Review by Howell S. Baum

Niraj Verma’s Similarities, Connections, and Systems stimulates us to think about questions central to planning and, indeed, all human experience. Why is it that we habitually analyze phenomena, issues, and problems–breaking them down into what we assume are their constituent parts–on the premise that their essence and meaning reside in the smallest pieces? Why do we emphasize differences, rather than similarities, among ideas, objects, and people? Why do we assume that relationships consist of differences and not similarities? Why do we insist on finding single best descriptions and making the single best decisions? And why do we do our best to conceal from ourselves that we are doing these things, in the sense that we avoid recognizing that we could think and act alternatively?

One might look for answers to such questions in several places. Some approaches would examine external influences on the mind, whereas others would explore the mind’s internal processes. The former strategy would look, for example, at culture and social institutions–how schools, labor markets, and employers, for instance, teach or reinforce particular ways of thinking. The latter would give attention to patterns of thinking that seem to be intrinsically human.

Verma focuses on external influences of a specific kind. He takes his orientation, through his teacher West Churchman, from the pragmatist and psychologist William James. The book examines the cognitive effects of different models of thinking. Its protagonists are these ways of thinking, not the thinkers. Culture and institutions are invisible. Why people choose to think one way or another remains elusive, although pragmatism points to a path the book does not follow. If the meaning of ideas lies in their consequences, then one might ask what use someone gets from thinking in a particular manner and consider how that use might have influenced deciding to think that way.

The book begins its approach to these abstract issues with a concrete problem, the case of Poletown. General Motors and the City of Detroit joined forces to level a neighborhood and build a Cadillac plant. The community tragedy, Verma explains, "is symptomatic of ... the polarization of two ways of valuation and two ways of inquiry ... analytic and systemic" (18). GM and city officials justified their actions in terms of an economic analysis that showed a potential for new jobs and income. Poletown residents could not oppose the destruction of their community in any publicly legitimate language. At best, they were forced to appeal to individual economic (property) rights, but they couldn’t appeal to a responsibility to maintain the richness of community life. It is an important question whether the Poletown tragedy is a product of economic interests and politics or of culture and epistemology. The book plays down the former and puts weight on the latter. Public life is governed by analytic rationality, which breaks life down into small pieces and ignores whole experience.

Critiques of analytic rationality are familiar. The challenge, taken as the purpose of the book, is to formulate an alternative rationality that sustains cognitive order while recognizing particulars, usefully guiding action, and avoiding analytic rationality’s "perverse simplifications" (2). One possibility is systemic rationality, a concern with comprehensiveness and teleology, or human intention. However, whereas analytic rationality offers a method that overlooks, and thus destroys, meaning, systemic rationality, while focused on meaning, does not bring a method for understanding and comparing it. Hence the book proposes a synthetic Jamesian "new rationality." The spirit of this exploration is to "change from the pursuit of the most ‘fundamental’ to search for the consequential, from prizing the rigorous to valuing the relevant, and from the quest for certainty to the inevitability of incertitude" (75). The method of this new rationality is "the method of similarity."

In this quest, Verma provides a useful way of thinking about similarities. Structural similarities, first, are single components or attributes of entities, such as income, location, or size. These are the province–indeed, the creation–of analytic rationality, which emphasizes rigor in breaking objects into pieces. In contrast, second, functional similarities are defined in terms of entities’ consequences or effects. For example, a sundial and a digital clock have no meaningful structural similarities but have the same function of telling time. These similarities, discovered in thinking about wholes, are the concern of systemic rationality. Yet, third, only do teleological similarities recognize, beyond simple function, common human intentions, or purposes. For example, much current discussion of the basic elements of planning focuses on shared aims in thinking about and ordering the world. These relations, discovered in a view that integrates sentiments and reasons, are the focus of pragmatic, or Jamesian, rationality. Planning, the book holds, would be better–Poletown would still live, if its members so chose–if more people used pragmatic rationality.

How should one proceed from here? On the one hand, it is hard to disagree with the position that planners should recognize whole experience in examining situations and acting. At the same time, Verma is not offering ethnographic guidance. Rather, he is concerned with how planners might think about what they find, in order to discover similarities within experiences (in essence, to frame experiences, cultures, and communities) and between experiences (especially different persons’ experiences). The method of similarity is to use metaphor to uncover similarities. Thinking metaphorically will enable one to recognize the unfamiliar in the familiar, to see relations where none seemed to exist.

This brief summary does not do the book justice, but it is useful to stop and make some tacit themes explicit. Although the book’s title does not offer a hint, Verma’s main theme is self-knowledge. He notes that people see similarities in everything all the time. Otherwise, the cosmos would be chaos and action would be impossible. The problem is that many similarities, drawn with many metaphors, are superficial, not based on what we could call facts, and pernicious. What Verma wants us to do is reflect on the ways we see similarities, question their foundations, and consider alternative ways of framing experience. One result, though the book does not say this clearly enough, is that we would treat people as members of groups, rather than mere individuals. We would not commit Poletowns. That, of course, is the second main theme of the book: Attend to the consequences of particular ways of thinking. We should think in ways that enable us to act, to accomplish our intentions, and (although here, too, the book is not explicit enough) to do good rather than evil.

Despite the subtitle, the book says little about planning–either its purposes or its practitioners. It has little case material. It does not engage the planning literature on rationality, particularly regarding the interplay of knowledge, interests, and power in decisions. Even though its pragmatic position emphasizes the use of knowledge, it says little about planning as a teleological enterprise, how planners might practice metaphorically, or how planners should use the general argument of the book in concrete circumstances. By and large, one is left to draw one’s own conclusions. And yet a hidden third theme offers direction, if not specific guidance. Planners (really, everyone) should anticipate seeing that everyone they encounter is similar to themselves in having moral purposes that govern and give meaning to their actions. This recognition should be the basis for working alliances with, for example, community groups.

Still, the book leaves us with many questions. It begins with an assurance that it offers something besides un-anchored relativism, but the success of its arguments rely on the reader’s good faith, ability, and freedom in reflecting on assumptions, judging desirable consequences, and identifying with others. As Verma recognizes from the start, Poletown, too, is the product of metaphorical thinking. Moreover, it must be said, it is the product of conflicting interests and unequal power. Contemporary attention to similarity, community, wholeness, and responsibility grows, reasonably, from concerns about the harmful effects of focus on difference, individualism, and rights. And yet fascism and genocide come from unbridled discoveries of similarity and unity. Civil life requires mental balance, and it depends on social conditions that make mental balance likely.

Verma’s book directs our attention to a basic challenge: How we can simultaneously recognize what is similar and different among ourselves so that we can live differently together.

Boston’s Changeful Times
Michael Holleran
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press
1998. 337 pages. $39.95 (HB)

Review by Dennis E. Gale

In the 19th century, Boston’s commercial center gradually spread from its colonial origins near the waterfront further inward, displacing small frame and masonry dwellings, stables, and cottage industries. Those who could afford to do so relocated to new residential neighborhoods away from the emerging central business district. Older religious institutions deconsecrated their buildings, sometimes demolishing them, and followed suit. Newer structures towered over older ones in response to higher land prices and growing demand for commercial space in the downtown. Newly emerging technologies such as iron-frame construction, elevators, horsecars, and electric streetcars drastically altered the density and configuration of buildings. New architectural forms such as department stores, office buildings, larger hotels, apartment buildings, post offices, and municipal and state buildings competed for space along narrow, twisting streets. Circumscribed on most of its perimeter by water, Boston had limited room for growth. Pressures for intensification of land use increased throughout the latter 19th century.

One result was that a culture of change emerged in Boston among those who, with the rise of the industrial revolution, accepted the new landscape as the price of progress. But, as Holleran argues in this intriguing new book on historic preservation in Boston, so also did there arise a small group of elites who resisted change, becoming the leading edge of what would later be known as the historic preservation movement. He describes their condition as one of "cognitive disorientation" (49). Gradually, those who sought permanence, rather than endless change, fostered more sophisticated forms of deed restrictions and equitable easements to limit the uses and configurations of new homes and to protect neighborhoods from incursions by commercial development. New residential enclaves such as the Back Bay and South End, built on filled-in tidal areas, were platted almost entirely under these controls. With time, the heterogeneous character of Boston’s old core responded to the dominance of the new downtown by spreading outward into a series of increasingly homogeneous enclaves segregated by class, race, ethnicity, and land use.

Some of the earliest conflicts between permanence and change arose from demolition of the John Hancock house in 1863 and preservation of Old South Church and the Old State House during the 1870s and early 1880s. Their defenders argued for preservation not on the grounds of architectural, aesthetic, or landmark significance (as would later be the case) but rather on the grounds of their historical associations in colonial and preindustrial Boston. Subsequent efforts to remove the ancient Granary and King’s Chapel burial grounds, and to build on Boston Common, made manifest the continued pressures for development space in Boston’s commercial core. But they also unleashed the emotional attachments held by many old families for these monuments to the city’s venerable past.

Public sentiments for the Boston landscape found new underpinnings in the 1880s when plans to build additions to Charles Bulfinch’s Massachusetts State House, located on Beacon Hill, were revealed. Although it was built at the close of the 18th century to replace the Old State House, the Bulfinch State House was defended less on grounds of historical significance and more from the standpoint of its scenic contributions to the Boston landscape. Sited near the summit of Beacon Hill, its proud gilded dome was visible from many vantage points throughout inner Boston. Many feared that alterations to its facade and construction of larger ancillary structures would obstruct the view.

As the 20th century approached, growing resistance arose to tall office and apartment buildings, not so much because they supplanted smaller, older structures but because they were out of context with their surroundings. (Indeed, the top two stories of one newly built apartment building on Copley Square were removed under court order, with the city paying its owner $350,000 in compensation.) These controversies help to undergird the police power foundations of land regulation in Massachusetts jurisprudence, based not on aesthetics but rather on public safety grounds (due to the difficulty of fighting fires in tall buildings). As difficulties became apparent in the use of deed restrictions and easements to control land use decisions, the stage was set for the legislature and the courts to reinforce the legitimacy of public land use regulation.

The emergence of a self-conscious historic preservation movement in Boston, with an emphasis on proactive, preemptive (rather than reactive, defensive) patterns of advocacy occurred early in the 20th century. Holleran documents the ascendance of one of the nation’s first preservation organizations, the Society for the Protection of New England Antiquities. Departing from contemporary trends, its founder, William Sumner Appleton, saw little merit in advocating the protection of properties for historic or scenic reasons. Rather, he emphasized historical architectural attributes (especially from the Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival periods), basing his defense on a property’s stylistic representativeness. Thus, buildings were to be understood as artifacts worthy of preservation unto themselves. Appleton, no fan of government intervention, advocated title acquisition as the most effective technique for protecting such resources. Once acquired, they were rented to sympathetic occupants or operated as house museums open to the public. Other governmental controls began at this time as well. Height limits were enacted and later upheld by the Massachusetts courts, but Boston’s first zoning code did not take effect until 1924.

The study is valuable because it contributes to the intellectual foundations of the historic preservation movement in America. Holleran maintains that the legitimacy of historic preservation emerged over three-quarters of a century in Boston through a series of incremental shifts arising largely in response to individual preservation issues. As Bostonians became more accepting of the worthiness of their own history, they found substantiation for preserving buildings and their spatial context in an ever-widening array of arguments. To support this, the author martials an impressive battery of archival documents, including litigation, legislation, municipal reports, newspaper accounts, organizational newsletters, and personal correspondence, as well as secondary resources. Holleran succeeds in demonstrating that arguments on behalf of protecting Boston’s older buildings and spaces underwent a series of shifts in logic, intention, and sentiment. Yet, his research has implications for planning and land use in general, representing an admirable and richly textured case study of one city’s coming to terms with the rights of individual property ownership and public responsibilities to broader human interests.

This study crosses paths with Invented Cities (Domosh 1996) in that both works examine the creation of 19th century Boston’s built form. Domosh’s approach is iconographic, seeking insights from analysis of the city’s emerging physical fabric in a cultural context. Holleran’s method, more traditionally historiographic, positions his research along an axis of juridical and legislative evolution. Both books wrestle with the role of Boston’s social elite in fabricating an urban setting reflective of their tastes, values, and needs. Domosh, however, adopts a comparative perspective, juxtaposing the Boston experience with that of New York City. Holleran’s parameters, more or less exclusively circumscribing the Boston experience, foreclose the opportunity to kindle an intercity or multi-city dialogue. Both Holleran and Domosh trace the lengthy and sometimes erratic delimitation of private property rights and public interest expressed in Boston’s landscape history.

Another history of Boston’s historical development, Planning the City Upon a Hill (Kennedy 1992), casts a broader net, placing similar themes over a longer time line and in a richer political and social context. But its narrative is woven of a coarser cloth and thereby misses the richness of detail and clarity of the Holleran and Domosh studies.

Boston’s Changeful Times will find its most receptive readership among historic preservationists; urban geographers; land use law scholars; and architectural, landscape, urban, and planning historians. For classroom use, it is probably most appropriately directed to graduate, rather than undergraduate, students in these fields. Some may quibble with assigning a 300-plus page volume encompassing but a single city’s land use history. But juxtaposed with readings in a more broadly conceived history of the historic preservation movement in America, such as Charles B. Hosmer, Jr.’s Presence of the Past, Holleran’s study could serve a valuable purpose.

References

Domosh, Mona. 1996. Invented Cities : The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth Century New York and Boston. New Haven, Conn., and London, U.K.: Yale University Press.

Hosmer, Charles B., Jr. 1965. Presence of the Past. New York : G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Kennedy, Lawrence W. 1992. Planning the City Upon a Hill. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press.

The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry
Robert Cervero
Washington, D.C.: Island Press
1998. 400 pages. $45 (PB)

Review by Susan Handy

Times are hard for transit, as Robert Cervero documents in The Transit Metropolis: "The decline in public transit’s share of metropolitan travel has been a nearly universal trend; however nowhere has it been more precipitous than in the United States" (33). Despite subsidies totaling billions of dollars, "[m]ore ridership was lost during the first half of the 1990s than during the entire decade of the 1980s" (33). Auto ownership is increasing globally: The relaxation of import duties and restrictions led to a jump to 200 vehicles per 1,000 population in Bangkok and increases in auto ownership in Brazilian cities of 12 to 15 percent annually (42). Even in rail-based cities in Europe and Japan, studies show that point-to-point travel times by car are 3 percent to 23 percent shorter by car than by transit (43), helping to explain why transit is losing out to driving. Does it make sense to continue pouring our hopes into transit in the face of such trends? Yes, argues Cervero, in this ambitious book that will prove both inspiring and discouraging to planners.

At the core of the book, Cervero presents 12 case studies of "great transit metropolises" from around the world, cities that have achieved "a harmony between transit services and urban form" (xi). These case studies, he says, represent the best examples of transit metropolises developed under free-market systems over the last half century, during the time when the car rose to dominance (5), hence the absence of great transit cities like London, Paris, New York, and Moscow. The case studies are grouped into four classes, reflecting different approaches to achieving this essential harmony. The "adaptive cities"–Stockholm, Copenhagen, Singapore, and Tokyo–have used rail systems to concentrate growth into urban and suburban centers, thus adapting development patterns to transit. In contrast, the "adaptive transit" cases–Karlsruhe, Germany; Adelaide, Australia; and Mexico City–have successfully adapted their transit systems to the prevailing development patterns, even to low-density suburban areas. The "hybrids"–Munich, Ottawa, and Curitiba–have achieved an effective balance between adapting the city to transit and adapting transit to the city, using innovative technologies, service changes, and flexible systems. The "strong core cities"–Zurich and Melbourne–have successfully combined transit investments with downtown revitalization. The case studies are thorough, well-documented, and persuasive.

From these 12 case studies, Cervero draws 15 lessons, the "ingredients for achieving a workable nexus between transit and metropolitan form" (402). Although, as the case studies show, each city must find its own path toward becoming a transit metropolis, these ingredients consistently show up in those cities that have achieved the status of transit metropolis. The length of the list may explain why so few cities have succeeded, especially when the list includes such challenges as efficient institutions and governance and the leadership of visionaries. Some of the ingredients are well beyond the reach of planners: serendipity–"good timing and good fortune"–played a not insignificant role in many of the cases, for example. Cervero also uses examples from the case studies to debunk six "lingering myths" about transit, from the belief that only poor people will ride transit to the assertion that people loathe compact suburban form, thus suggesting that these common beliefs are not valid reasons to not pursue transit. However, these myths, like most, are built on some kernel of truth, perhaps more so in the U.S. than elsewhere. Planners need to understand and address both the truths in the myths and the truth of the myths, the fact that these beliefs, even if largely unfounded, are so widespread.

It’s hard not to question what all this analysis means for U.S. cities. The experiences of the adaptive cities seem particularly irrelevant to the sprawling, car-dependent cities of the West. To address this question, Cervero describes five efforts underway in North America to adapt transit to this pattern of development, in Portland, Vancouver, San Diego, St. Louis, and Houston. Although each of these cities has made impressive strides toward harmonizing transit with urban form, it remains to be seen whether they can maintain this vision for the long haul–or what difference even the most innovative approaches to transit will make. Who can take comfort in the assertion that Houston "has taken on the mantle of America’s premier example of adaptive transit," or that even this premier example will probably never achieve the status of a "transit metropolis"? Is the best that any U.S. city can hope for to become "a region where respectable transit services can and are being designed" (439)?

The Transit Metropolis makes a persuasive case for the importance of finding "a harmonious fit between transit systems and the cities and suburbs they serve" (441). Less persuasive is the argument that this approach represents a "promising model for building sustainable pathways" (xii). Cervero’s pervasive optimism about transit is hard to reconcile with his discussion in Chapter 2 of the "mega-trends" that have worked in favor of increased auto-mobility. If the worldwide decline in transit is "more an outcome of powerful spatial and economic trends" than government action or inaction (2), how can we expect new government action to stem this decline? Cervero also leaves unanswered the question of degree: How much transit use does it take to become a "transit metropolis"? How much transit use will it take to make a dent in the problems of automobility also outlined in Chapter 2? The case studies suggest a high threshold:

Stockholm’s experiences suggest a handful of transit villages in a landscape of sprawling development will not yield significant mobility or environmental benefits. Only when community-based planning and design add up to a coherent whole–something that requires a regional framework–can sustainable transit metropolis begin to form (130).

This book includes a wealth of information and insights about current transportation problems and potential solutions and will be an important resource for planners not just in the U.S. but throughout the world. It will also be useful to planning educators. The book as a whole could work as the core of a graduate-level seminar on transit planning, while selected chapters could enrich overview courses on urban transportation planning. The exposure this book provides to transportation problems and solutions from elsewhere in the world is important for U.S. students but regrettably rare.

With so much information, however, the chapters at times feel pieced together, without sufficient integration to make a cohesive whole. Why, for example, are Toronto and San Francisco included in Chapter 3 as examples of how transit can shape urban development rather than as case studies of either successful transit metropolises or North American cities working toward transit metropolis status? In addition, several important points are buried in the discussion and deserve more attention than they’re likely to get. One example: "Transit should be serving land-use visions and realities (12)"; in other words, the vision of land use, not of transit, should dictate transit investments. Another example: "Transit-supportive development is as much about enriching consumer choices as it is about inducing transit ridership" (413).

The Transit Metropolis may ultimately prove discouraging for planners looking for ways to stem the decline in transit. What do all of these lessons imply for a city like Austin, Texas, for example? Austin has debated the merits of light rail and transit-oriented development for well over a decade. With its recent Smart Growth initiative, Austin may finally have a land use vision that could justify a light rail system. On the other hand, a more realistic approach might be to redesign the existing transit system to better "harmonize" with the prevailing pattern of low-density, suburban development, following Houston’s model. But without mechanisms for regional planning, consistency in the vision or the visionaries, community consensus on giving priority to transit, or much in the way of serendipity, it seems doubtful that Austin will ever make much progress toward becoming a transit metropolis of any sort. Perhaps planners can at least take comfort in the lesson that "small, incremental steps matter" (407).

Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability:
The Case of Mexico City
Keith Pezzoli
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
1998. 437 pages. $40 (HB)

Review by Tom Angotti
Graduate Center for Planning and Environment
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y.

This is two books in one. First of all, it’s a fascinating story about the struggle for survival of a neighborhood in an ecological reserve in Mexico City. Second, it’s a broad and balanced theoretical discussion about urban sustain-ability issues. It could be used as a text for either or both purposes–as a detailed case study and/or background reading for courses in urbanization in Latin America, urban sustainability, and land use and environmental planning.

The greatest merit of this substantial volume, however, is the author’s passion and spirit of commitment to his subject and the subjects of his study. Over a period of 10 years, Pezzoli studied Los Belvederes, a group of low-income settlements, or colonias, that sprouted in the Ajusco ecological reserve, located in the Mexico City metropolitan area. Along the way, his research resulted in a masters and doctoral thesis. He spent periods of time living in the area and developed close ties with community leaders. Pezzoli states that while doing this study he learned "the meaning of popular struggle and the importance of critical social movements" (xix).

Pezzoli tells the story of the political struggles for land as a lively and readable narrative. He shows the clash between the government that planned to keep development out of an area of sensitive natural resources and the settlers who organized first to find a place to live and then to save their community. He describes the successful struggle of the community to halt government plans for the eviction of settlers, and the manipulations of land developers to advance their interests through a combination of political wheeling, economic dealing, and just plain thievery. He tells of the creative proposals by community leaders, which earned government support, to transform their communities into "productive ecological settlements" (colonias ecológicas productivas) and the failure of this project to do much more than avoid a massive eviction by the government. He uncovers the contradictory roles played by public agencies, private developers, real estate interests, and individual settlers. Pezzoli avoids the dull and icy detachment of too many case-study authors while struggling for a balanced and fair understanding of the dynamics that shaped the colonias of Ajusco and other marginally sustainable communities around the world.

Following his mentor John Friedmann, who wrote the forward, Pezzoli believes in the importance of critical theory, social learning and social experimentation. Perhaps the most important theoretical framework for his analysis is the body of work known as political ecology. Following the work of Enrique Leff (1990) and others, Pezzoli focuses on the intersection of environmental issues and economic and political relations. In his concluding chapter, he constructs a framework for political ecology that includes four spheres of analysis: (1) environment, history, and power; (2) the legal-institutional terrain; (3) civil society and culture; and (4) economy and technology.

The most significant lesson of the book, according to the author, is that "to be effective, community based environmental action requires continuity and cohesion in terms of social organization, and, ultimately, it requires the support of the state" (25). This is not a new revelation for veteran community organizers, who spend most of their time trying to find ways to give continuity to community struggles and to get government to follow through with its promises. But it is a lesson that is constantly reproduced by experience and warrants continual reevaluation and discussion.

For planners, Pezzoli’s book offers many rich examples of the contradictory role of the state and the opportunities presented for creative and supportive intervention by professionals. In the end, however, the experience of the colonias ecológicas productivas illustrates how difficult it is to overcome the inertia of technocratic conservatism, clientel-ism, and the economic interests of powerful developers. Creative approaches to sustainable urban development that try to integrate open space and conservation with low-income urban development have yet to evoke strong support from governments, especially in countries with dependent economies and mass poverty. While most endorse the principles of sustainability, they have yet to confront the economic and political inequalities that make environmental quality achievable only for rich enclaves. Throughout Latin America, there has been little progress in bringing the principles of sustainability to the process of planning human settlements. As in the North American conservationist model, planning for open space preserves, however noble that enterprise may be, is often done without taking into account broader social needs and inequalities. In sum, in order to make progress in environmental preservation, the political challenge of environmental justice has to be confronted.

The shortcomings of this book are related to its positive contributions. Since it’s two books in one, it is rather long. The case study and the theoretical discussion, however, can be easily separated. The first and last chapters are mostly the theoretical and historical context and discussion. The middle two chapters cover Mexico, Mexico City, and the Belvederes case study. The book is well documented and illustrated in black and white with photos, maps, and tables. However, some redundancies could have been avoided. The volume brims with the inclusiveness of a thoroughly researched Ph.D. thesis, and would have benefitted from the selectivity that goes into telling a good story. In an attempt to cover the literature on metropolitan development in Latin America, for example, Pezzoli glosses over the facile orthodoxy about the relevance of city size and primacy.

Taken as a whole, however, both the analytical and case study parts of the book are an engaging and thoughtful piece of work, a representation of the author’s own contribution to the process of social learning that he so eloquently advocates.

References