in urban and regional planning and in real estate and development.

Anthologies, readers, and symposiums are not uncommon in the planning field. But relatively few are designed explicitly as introductory texts, and more rarely do we find a formal approach to assembling them. What is interesting about the two "Classic Readings" by Stein is that these two volumes are a product of a systematic four-stage methodology: (1) a survey and analysis of introductory course syllabi, (2) a survey of experts, (3) identification of award-winning writings, and (4) a review of planning literature. The four- step methodology was applied separately for both volumes.

The survey for the planning classics volume, conducted in the summer of 1992, included introductory courses offered by corresponding and member schools of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). For the real estate and development classics book, Stein’s survey was based on introductory real estate and development courses offered by departments listed in Urban Land Institute’s 1994 Directory of Real Estate Development and Related Education Programs.

The second phase of Stein’s methodology involved a survey of a panel of experts. The experts (sixty-one, according to my count) for the planning classics volume were selected from their fields of interests as reported in the ACSP Guide to Graduate Education in Urban and Regional Planning. The experts (forty-two) for the real estate and development classics book were chosen, similarly, from their reported fields of interests in ULI’s 1994 Directory. The experts, in both instances were given the same tasks: (a) to identify three articles or books in their respective fields they considered essential reading and (b) to suggest another three articles or books, regardless of their fields, that they felt were "essential" reading in an introductory/survey course.

The data thus obtained must be interesting stuff. I, for one, would have liked to see the range, distribution, mode, and ranking of such references and the level of agreement, or the lack thereof, among such expert judgments. This may in fact say a lot about the nature of our two fields. But that’s another matter, and in any event Stein doesn’t share any of his raw data or analysis in his brief introduction.

The next two phases of this methodology involved different types of expert judgment, albeit much less comprehensive, and perhaps more introspective. One involved looking at award-winning articles and books in each of these two fields, and the other, the editor’s personal introspection and consultation with colleagues. We can think of this methodology as a mutant of the well-known Delphi technique. The participants were not asked to revise their judgment in light of the aggregate response, but the phases are similar to different cycles of convergence-seeking Delphi. In particular, the last two phases represent the editor’s personal effort to achieve some convergence.

One of the major challenges of these two volumes, as Stein himself discusses at length, is to reconcile the inevitable differences between what are considered "classic" and what might be considered "introductory." Not all texts that are considered classic readings in the profession may be appropriate introductory texts. And not all good introductory readings are necessarily classic. Furthermore, this dilemma has been further confounded by the fact that Stein never asked his panelists to identify either classics or ideal introductory texts? He asked them simply to identify the "essential readings" for an "introductory/survey course" in urban planning or real estate and development. One has to wonder if Stein may have unwittingly introduced a third ingredient in the stew. It is possible that there are many readings that may be considered essential but are neither classic nor introductory.

This may all sound like unnecessary nit-picking in a social-scientific sense, an area from which I myself try to keep some distance. In reality, one could argue, there is considerable overlap in these terms, and when the experts identified essential readings they knew what Stein was after. I am inclined to agree, but I mention all this mainly to rationalize some of my own uneasiness with ascribing the honor of "classic" to many of the selections. To use Stein’s own definition, classic readings are "of superior quality, represent outstanding scholarship, and may have significantly influenced or changed the field" (1995, xxiii). I emphasized that last phrase because it should be the single most discriminating criterion in choosing classics. For example, Paul Davidoff’s "Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning" is without a doubt a classic in this sense, as is Charles Lindblom’s "The Science of Muddling Through." Stein’s volumes include several such masterpieces. But a good many of them, while being of superior quality and representing outstanding scholarship, are not seminal in that sense. The volumes also include authors who are known for their seminal work and influence in the field, Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch, and Jane Jacobs, for example, but the chosen selections may not be the best or most appropriate examples of their contributions. There are also some notable omissions. Neither of the volumes contains writings of many planning stalwarts whose works are considered seminal in the field: for example, William Alonso, Edward Banfield, Martin Meyerson, Herbert Gans, Ian McHarg, Harvey Perloff, Lowdon Wingo, Melvin Webber, Manuel Castells, Stuart Chapin, and the like. Stein concedes that he had to include some non-classic selections to maintain the breadth necessary for an introductory/survey text. But how will the audience of these volumes, beginning graduate level students, know which ones are classic and which ones are not? How many of them will ever get to read pieces by the authors I have listed above? Will they growup thinking they have read everything that is considered classic in their field by reading one of these two books? Scary thought, isn’t it?

The two volumes have almost identical formats and organization. Both of them are organized in thirteen sections with two or three articles per section; the planning volume contains thirty-six articles and the real estate and development classics volume contains thirty-four. Both volumes begin with sections devoted to history of the field, then cover theory and ethics, and end with a section on future issues. They each have a section devoted to international issues, politics, design and form, public policy and land use controls. But specific selections, as to be expected, are different. In fact, there is no overlap in these selections, an imperative, no doubt, of the publishers.

The volumes have their own specialized sections. The planning classics volume includes several sections devoted to planning specialties: comprehensive planning; economic development; transportation; housing, social policy, and community planning; environmental planning; and the profession of planning. On the one hand, one wonders if thirteen sections are too many, with only two or three articles on the average per section. On the other, one must also wonder if three such distinct areas of planning, housing, social policy, and community planning, deserved to be lumped into one category having only three articles. After all, these very areas of planning practice provided the stimulus for political and theoretical insights about equity, social justice, and local empowerment and were the basis of much of the planning ethos that grew out of the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the lumping of land use, zoning, and growth management into one category could also be questioned. One could also bemoan the omission of any coverage of urban redevelopment or historic preservation, two major areas of planning practice. As an academic with a strong interest in international planning, I find the coverage under that heading rather minimal, confirming once again the U.S.-centrism of this country’s planning academia, notwithstanding the presence of large number of international students and faculty in the U.S. planning programs, and rapidly expanding practices of American planners abroad. There is also little coverage of the gender or diversity issues in planning and development, despite years of sustained interest. It is also somewhat peculiar, given the essential futurity of planning practice, that a section on "Future Issues" comes almost as an afterthought and contains only one article. The selection, a piece from Joel Garreau’s trendy "Edge City," written mainly for general audience, is particularly disappointing, especially since there is no dearth of visionary and futuristic writings in the planning literature.

Like the planning volume, the real estate classics collection also includes several distinctive sections emphasizing real estate economics and finance, valuation and appraisal, market analysis, public finance and taxation, and real estate law and regulation. My earlier discussion about the quandary over depth versus breadth applies here also. One wonders whether there shouldn’t have been a section on sustainable development or environmental impacts or historic preservation. This volume includes several sections that clearly are designed to raise the ethical and social consciousness of the development community. It is somewhat of surprise (but pleasant nonetheless) to see a section devoted to community development, affordable housing, and special populations and one that includes writings of Dolores Hayden and Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear. This volume also does a much better job in dealing with issues of values, ideology and vision than the urban planning classics book. Furthermore, the lists of suggested readings included with each section in this volume are significantly longer than those included in the earlier volume.

There is one significant difference between these two volumes, and this goes back to my earlier discussion about what constitutes a classic. If age is any indicator of classic readings, the urban planning classics collection fares better than the real estate and development classics book as the following table clearly establishes (and I don’t think you need a ChiSquare Test to make the point).

Classic Readings in 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

Urban Planning [36] 10 5 13 8

Real Estate/Development [34] 1 6 13 14

There is only one selection in the real estate classics book that dates back to pre-1970 era: Charles Tiebout’s "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditure." The planning classics volume on the other hand has at least ten such selections. But the more relevant point here is that as an academic field real estate and development is much younger than planning, even though as a profession it might compete for one of the oldest in rank.

Despite my misgivings about the use of the term "classics" and omissions of certain authors and selections, I must commend Stein for doing a rather conscientious effort in presenting the materials in a coherent fashion. He introduces each article by providing a short abstract and discussion. Each section is followed by suggested readings. This is very helpful for beginners and also for the instructor. Suggested readings also help mitigate the omissions I have discussed earlier. Many, but not all, of the important stalwarts are at least recognized in this additional reading list.

In sum, Stein has done a commendable job in editing these two volumes given the intractability of his task. A textbook designed by a committee certainly is risk-aversive, more democratic, and ultimately strengthened by expert validation. But the question is, will it serve your purpose? At University of Southern California, where I teach, the graduate urban planning program and graduate real estate development program don’t offer any introductory/survey course, hence we can’t effectively use these texts. On the other hand, the planning classics volume (and possibly the real estate classics collection) can certainly serve as a text for our undergraduate introductory course in planning and development. In other programs, they may very well serve as a supplementary text for introductory graduate courses.

Overall these two volumes represent an important contribution to the pedagogy of urban planning and of real estate and development. Calling them "Classic Readings," however, may have been somewhat daring.

Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future

James A Throgmorton

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1996. 328 pages. $61.00 (HB), $19.95 (PB)

Review by Patsy Healey

Director, Centre for Research in European Urban Environments

Professor, Town and Country Planning

University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne

In this case study, Thromorton makes a contribution to planning theory and practice on three interconnected levels. First, he advances and consolidates a theoretical position within the interpretive or communicative perspectives. Second, he provides a rich account of the perspectives and dilemmas surrounding the regulation of utilities provision. Third, he offers an example of the method of storytelling in policy analysis.

Planning scholars and students in planning theory, utilities regulation, and qualitative methods in policy analysis will find something of interest in this multifaceted book. But Throgmorton’s ambitions are wider than this: He has sought to write a readable and accessible book for practitioners and concerned citizens interested in the politics of planning issues and for anyone interested in the reflective use of rhetoric.

The book follows a traditional case study format. It begins with a theoretical account, which tells the conceptual story of the decline of "modernist planning" and the rise of the "rhetorical turn." The story of the struggle between Commonwealth Edison, the monopoly electricity producer and supplier in the Chicago area, and its regulators and the citizens and the city of Chicago, then occupies the rest of the book. To help make this narrative come alive, the characters are illustrated by photographs and sometimes thumbnail sketches. Finally, we are given an interpretation of the story as it illustrates Throgmorton’s ideas of the planner as the writer of story-making texts. Regular inserts on the use of particular words and their meanings remind us that the making of persuasive narrative is a complex task. In recognition that the personality of the author intrudes into texts, Throgmorton tells us something about himself and the study and, as he goes along, his writing.

Theoretically, Throgmorton consolidates the contribution he has already made to the interpretive turn in planning theory. He takes for granted that planning work is an active task of discursively constituting options and possibilities. Through his previous papers, we have been made aware of the value of the tools of linguistics and rhetoric in analyzing such discursive work. In this account, Throgmorton adds more about the context in which such discursive work is done. In a language that parallels the new institutionalist understanding of social and economic dynamics,1 he reveals this context as a world of cross-cutting and intersecting networks. In the development of his thinking in this respect, he draws on the literature on information networks (Castells 1989) and the processes of production, validation, and diffusion of scientific knowledge (Latour 1987), adding a valuable infusion into the existing communicative planning literature.

Throgmorton argues that we should consider planning as: "a form of persuasive and constitutive story-telling (about the future) that occurs within webs of relationships and partial truths" (xiv). Planners are therefore "future-oriented storytellers who write persuasive and constitutive texts that other people read (construct and interpret) in diverse and often conflicting ways" (46).

This idea of planners throwing in carefully crafted rhetorical products into a dynamic and fluid "shared-power world" (Bryson and Crosby 1992) of multiple and shifting discourses, attempting to coordinate and stabilize the discursive climate, will resonate with many practitioners and researchers on planning practice.2 Throgmorton’s notion of the web of relations, however, takes us beyond much of the communicative planning literature’s emphasis on how planners do their work, to looking at planning work as it operates within complex and dynamic institutional contexts. Throgmorton’s account gives many insights into the actions of the participants in the utility regulation story, particularly the forces shaping those actions. But I am left with doubts about the tools of rhetorical analysis to capture the nature of planning work. Much in the story told here could be handled with the emerging tools of interpretive policy analysis. These focus not just on metaphors and tropes, but on what leads to "discursive turns" and how new discourse coalitions are built up etc.3 I also wonder whether the idea of the planner as producers of texts is itself too limiting. In some instances, planners may in fact be merely the scribes of other people’s texts, or instances of collaborative planning work, be involved in complex tasks of collective discourse formation.

The utilities regulation story is told as a form of tragedy of incomprehension and technical incompetence. Energy planners for the utilities company thought their priority was to expand production through major investments in nuclear power and that they could pass on the costs of this to the consumer, since the regulation of their rate levels was based on calculations of rates of return. But as levels of energy consumption fell, to the surprise of the company, this meant rapidly rising rates for citizens and businesses, who were undergoing hard economic times. It was also increasingly offensive to many that the company seemed to think that expansion itself was a good thing, when all the environmental arguments were stressing reducing energy consumption by conservation measures. Throgmorton shows us how difficult it was for the company’s experts to accept that they were living in a shared-power world, where they could be challenged from many directions. At the same time, the city officials and members of citizens’ groups found it hard to find a persuasive rhetoric to mobilize citizen and business concern and to find a practical solution to what became a prolonged impasse. This is a fascinating case, unfolded over a long time-span so the discursive evolution can be wellobserved. But it is also a case of overt and at times very hostile and public confrontation, told largely through observations of the arenas of interchange between the parties. It would have been interesting to know more about what was going on inside the organizational culture of the electricity company. Throgmorton’s account is of the poverty of planners’ rhetorical work in this case. This made me wonder whether we would get more insights by observing more routine planning operations, where planners are contributing to maintaining "storylines" over time.

Finally, what about Throgmorton’s own story-telling method? Despite all his thought about the craft, the story reads as yet another tale of local politics. It is only occasionally that the characters come alive, and the deficiencies of their rhetorical strategies become obvious to them. (It is interesting the few times where this happens are what I most remember about the story.) Also, Throgmorton’s reflective insertions interrupt the flow in what is a difficult story to track, rather than helping the story along. In the end, I stopped reading them. Maybe it would have been better to tell the story straight and then reflect on it. This emphasizes that the craft of telling good policy stories is a very difficult one, and we need more experimentation to find models that work.

Throgmorton’s conceptual and empirical storytelling is persuasive, however; planning scholars and students will find it a rich and rewarding book. Readers of will enjoy Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future and will be stimulated by it on several levels.

Notes

1. See Healey (1997) for summary.

2. This persuasive skill was just what Norman Krumholz deployed in Cleveland in seeking to "make equity planning work" (Krumholz and Forester 1992)

3. See Hajer (1995), for example, and the discussion of policy framing (Schon and Rein 1994).

References

Bryson, J., and B. Crosby. 1992. Leadership in the Common Good: Tackling Public Problems in a Shared Power World. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Hajer, M. 1995. The Politics of Environmental Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Healey, P. 1997. Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. London: Macmillan.

Krumholz, N., and J. Forester. 1992. Making Equity Planning Work. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.