Collaborative Planning:
Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies
Patsy Healey
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press
1997. 352 pages. $75 (HB), $29.95 (PB)

Review by Charles Hoch
College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
University of Illinois at Chicago

How might we remedy institutional oppression and nurture individual participation as we plan local and regional settlements? In Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies, Healey uses concepts of social and political justice to elaborate this question and construct her answer. Unlike many of the theorists whose work she uses, Healey includes spatial relationships as an important focus of attention. In fact, her chapters build her argument through conceptual layering rather than sequential narrative. Readers encounter the new ideas and information as overlays on the cumulative renderings of earlier chapters. In this her overall framework resembles the synoptic theoretical work in John Friedmann's Planning in the Public Domain (1987) and Tore Saeger's Communicative Planning Theory (1994). The resulting agglomeration produces a rich texture of intersecting and overlapping theoretical domains, although the volume and density of the coverage can place considerable demands on the reader. This book is not an introduction, but an immersion.

Healey conducts an impressive multinational consideration of the planning literature. She assimilates ideas generated by authors from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, and the U.K. Healey uses their theoretical and empirical insights to frame her arguments. This draws the reader out of provincial attachments, emphasizing important similarities and differences in land management, regulation, and other planning related activities conducted in different nations. Healey tries valiantly and, I think, successfully to speak to planners across national and cultural divides.

Healey argues that spatial planning plays a more important role in the era of global restructuring because economic activity seeks a wider range of locales. Local planners can help shape combinations of social, economic, and environmental characteristics that attract specialized enterprises to particular places. Ironically, the footloose flexibility of modern firms enhances the prospects for shaping their locational choice. Healey describes how three sets of overlapping activities set the stage for local development: social, economic, and environmental. In framing these descriptions, she adopts what she calls an institutionalist approach. This approach improves upon deterministic planning rationales, whether informed by concepts of political economy, neoclassical economics, or the longstanding rational model, because it allows for individual initiative and change. However, it also improves upon currently fashionable interpretive accounts of the meaning and value of planning action by linking such discretion to the context, limits, and constraints of existing customs, regulations, and the like. Although the vocabulary of inclusion gets a bit clumsy, Healey repeatedly puts the concept to work, binding together a huge assortment of social, economic, and environmental relationships.

After considering the social, economic, and environmental characteristics that make places susceptible to planning, Healey offers a comprehensive assessment of governance and strategy. From Healey's perspective, welfare state technocracy takes a back seat to neo-liberal contract culture, entrepreneurial consensus, and inclusionary argumentation. Planning can play a role explaining the costs and benefits of contract outcomes, briefing entrepreneurial alliances, or managing inclusive discourse. But Healey wants more. She wants planners to generate strategic conviction among a diverse group of political actors. Her final two chapters explain what needs to happen to make planning a powerful and persuasive tool for effective democratic governance.

Healey imagines an audience of economic, social, and political actors who face regional and local uncertainties that none can remedy alone. Working together appears attractive in light of higher-risk go-it-alone strategies. Although she admits that the complexity of the interdependencies and the legacy of the institutional antagonisms and technocratic planning styles pose formidable impediments to inclusive, trust building planning efforts, Healey makes the case for a more democratic planning. How do we combine individual discretion and social collaboration without favoring one or the other? Healey proposes institutional design. We need to invent new rules as well as new strategies that expand the practical reach of intelligent democratic planning. But as she lays out the elements of this design activity her encyclopedic talents lead her astray. Instead of focusing on the qualities of design activity in use, she ends up making abstract moral arguments that draw upon too many currents of political and planning theory.

Critics from the right will dislike Healey's effort to expand the powers of the state, however optimistically conceived, into local arenas best left in private hands. Public choice theorists will balk at the costs of inclusion. From the left, critics will scoff at shared power and meaningful collaboration with the owners, investors, and managers of capital. As a (small d) democrat at heart, I found Healey's comprehensive effort competent and commendable, if not compelling. The efficacy of improved practical deliberations among the livers, doers, and makers of urban settlements requires more detailed accounts of what to do and how to do it to win my firm consent. But I am still adding this text to my graduate students' required reading list as a healthy antidote to American intellectual provincialism.

References

Friedmann, John. 1987. Planning in the Public Domain. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Saeger, Tore. 1994. Communicative Planning Theory. Aldershot, U.K.: Avebury.

The Evaluative Image of the City
Jack L. Nasar
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications
l998. 182 pages. $19.95 (PB), $42 (HB)

Review by Katherine Crewe
Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture
Arizona State University

The strength of The Evaluative Image of the City is that it confines itself to a straightforward purpose: improving the visual appearance of cities in ways that citizens like. In order to address this objective, Nasar has made some broad assumptions, and he has done so knowingly. The first is that citizens share large areas of agreement about what makes their cities look good, particularly when it comes to the broader scope of urban design. The second is that professional designers themselves are radically out of touch with citizen wishes, often showing preferences that run counter to the public's choices. The third assumption is that the state of visual disorder in American cities has become so serious and so dire in its consequences that it is important for urban professionals to begin working on some eminently treatable problems, such as litter and graffiti, unsightly billboards, and a lack of greenery in places where it is most wanted.

As such, this is an eminently useful book for the many professionals embarked on civic improvement who also want to consult the larger community. Readers might range from urban design teachers and professionals to public policy groups and planning commissions to downtown chambers of commerce, tourist commissions, and real estate groups. The book not only shows how to solicit information about citizen views and bring this together to form an "evaluative image," but it suggests basic strategies for presentation and effectiveness.

The book is largely based on the author's evaluations of two cities in Tennessee--Knoxville and Chattanooga--begun in l978. The study involved interviews of a representative sample of residents and visitors from each city on areas they most liked and disliked. Results showed a strong overlap in preferences among visitors and local residents alike. Respondents showed they liked very much the same things: natural-looking landscapes, buildings which looked historically significant, open but bounded views, and places that were tidy and well maintained. Respondents shared the same dislikes too: dilapidated buildings, messiness, pollution, and deserted-looking streets. While this may come as no great surprise to anyone (as Nasar is the first to admit), it is nevertheless useful to have citizen preferences identified and explained.

Following his outline of the Tennessee study, Nasar presents a series of evaluative studies of local neighborhoods, showing a finer grain of testing. Studies include sixth graders' views of their surroundings in the town of Gilbert, Arizona, and residents' evaluations of old buildings in an historical district in Columbus, known as German Village. Studies in Vancouver and Kyoto were done to elicit a wider range of attributes beyond liking and disliking, such as excitement, interest, and arousal. A study in Newcastle compares daytime and nighttime evaluations, among others. In all these local cases, the same preferences emerged for well--landscaped spaces, historic-looking buildings, and tidy and well ordered settings, while the same dislikes were shown for the littered, the unkempt, and the dangerous. In discussing these cases, Nasar provides insightful analyses of citizen preferences, relating his findings to previous research.

Nasar brings a rich store of empirical research from the visual assessment field to this work, particularly as it tests the relationship between environmental processes and human spatial behavior. Those who have traced the field from its early beginnings in the l960s may agree that although this has not yet yielded many practical solutions for planners, it is nevertheless known for its methodological sophistication, the richness and variety of its case studies, and its insightful interpretations in the realm of environmental perception. Nasar's work benefits from his longstanding association with the field and shows an informed use of the case-study approach.

However, there have been criticisms of visual assessment research that point to some misgivings I have with the use of an evaluative public image as a planning tool. Every decade or so, researchers in visual assessment have lamented the absence of a strong theoretical base. After Appleton raised the question in the mid-l970s (Appleton l975), Zube, Sell, and Taylor wrote of the field's theoretical vacuum (l982), while Bourassa followed suit 10 years later (Bourassa l991). Most recently, Carlson (1993) argued that the visual assessment field suffers not only from an absence of theoretical framework, but from the lack of what he calls a "justification theory" (52). Drawing an analogy with popular tastes for sweet food, Carlson voices the inadequacy of quantifying tastes to justify policy: in other words, argues Carlson, proof that people like sugar frosted flakes does not warrant planning around them (54). I have the same misgivings as to the wisdom of using citizen tastes as a solution to urban ills, and believe that areas of weakness in the book may derive from this central premise. I believe, for instance, that Nasar fails to give due consideration to possible conflicts between popular citizen tastes and pressing urban problems evolving around land use, transportation, and other such issues. Citizens' proven penchant for the appearance of affluence and high social status (as described by Nasar himself) reinforces this concern. One suspects that evaluative studies, given their shaky theoretical justification, might be employed for the quick cosmetic fix, in spite of Nasar's own cautions to the contrary (3).

A second question addresses the relation of citizen evaluations to architecture, and perhaps to design innovation by professionals in general. For Nasar, architects are a breed apart, forming an elite colony that exists in opposition to an apparently united citizenry, and throughout the book Nasar takes pot shots at architects for snobbishness, for professing to like "historic" buildings until they learn they're new, and for occasionally questionable relations with urban renewal and failed public housing projects. However justified these comments may be, Nasar is raising some key issues: Are architects to make no contribution to the city's evaluative image? And does this mean we are to endure a plethora of Tudor-style houses because citizens like them? One thinks of the many cases when architectural work was initially scorned by citizens, only to win public affection in time, as has been the case with Miami's Art Deco district or the Seagram Building. I would for this reason expect architects to take issue with Nasar.

However, to Nasar's credit, the book largely anticipates potential conflict between citizen evaluation and public policy, and he justifies his approach on the grounds that American cities are in dire straights. Overall, the book is extremely helpful, not only in providing thoughtful interpretations of prevailing tastes and trends, but in its wealth of suggestions for new research techniques and new methods of visual presentation, both derived from his own work and the work of associates. I was informed by Nasar's suggestions for ways to refine and diversify evaluation methods, to make fruitful comparisons between cities, to identify successful city traits for emulation elsewhere, to predict neighborhood needs from census data, and to research within a low budget. The ultimate usefulness of this book lies in the application of planning strategies to engage the support of public groups for improving the city's appearance.

References

Appleton, J. l975. Landscape evaluation: The theoretical vacuum. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 66: 120-123.
Bourassa, S.C. l991. The Aesthetics of Landscape. London: Belhaven.
Carlson, A.A. l993. On the theoretical vacuum in landscape assessment. Landscape Journal 12(1): 51-59.
Zube, E.H., J.L. Sell, and J.G. Taylor. l982. Landscape perception: Research, application and theory. Landscape Planning 9:1-33.

The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community
Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning
Washington, D.C.: Island Press
1997. 265 pages. $25 (PB).

Review by Michael Hibbard
Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management
University of Oregon

This is an exhilarating manifesto. Beatley and Manning have given us an idealistic and visionary view of a possible future for cities and towns, but one that is grounded in real examples and practical suggestions. The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community is the sort of book we once expected of planners, but this approach has fallen from favor in an era of pinched professionalism on one hand and ethereal theorizing on the other. Its aim is to reach beyond the audience of academic and professional planners to an actively engaged public composed of individuals who care about their communities.

The Ecology of Place does not offer any original research. Its contribution is to synthesize an enormous amount of material into a coherent discussion of what it takes to create environmentally, economically, and socially healthy places--sustainable places in the current terminology.

Drawing on the rhetoric of the 1996 Habitat II meeting in Istanbul and of the final report of the President's Council on Sustainable Development, Beatley and Manning take as their starting point the idea of planning for sustainable places. They argue that this is the natural next step in the evolution of the idea of planning. As they see it, planning started with fairly narrow considerations of land use and zoning, then widened in the 1970s in an attempt to guide and even contain the physical development of towns and cities. However, because of the continuing focus on land use and infrastructure, growth management has had only limited success in the U.S. What is now emerging, according to Beatley and Manning, is a more holistic and comprehensive view of planning and of communities, one that seeks to minimize environmental impacts; considers how policies and programs can enhance quality of life; and takes into account resource needs as well as the environmental and social impacts of meeting those needs.

Beatley and Manning are at pains to distinguish planning for sustainable places from neotraditionalism or new urbanism. They credit the new urbanism as an important source for the current reappraisal of planning, especially in its support for compact settlement patterns, emphasis on transit- and pedestrian-oriented developments, and recognition of the importance of public spaces. But they also raise serious reservations about the new urbanism. First, they point out that it has not been very urban in practice, noting that the most visible new urbanist projects have been located in suburban or exurban areas. Second, and of greater concern to Beatley and Manning, few of the new urbanist projects have been conceived or designed in ways to minimize their environmental impact.

Thus, planning for sustainable places includes but goes beyond design solutions. (In fact, the pre-publication title of this book was Beyond the New Urbanism.) Conventional land use and growth management concerns are still essential, but other concerns are of equal importance. It is necessary to understand cities as intrinsically embedded within larger ecosystems and the natural processes upon which they depend, and as generators of environmental impacts. This has implications not only for land use patterns but also for the kinds of industrial and economic activities at work in a given community, the ways in which homes and other structures are designed and built, and the policies and programs the community employs to address its resource needs and ways of dealing with waste.

The Ecology of Place is an ambitious attempt to describe an approach to planning that simultaneously addresses concerns about the environment, the quality of human life, and the distribution of social and economic opportunities. The authors begin with an introductory chapter that conveys their sense of crisis about sprawl and urban over-development and offers a vision for a different type of settlement pattern built on the concept of sustainability. They lay out the broad contours of their alternative vision in chapter two. Then, in four substantive chapters, Beatley and Manning provide a very rich discussion of how to move in the direction of creating sustainable places. Successively, they take up urban form, the struggle of cities and regions to live within their ecological landscapes, economic development, and issues of civic involvement and social capital including nurturing cultural and social diversity. Though there is nothing really new here, this is the heart of the book. The foci on compact urban form, designing with nature, living within ecological limits, economic self development of communities, and instilling a sense of connectedness to place and one another will be familiar to most readers. What makes this material exciting is that it is tangible. There is nothing theoretical or speculative here. Each chapter makes its points by drawing on a breathtakingly wide array of real examples, mostly from the U.S. but occasionally from other places. Additionally, these subjects are tied together in ways that allow the reader to immediately see how they reinforce one another; for example, how compact urban form can facilitate community economic development, which in turn can help instill a sense of connectedness.

The concluding chapter presents the next logical steps in promoting more sustainable places. As one would expect from Beatley, it begins by identifying elements of a new ethic of environment and community and proposing actions to promote such an ethic. The authors then discuss specific local and regional actions that can be taken to move in the direction of sustainable places. Again, these are new only in their application to the concept of sustainable places. They revolve around ideas of strategic planning visioning strategies, public dialogue and partnerships, establishing systems of indicators and benchmarks of sustainability, and the like. The chapter also proposes a number of concrete federal policy changes that could assist in the creation of sustainable communities. These include such things as changes in the tax code, environmental policy reform, and adjustments to federal subsidies and financial incentives.

Despite the prolific use of concrete examples, The Ecology of Place is not an instruction manual. Rather, the spirit of the book is to use the examples to stimulate further thinking about how cities and communities can be organized in the future. It will make provocative reading for city councilors, planning commissioners, and community activists. And it will be a wonderful tool for helping beginning planning students to ground and focus their idealism.

Policy Design for Democracy
Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram
Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas.
1997. 241 pages. $15.95 (PB), $35 (HB)

Review by James A. Throgmorton
Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning
The University of Iowa

In Policy Design for Democracy, Schneider and Ingram argue that, while each of the prominent public policy theories (pluralism, policy sciences, public choice, and critical theory) has plenty to offer, none is adequate for a society that has grown profoundly disenchanted with government. Given that inadequacy, Schneider and Ingram offer a synthesis that explicitly seeks to make policy-making more democratic,thereby restoring citizen confidence in government. An admirable objective. How well do they succeed?

According to the causal model that Schneider and Ingram propose, policy designs--by which they mean the content or substance of public policy--emerge from an issue context which, in turn, emerges from the broader social context through a process of framing dynamics. Given this general model, Schneider and Ingram then argue that policy design (as a dependent variable) is shaped by the social constructions, distributions of power, institutional characteristics, and behavioral dynamics found in the history and context of policy-making. Policy design (as an independent variable), in turn, has subsequent effects on democratic institutions, justice, problem solving, and citizenship.

After detailing core empirical elements, which they claim are found in virtually all aspects of policy (goals or problems, agents, target populations, rules, tools, rationales, and assumptions), Schneider and Ingram elaborate on their theory by focusing on the dynamic processes through which issues are socially constructed and how those social constructions interact with political power to produce opportunities or risks for political leaders. In the authors' view, some issue contexts are dominated by the social construction of target populations, whereas in other contexts the social construction of knowledge and facts plays a much more prominent role.

The first set of issue contexts results from "a degenerative form of politics" in which elected officials and others in the policy-making process strategically manipulate the social construction of issues and target populations for their own political gain (6, 102-149). Such designs separate target populations into "deserving" and "undeserving" groups, and thereby legitimate the practice of directing beneficial subsidies and regulations to the former and punishment or neglect to the latter. The second set of issue contexts appears to be scientific and professional rather than political, and its power relationships and institutional cultures favor a world view structured around the taken-for-granted objectivity of science. Schneider and Ingram identify a series of design flaws that each of these issue contexts produce and then consider what the flaws imply for democracy. Most importantly, in their view, these flaws explain how characteristics of the context become embedded in designs, damage democracy, and (re)produce themselves in future contexts.

There is much to admire in this book, particularly its comparative assessment of the four prominent policy theories. Finally!, one might say. At last there is a policy text that provides a clear, direct, and insightful two-chapter comparison of public choice and critical theory along with the stale, but still relevant, theories of pluralism and rational decision making. Any student of public policy-making would find the book to be well-worth reading, if for that reason alone. That praise notwithstanding, I would like to have seen a more sustained comparison of critical theory with public choice. The cutting edge of contemporary policy-making lies at the intersection of those two quite different theories, and a bit more thorough comparison of them would have been rewarding.

Schneider and Ingram also deserve praise for the fact that, unlike many theorists, they make a strong and explicit normative argument: that policy designs are strongly implicated in the current crisis of democracy; and that contemporary policy designs "deceive, confuse, and in other ways discourage active citizenship, minimize the possibility of self-corrections, and perpetuate or exacerbate the very tendencies that produced dysfunctional public policies in the first place" (5). That normative argument leads them to propose seven "general rules of thumb" (202) for more democratic policy designs:

1. Construct target groups (for the allocation of benefits and burdens) in such a way as to cut across longstanding lines of social, racial, economic, and other cleavages;
2. Design to ensure public involvement; avoid overly complex and technical designs that empower narrow scientific and professional interests;
3. Create designs that encourage and strengthen communicative ethics and communicative rationality across all policy-making contexts;
4. Cultivate a sense of community through designs that favor the creation of civic organizations;
5. Design for context, draw from multiple theories, and analyze from multiple perspectives;
6. Design theories that build capacity, inform, empower, and facilitate self-governance and learning rather than policies that manipulate through slogans or symbols; and
7. Avoid designs that rely on deception for support.

There is also much in the book that simply rings true, at least true to my reading and experience. I refer in particular to the authors' claim that target populations and scientific knowledge are both socially constructed. Said differently, public officials and private advocates routinely use the persuasive powers of language to construct preferred images of self, community, and culture, and to construct persuasive stories about the origin and preferred resolution of particular policy-related issues. Moreover, as Schneider and Ingram put it: "the dynamic process through which issue contexts shape policy designs involves the social construction of the context itself. Policy makers and others involved in the designing process will attempt to construct the issue to ensure that values favorable to them will become dominant within the issue context" (192). Although Schneider and Ingram never say so directly, this process of constructing target populations and knowledge is very much a matter of rhetoric, that is, of persuasive argumentation directed at an audience. Unfortunately, Schneider and Ingram miss the opportunity to analyze the rhetorical tradition and incorporate it into their synthesis; rather, they implicitly denigrate it as either manipulation or mere style; that is, as a part of "degenerative politics."

These admirable qualities notwithstanding, Schneider's and Ingram's apparent lack of self-reflexivity concerning their own rhetoric is puzzling. They rightly claim that each dominant theory views the world through its own, narrowly focused, orientation and that those diverse orientations offer differing visions of democracy, assign differing roles for public policy to play, and propose differing normative standards for judging public policy. Each theory, in other words, implies a politics. But then Schneider and Ingram promote a theory as a synthesis without considering the political (rather than merely theoretical) relationship of their theory to the others. Does not their own theorizing constitute a social construction of knowledge? And does not their own theory have political implications? I suspect that Schneider and Ingram would agree that it clearly does, and yet I do not recall them directly engaging the moral claims that underlie each of the dominant theories. Thus, although they present their modelas a synthesis of the other four, I suspect it will be received as a competitor.

A further irony can be noted. The book is so densely packed with abstract claims and hypotheses that it cries out for detailed application to particular cases, primarily so that the purported beneficiaries of the proposed theory would be able to read and understand it. At times, the prose feels terribly redundant and, densely laden with abstractions, quite burdensome to read. Reading it, I felt like I was plodding sleepily through a museum, listening to an omniscient curator drone on about particular displays in each of the many hundreds of rooms. Tired by the text, I longed for the lightness of a good novel where the pages float past and the reader incessantly desires to learn what happens next. (Jonathan Harr's superb book, A Civil Action, exemplifies the alternative I have in mind.) This is no trivial point and most certainly is not merely a matter of writing style. If the authors' point is to encourage adoption of policy designs that "advance citizenship by listening to, educating, and involving ordinary people" (back cover), then their own text should be written in such a way as to invite a reading by ordinary people. On page 151, Schneider and Ingram write that "scientific and technical designs send messages that marginalize citizens and have important implications for the openness and responsiveness of government. The societal consequences include less participatory citizens and the emergence of an elite corps of experts--both of which are destructive of democracy." I would suggest that their own rhetoric "marginalizes citizens," undermines their own normative project, and violates their own rules of thumb. Scholarship itself has a politics. I think that Schneider and Ingram know that, and I wish that their otherwise quite meritorious book had demonstrated that knowledge.

References

Harr, Jonathan. 1995. A Civil Action. New York: Vintage Books.

Cities Fit for People
Uner Kirdar, editor
New York: United Nations Publications
1997. 504 pages. $24.95 (HB)

Review by Alma H. Young
College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs
Wayne State University

It's refreshing to find a book entitled Cities Fit for People, a remarkable book that challenges us to make cities safer, healthier, and more humane and sustainable. The basic message of the book is that cities are a microcosm of today's world, and the kind of world (and cities) that we want is largely a matter of political will. This edited volume contains contributions from 46 international policy experts, academics, urbanists, and journalists, many of whom participated in Habitat II--the City Summit--in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1996. Uner Kirdar, the editor of the volume, is a pioneer in the human dimension of development and was, until recently, one of the leaders in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 looks at the challenges facing citizens and the sustainability of cities; Part 2 focuses on the issues of poverty, gender, employment, culture, and values in cities; and Part 3 considers questions related to governance and fuller participation of citizens in the decisions that affect their lives. This book does not shy away from discussions of accountability, responsibility, collaboration, leadership, and vision. It is a bold call for action to rebuild cities so that they are the source of positive development for all people: "No rebuilding of a decayed infrastructure will be sufficient to ensure that the cities are safe, healthy, and livable, until its resident's thoughts, souls, and spirits flourish" (8).

In the introductory agenda for making cities fit for people, we are challenged to reorient our development strategies to encompass three major goals: balance economic growth, social progress, and the environment; create mechanisms that enable a partnership among all developmental players; and engage in full resource mobilization. We are then presented with ten practical, policy approaches to achieving these goals (15-23). Some of the policies we have heard before, such as creating a new social contract between the rich and the poor, "banking on the poor" for development, and being more creative in attracting a mix of private and public financing to our cities. Other approaches we hear less frequently, such as creating "learning cities," which rely much more heavily on city universities and information-exchange networks with other cities and listening to the voices of children who have their own views about tomorrow's cities.

This policy-oriented book is clearly written for an international audience, for those anywhere in the world who care about how their cities develop, and for whom. Each contribution has a coherent theoretical argument that buttresses the policy prescriptions that are advanced. While all the contributors support the notion of sustainable cities, there are differences of opinion presented as to how to create and nurture those possibilities. Readers get a feel for the kind of dialogue that must have been ongoing at Habitat II.

This book should appeal to a range of audiences. It could be an appropriate text for undergraduate courses where students are being introduced to topics like urban poverty, the gendered dimension of urban development, and the informal city. This book could also be useful in more advanced policy-oriented courses where students are taught the importance of finding the appropriate strategies for a given context. For others who have toiled in the area of social planning and often felt they were "blowing in the wind," this is a text that is refreshing in the sense that its policies, centered around social sustainability and human development, have become part of a new UN economic and social agenda. A weakness of this volume is that, with so many contributors, there is a great deal of repetition in terms of information and policy prescriptions. Still, for its clear articulation of the need to develop an urban society based on social justice and social stability, it is a book worth reading.

Wally N'Dow notes that "the economic dimensions of 'sustainable development' are well understood and strongly woven into the current literature on sustainability, but the social dimension is less well formed but just as crucial." (45). In presenting us with a picture of the glaring inequalities in the patterns of global economic growth, Mihaly Simai reminds us that "(l)iberalization and structural adjustment have increasingly subordinated the social dimension of development to external economic forces.... Thus the extent of poverty is among the dominant problems in the current international system, for human security is becoming a serious source of problems and risks" (64). Poverty is reflected not only in our material well-being but also in our values. This is seen in Louis Emmerij's argument that "competition has become the answer to everything.... Extreme competition diminishes the degree of diversity in a society and contributes to social exclusion. Individuals, enterprises, cities, and nations that are not competitive are being marginalized and eliminated from the economic race..." (103).

How to provide citizens with opportunities to be fully integrated into the economic, political, and social life of the city is a major concern of this volume. There are many policy prescriptions offered for meeting the needs of the poor, especially poor women, who are seen as holding the keys to solving urban poverty. Sylvia Chant reminds us that gender itself is a vital component of urban development, and therefore planners must consider the special needs of poor women, particularly for employment and shelter. "The links between labor and shelter are particularly pertinent in contemporary cities" (260) and yet "all too often housing acts to reinforce disadvantage and inequality, not the least on grounds of gender" (272).

The volume ends with stories of cities that have begun to take substantial steps towards creating more humane environments. Examples of successful planning and governance are found in urban areas in Brazil (Curitaba), Costa Rica, India (Bombay), China, Ghana (Accra), Kenya (Mombassa), and Hungary. In Curitaba, for example, progressive city administrators chose a style of urban development based on a preference for public transportation over the automobile, working with the environment instead of against it, appropriate technology rather than high-technology solutions, and innovation with citizen participation in place of master planning (424). Curitaba's planners learned that solutions to urban problems are not specific and isolated but interconnected, and that planning should be done in partnership with all relevant actors.

Making the Invisible Visible:
A Multicultural Planning History
Leonie Sandercock, editor
Berkeley: University of California Press
1998. 270 pages. $15.95 (PB), $45 (HB)

Review by Sigmund Shipp
Department of Urban Affairs and Planning
Hunter College of the City University of New York

Leonie Sandercock's book, Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History, sheds light on urban planning history, illuminating the mirror that has until now provided only a murky reflection. Related to this journal's mission, the phrase, "making the invisible visible," defines the educational or learning process. Education depends on the ability to raise and transform the consciousness of individuals. The essays in the book allow readers to hear planning's silent and neglected voices. The educational aspect of the book makes it appealing to academic planners, especially those concerned about race, class, and gender issues.

Sandercock analyzes these issues and their relationship to mainstream planning history or "the official story" (xi). The story deifies the grand plans that an elite group of white males--e.g., Geddes, Burnham, Moses--formulated and executed. This idolatry transforms planning history into a virtual epic where these white males become the heroes of planning and urban development.

In her compelling introduction, Sandercock demythologizes the heroic image of planning. The hero worship casts a long shadow that erases a noteworthy set of urban planning achievements. It has led to, she writes "an unspoken assumption that there are no African/Mexican/Asian-American/[gay] forefathers or foremothers of city planning" (9). These erasures prevent access to a host of alternative critiques and solutions. As she sees it, these alternatives can no longer linger in the shadows. Planning history must go wider if it is to be a more enlightened record about urban planning especially as cities become more diverse and multicultural.

The essays in the book underscore Sandercock's call for a more comprehensive planning history. Theodore S. Jojola's article, "Indigenous Planning: Clans, Intertribal Confederations, and the History of the All Indian Pueblo Council," demonstrates the value of uncovering one of planning's silent voices. As with most minorities, Native Americans were largely misunderstood and stereotyped as noble, ignorant savages and a "native people [who]were devoid of planning skills for their communities and incapable of managing their own internal affairs" (103). As a result, policies from the Bureau of Indian Affairs emphasized paternalism, forced cultural assimilation, and dependency.

Jojola sheds light on our view as he tears down the stereotypes. The Native American intertribal confederations that 16th century Spanish explorers stumbled upon were actually regional planning systems. According to Jojola, each federation was comprised of designated tribal leaders who met regularly at convenient regional locations. Broad regional issues were of paramount concern. "The common bond that these federations ultimately established was an interdependent economic system, which, in turn, was tied to managing and sustaining a shared ecosystem" (106). Tribes were willing to unify because collective action promised certain benefits that individual action could not produce.

The essay validates the planning heritage of Native Americans, which the heroic version of planning history has ignored. His timely discussion of collective action is generalizable and relevant to the current community development debate about collaboratives as a way to make inner cities more self-reliant.

June Manning Thomas's article, "Racial Inequality and Empowerment: Necessary Theoretical Constructs for Understanding U.S. Planning History," also promotes the need for a multicultural planning history. Her discussion about the sins of omission applies to the African-American community. The best written essay in the collection, it delineates the reasons why planning history and the profession must acknowledge the existence of racial inequality. Not to do so, Thomas contends, will be harmful. Failure to be more inclusive and define the significance of race makes the official story of planning a naive and incomplete way to chronicle events.

Failure, moreover, to create a more realistic portrayal of racial inequality will continue to render powerful lessons and insights invisible. To Thomas, this eventuality can be avoided by viewing planning history from the perspective of the oppressed--those most affected by racial inequality. Since slavery, African-Americans have continued to rebound in the face of social, political, and economic oppression. Their institutions, the church and social organizations, have allowed them to be self-determinant, relying on themselves to create stable and vibrant communities. As a more recent example, Thomas points out how blacks mobilized against the destructive forces of urban renewal to gain control over their "communities' destinies" (204). This struggle toward empowerment makes blacks more than helpless victims as the official story would have it. An "illuminating planning history," as Thomas refers to it, would accept the reality of racial inequality, demonstrate how African Americans have participated in the revival of their communities, and validate this participation as a form of planning (205). This more inclusive approach will illuminate the darkness. Thomas writes, "[r]ather than foster an attitude of helplessness, historians of social science can foster a sense of constructive self-initiative, a sense of human nobility. Acknowledging that self-initiative existed in the past is one way to do so, and this does no more than acknowledge the truth" (206).

The book as whole would be more effective if Thomas's article were presented earlier, rather than toward the end of the book. It sets the tone for many of the volume's essays, including Jojola's article about the planning heritage of the Pueblo, Clyde Woods' disturbing but moving discussion about how poor blacks in the Mississippi Delta have fought against economic and racial oppression, and Susan Marie Wirka's essay that critiques the profession and its historic neglect of women who were planners. While space prohibits a review of all the essays, this does not mean that they differ greatly in quality than those mentioned here. However, I feel that many of the unreviewed essays would be best reserved for advanced theory or history classes, given their depth and challenging nature.