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Book Reviews, JPER 19(4)Natural Hazard Mitigation:
Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning David R. Godschalk, Timothy
Beatley, Philip Berke, David J. Brower, and Edward J. Kaiser Washington, D.C.: Islands
Press 1999. 575 pages. $45 (PB) Social Science Research
Institute University of Hawaii Natural Hazard Mitigation is
an ambitious assessment of hazard mitigation policy and practice in the United
States. It focuses on federal government mitigation policy and activities
undertaken by state and local governments in the 1980s and 1990s. The book,
which contains the findings and recommendations of a collaborative National
Science Foundation-supported study conducted by the authors and their project
advisory committee, provides a very useful and insightful analysis for national
and state policy makers. Its description of the evolving federal policy on
hazard mitigation and mitigation options will be of value especially to planners
and practitioners at the state and local level. Natural Hazard Mitigation
contains four parts. The first, “Coping with Floods, Earthquakes, and
Hurricanes: U.S. Hazard Mitigation Policy,” is an excellent introduction to
the evolution of hazard mitigation policy in the U.S., primarily since passage
of the Robert T. Safford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988.
It also provides a critical assessment of recent legislative and policy efforts
to reduce both the losses from natural disasters and the cost of disaster
response to the federal government. This section of the book provided me, as a
researcher and planner involved in hazard mitigation for more than 17 years,
with the first coherent explanation for the federal government’s drift toward
a rational approach to reducing disaster losses. Part II discusses
“Mitigation in Action: Six Disaster Case Studies.” The case studies are
fairly detailed accounts of mitigation activities following Hurricane Andrew in
Florida, the 1993 Midwest floods in Missouri and Iowa, the Loma Prieta and
Northridge earthquakes in California, Hurricane Bob and other storms in
Massachusetts, and floods and storms in Tennessee. Each of the case studies
provides an overview of the disaster event and a critical evaluation of the
mitigation plans developed following the event as required by Section 409 of the
Stafford Act. They also describe the mitigation activities funded by state and
local governments and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, the National Flood
Insurance Program, Community Development Block Grants, and other federal
agencies following the event. The case studies highlight many of the weaknesses
we have found with the hazard mitigation planning process mandated by the
Stafford Act and the use of Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) funds. The
case studies provide examples of what appear to be successful mitigation
activities, many of which were supported by HMGP and other federal programs.
They also chronicle creative ways of overcoming impediments to planning and
implementing sound mitigation projects that may become hamstrung by the lack of
flexibility common to some of the federal programs that fund hazard mitigation.
Hawaii’s Statewide Hazard Mitigation Forum will certainly look to these case
studies as we develop a statewide hazard mitigation plan. Part III goes beyond the case
studies and provides a comprehensive assessment of the national mitigation
system. It is based on a content analysis of 44 state mitigation plans required
under Section 409 of the Stafford Act and developed by 1995, and an analysis of
data on the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program provided by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency. It systematically evaluates the state hazard mitigation plans
and the implementation of national disaster mitigation policy at the state and
local level. To my knowledge, this is the first statistical analysis of FEMA-supported
mitigation planning, and the findings are quite revealing but not surprising.
For example, the vast majority of the state plans evaluated involved agencies
other than the emergency management agency and plans did not stress “the
mitigation aspect of ongoing programs existing primarily within other local
government functions, such as land use and environmental management” (337).
Teams involved in developing Section 409 plans could use the “Guide for
Describing and Evaluating Section 409 Plans” or some modification of it as a
guide for improving mitigation planning to avoid some of these shortcomings. The evaluation of the Hazard
Mitigation Grant Program itself is based on a database developed by the authors
and an analysis of HMGP expenditure patterns by disaster type, years declared
and years obligated, project type and category, FEMA region, state match, and
processing time. The conclusions drawn in the policy implications section of
Chapter 10 are very consistent with experience in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands
served by FEMA, and the recommendations at the end of the chapter, if
implemented, would clearly improve the now chaotic mitigation planning process.
These include the pre-identification of mitigation projects, a regional focus
that encourages cooperative efforts of state and local governments, coordination
of project identification, and broader participation in the planning process
(452-453). The final chapter in Part III
assesses implementation of the national hazard mitigation policy by analyzing
data on mitigation plans, HMGP expenditures, and surveys of federal and state
hazard mitigation officers. Using a conceptual framework developed from
literature on policy implementation, the authors examine federal, state, and
local agency commitment and capacity; disaster experience; and the political
context of the states, the quality of state plans, and the mitigation
implementation outcomes (455). As one might expect, local involvement in plan
preparation and state emergency management staffing levels and experience with
the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program were the most important factors in
successful implementation. The final part of the book
discusses ethical guidelines for hazard mitigation, a vision of what hazard
mitigation should be, and what will be required to get there. The discussion of
ethical issues in hazard mitigation is a refreshing attempt to put issues of
public costs and benefits and private risks and responsibility in a rational
framework. During the 1990s, these issues have been hotly debated in
Congressional deliberations over the National Flood Insurance Program, the
Natural Disaster Protection and Insurance Act, and proposed changes in the
Stafford Act. While the analysis of the ethical issues in Chapter 12 may provide
some light where there has mostly been heat, I am not sure members of Congress,
FEMA, the National Emergency Management Association, or other public interest
groups will simply embrace the ethical guidelines that are proposed. The country
would probably be much better off if they did. The guidelines include directly
involving individuals and groups affected by a disaster in mitigation
decision-making, giving public needs priority over individual wants and
encouraging individuals and groups to assume more personal responsibility for
safety and risk reduction (516-517). The final chapter provides a
vision for natural hazard mitigation in the U.S. through the development of
“sustainable communities.” It advocates changing the mitigation system in
the Stafford Act from one that is disaster-driven to one that is policy- and
threat-driven; changing the policy focus from “reacting to individual
disasters to a focus of living sustainably within an ecological system with
foreseeable variation”; and instituting “best management practices aimed at
developing resilient communities” (528). This vision, as the authors
acknowledge in the conclusion to Chapter 2, includes many of the themes and
planning directions discussed in Part I. The strengths of Natural
Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning are very clear. It is
a comprehensive and critical review of national mitigation policy and practice
that is well researched and documented, well organized, and well written. If the
book has a weakness, it is that it provides almost too much information to
digest. Clearly members of Congress
should read it, as should state and territorial legislators and FEMA and state
disaster management officials. Unfortunately, most will not take the time.
Hopefully, the authors will present this information in other forms because the
findings and the recommendations are relevant to both the formulation of
rational federal and state policies and the practice of hazard mitigation
planning and implementation throughout the country. I hope that state and local
government planners and regulators, insurance and building industry analysts,
and natural resource managers will also read the book. These audiences may not
be interested in a detailed analysis of the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and
implementation of Section 409 of the Stafford Act. However, if the vision of
sustainable communities put forth in the book is to become a reality, people
outside the disaster management community will have to take up the challenge of
planning and building them, or retrofitting the communities that are already
vulnerable. Houser: The Life and Work of
Catherine Bauer H. Peter Oberlander and Eva
Newbrun Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press 1999. 320 pages. $85 (HB). Review by Daphne Spain Department of Urban and
Environmental Planning University of Virginia Catherine Bauer could be
called the Joan of Arc of the American housing movement because she led the
charge for well-designed public housing against substantial odds during the
worst years of the Depression. Her publications, speeches, and lobbying efforts
played a significant role in passage of the landmark Housing Act of 1937. Rather
than burned at the stake, however, Bauer was raked over the coals by the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) when she was accused, then eventually
cleared, of Communist sympathies. Houser: The Life and Work of
Catherine Bauer restores Bauer to the intellectual prominence she deserves in
the housing movement. It also reveals her to be an unlikely candidate for
sainthood. Bauer was a smart chain-smoking vamp with all the privileges
conferred by wealth and a Vassar degree. She created her own professional niche
as a “houser” by taking architecture classes at Cornell and traveling
extensively in Europe. Her life blended equal parts of Mae West and Margaret
Mead with a dash of Dorothy Parker and a pinch of Simone de Beauvoir thrown in
for good measure. Bauer was a very complicated woman. Her mission, however, was
simple. Catherine Bauer wanted to convince Americans that the government was
responsible for providing livable housing for people too poor to compete in the
private market. Her opinions were based on analyses of successful European
examples she visited in 1930. She was particularly impressed with Romerstadt, a
government-planned community of 1,200 housing units located on 116 acres outside
Frankfurt, Germany. Economical, sturdy, attractive row houses were built on
municipally owned land separated from the city by a greenbelt reserved for
recreational and educational uses. She invoked the principles of good design she
observed at Romerstadt in her book Modern Housing, published in 1934. The book
was so successful it influenced the designers of some of the first federally
funded housing in the United States, the Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia. Modern Housing became the
“principal intellectual guide to the early public housing movement”
according to noted scholar Frederick Gutheim (109). Photographs from the book
were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Glowing reviews in the New
York Times, The Nation, and the New Republic insured that its message reached
both professionals and politicians. Bauer exploited her book’s substantial
reputation to lobby vigorously for national housing legislation. Her greatest
success was passage of the Housing Act of 1937. Later in her life, Bauer’s
credentials as an author and activist opened doors to academic positions at
Harvard and Berkeley. Planners liked her work
because she advocated federal housing legislation as the catalyst for local
planning efforts. Architects appreciated the keen sense of design she developed
on her tours of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe’s buildings
in Germany. Builders endorsed her philosophy that housing should be built in the
interests of both the laborers who produced it and the families who lived in it.
On her return from Europe, Bauer became executive secretary to the Labor Housing
Conference, the first chapter in her lifelong commitment to organized labor. Planners, architects, and
builders today should be equally interested in this book because Bauer advocated
planning housing in the context of neighborhoods. She believed that balanced
communities should provide housing, recreation, and work opportunities for every
income group. Thriving metropolitan housing projects would be linked to jobs,
schools, clinics, parks, and playgrounds through a coordinated transportation
system. In many ways Bauer anticipated the current clamor for sustainable
neighborhoods. Oberlander and Newbrun do a
good job of documenting Bauer’s contributions to American public housing
policy. Their archival research is supplemented by interviews with more than 50
of Bauer’s friends, family, and colleagues. They also provide a selected
bibliography of 115 publications Bauer produced between 1928 and 1964. The book
also contains the occasional aggravating omission. The Housing Act of 1937, for
example, is typically known to Americans as the Wagner-Steagall Act, yet is
never cross-referenced as such. The entire index, in fact, is frustratingly weak
for an academic audience. Some tantalizing lapses also occur. For example, we
see passing reference to Bauer’s “A Citizen’s Guide to Public Housing”
in the chapter about her marriage to architect/planner Bill Wurster. She gave
the booklet to her new husband, along with Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of
Cities, as examples of what he should be reading (199). Oberlander and Newbrun
offer no other details about this publication. Yet if Bauer considered it
significant enough to recommend to her husband, in the same league as
Mumford’s, it must have been one of her best works. And why on earth did she give
her husband a book written by her former lover? Bauer and Mumford’s affair was
such public knowledge that the authors easily reconstructed it from
correspondence and interviews. In one exchange, Catherine and Lewis spelled out
“the F word” to describe that morning’s activities explicitly for the
benefit of their anticipated biographers. Mumford’s wife Sophie once met
Catherine at a party and remembered they had been wearing the same style dress.
It must have been an ideal relationship for Mumford. Sophie bore his children
and his indiscretions, while Catherine was his muse and lover. The prose
describing these events, alas, is less passionate than Bauer’s life. Bauer and Mumford obviously
influenced each other’s ideas and writing. Yet, like Simone de Beauvoir and
Jean Paul Sartre, Mumford did most of the writing and got the lion’s share of
the intellectual credit, while Bauer worked largely behind the scenes and
produced only one book. Bauer accepted the inevitable constraints of Mumford’s
marriage, but indulged her Mae West side through friendships and sexual
relations with other men. She clearly relished her good looks and liked to
flirt. When her sister Betty learned that Catherine was getting married, Betty
said she was so surprised “you could have knocked me over with a small housing
pamphlet” (196). Bauer shared her sister’s
sense of humor. She teased Mumford in dozens of letters (that he kept and
annotated for posterity), referring to him as a “victim” of her love. A year
after her marriage to Wurster, Bauer wrote to a friend about her ambivalence
toward children, confessing that she would probably have children more as an
excuse to get out of meetings than from any “very gnawing maternal instinct”
(203). Thus did Dorothy Parker’s sharp wit merge with Margaret Mead’s
professional persona. Mead was a pioneering female academic and public
intellectual who was also apparently a reluctant mother. Bauer died as dramatically as
she lived. In November 1964 she hiked alone up Mount Tamalpais, near the
Wurster’s retreat at Sea Drift, and disappeared. Two days later her body was
discovered by one of the 250 faculty and students from Berkeley who gathered to
form her search party. Her sister wondered whether Catherine had committed
suicide due to depression over her husband’s failing health. If so, Bauer
ended her career at age 59 the way she began it when she became a “houser”
in her early 20s—on her own terms. What Your Planning Professors
Forgot to Tell You: 117 Lessons Every Planner Should Know Paul Zucker Chicago, Illinois: APA
Planners Press 1999. 211 pages. $26.95 (PB) Review by Terry Szold Department of Urban Studies
and Planning Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Throughout history, exalted
leaders occasionally share wisdom with their minions, thereby ensuring that
their legacy will not be entirely filtered through the critical lens of critics
and historians. Whether by self-appointment or by popular demand, Paul Zucker, a
planning practitioner and management impresario, has decided to share life
lessons based on his colorful and sometimes tumultuous career. Speaking of color: while most
of us have been advised not to judge a book by its cover—it’s hard not to in
this case. The brightly colored cartoon-style of the book’s cover, and the
large fonts used in the titles, immediately signal that this not a typical
planning text. It’s about having some fun—and perhaps learning a few things
along the way. As Eric Kelly rightly observes
in the introduction, the book has little to do with lessons or knowledge that
your professors failed to impart. The title is simply a hook to snag the
unsuspecting reader, a fun moniker for humorous tales of life-learning. Former
Massachusetts governor and presidential aspirant, Michael Dukakis, provides a
forward to the book that serves as a general blessing for its author and their
work together as young lions committed to public service in Brookline,
Massachusetts. For the most part, each of the
short chapters are vignettes and mini-parables drawn from Zucker’s
professional experience in the many diverse settings in which he has worked.
Most seasoned practitioners and managers will easily relate to the range of
issues covered by Zucker during his tenure in the various places that he served.
Some of the chapters and lessons reflect both his resounding successes, as well
as some highly visible faux pas. Chapters and lessons are
divided into the major career installments of Zucker’s career. Part 1 yields
two lessons, and focuses on Zucker’s decision to move from architecture to
planning—he can’t draw! In Part 2, a few bits of wisdom from his Bucks
County planning experience are offered, but there are no stunning ideas that
emerge here. In Part 3, Zucker pursues and completes his planning degree at
Berkeley. He studies with planning luminaries such as Jack Kent, and discovers,
by observing the guest lectures of local area planning directors, that most are
bureaucratic and bland—a trait that Zucker believes need not be a prerequisite
associated with such professionals. In Part 4, stories from his
early career period and halcyon days in Brookline provide a short and nostalgic
look back at lessons from formative years. Zucker had the privilege of working
with MIT’s John “Jack” Howard, who apparently imparted much wisdom to
Zucker. There are a few nifty lessons on learning that one is not indispensable,
saving trees, making little plans, and avoiding too much complexity in drafting
zoning rules. From Brookline, Zucker takes a very brief detour to Washington,
D.C., working as a special liaison to Ladybird Johnson and the Capital Planning
Commission. In Part 6 of the book, perhaps
the most fun to read, Zucker shares a variety of experiences as Marin County’s
planning director. It is in this section that one senses his future interest and
preoccupation with what makes organizations work. Lessons range from unusual but
successful methods to recruit staff talent, innovative ways to preserve open
spaces, and other winning ideas such as building bridges with those who oppose
your ideas (including those who want to fire you!). Speaking of firing, Zucker
decides to violate one of his cardinal rules—the one about not mixing planners
and politics—and runs against the Chairman of the Marin Board of Supervisors,
who previously voted for his ouster as planning director. This chutzpah is
classic Zucker, and the story is worth the price of admission. With typical
candor, Zucker admits that egotism, not altruism, was his prime motivation for
running. After losing the election, Zucker was promptly fired by the Board. The
chronicle of this humorous volley into politics closes with the following
Zuckerism: “If you are going to shoot the king, make certain you hit him.” From Marin County, Zucker
takes a position assisting a Hispanic community development corporation. There
are a few cute stories here about fund raising and business development schemes
(which I will not give away). But one senses that Zucker is out of his element
here, and the lessons are not particularly memorable. Alas, the lessons offered in
the last three sections of Zucker’s professional life, as he moves toward his
successful consulting career, are not as engaging as the earlier sections. The
lesson captions that serve as codas to the chapter headings seem flatter, and
the packaged wisdom grows a bit tiresome. Some of lessons drawn from his Tucson
and San Diego experience are too self-congratulatory. The final chapter on his
consulting life, Zucker gets more serious in tone. He decides to suspend the
“fun” here, and appears to be marketing his management ideas to his captive
audience. But his fast and easy approaches and remedies are too simplistic and
self-serving. In lesson 110, he solves the problem of a slow permit logjam in a
nameless city by suggesting to the mayor, who has an aversion to hiring more
city staff, that consultants be used to speed things along. Zucker’s lesson:
“Every problem has a solution, no matter how elusive it may seem. Be the one
to find it.” See how easy all of this planning management stuff really is? It is better not to view
Zucker’s life lessons too seriously or as prescriptions to remedy troubled
places or planning organizations. Many of the lessons offered are meant to be
humorous insights taken with a dose of levity. Perhaps Zucker, after reading
this review might offer an additional lesson to this writer: Lesson 118:
Reviewers should not take themselves too seriously! From Aztec to High Tech:
Architecture and Landscape Across the Mexico-United States Border Lawrence A. Herzog Baltimore, Md.: The Johns
Hopkins University Press 1999. 212 pages. $39.95 (HB) Review by William J. Siembieda City and Regional Planning
Department California Polytechnic State
University-San Luis Obispo
Many sayings and little stories (dichos) express the tension felt by
Mexicans in their relations to the U.S. These include “poor Mexico so far from
god, so close to the United States” (i), and that of the well-fed Mexican dog
who was living in the U.S., but decided to return to Mexico because there “he
has the freedom to bark” (206). Larry Herzog’s book From Aztec to High Tech:
Architecture and Landscape across the Mexico-United States Border provides us
another view of this tension in the form of the border’s built environment and
cultural landscape. Herzog approaches the study of
urban landscapes through understanding of Mexican culture, as it “imposes
unique systems of beliefs on buildings and streets, on the use of public space,
and on the larger design of the city” (11). A main theme is that the rich
history of Mexican city design and architecture evident in the country’s
interior areas is a strong factor in the struggle to develop a sense of place in
border cities.
Offered up here are the historical forces involved in making what Herzog
terms the transcultural city (171). The trans-cultural city is formed by the
changing needs of the U.S. to use Mexican space and labor in creating places
that carry out functions not easily produced (or desired) in the U.S. Each
historical period creates its own set of forces that dominate the built
environment. On the U.S. side, various aspects of Mexican culture are picked up
and absorbed into the architectural styles of the local city (formal and
vernacular).
The major chapters of the book focus on the built environment history of
Tijuana, the largest of Mexico’s border cities. The forces generated from its
neighbor to the north (the city of San Diego and the state of California) are
offered as representative of what occurs along the U.S./Mexico border in
general. This point is well told in the history of the 1920s Agua Caliente
casino. While it is always difficult to support general conclusions from case
observations, many of the factors that influence the Tijuana experience are also
in play in other paired border communities (i.e., El-Paso-Ciudad Juárez;
Laredo-Nuevo Laredo). The methodology employed is a mix of historical facts on
Mexican city design, case material on Tijuana and San Diego, and interviews with
Mexican and U.S. architects practicing in the San-Diego/Tijuana metropolitan
area.
A chapter on the elements that make up the Mexican landscape covers the
pre-Columbian and colonial memory of the country. The colonial period
establishes the use of the plaza as a organizing principle of city design, as
well as the dominance of church architecture. The chapter on the Mexican
architecture on the border combines a short history on major events forming the
border town relations.
A comparative chapter provides examples of buildings and neighborhoods
from California through New Mexico, including mission architecture, plazas, and
improvements in adobe construction. The architectural history of San Diego is
used in this chapter to reflect the desires of Americans to replicate elements
of its Spanish-Mexican-colonial past. This chapter provides the context for
discussing how Mexico influenced noted San Diego architects, including Irving
Gill and the designer of the famous Balboa Park, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.
A discussion of the three Mexican-American barrio periods provides an
important insight on community and neighborhood form. The post-1945 period is
characterized by what is called barriology: the “collective decision of find
ways to Mexicanize the bland spaces that had become home to the Chicano
population” (125). Activities such as fencing and adorning front yards to make
them into social spaces are examples of adaptation, or cultural marking of
space.
The less celebrated side of border spatial reality, the immigrant farm
work housing camps (cantones) and the irregular land subdivisions (colonias) are
briefly covered along with a description of living conditions. Both settlement
types represent expressions of the search for shelter on the part of poor
working class Mexicans in the U.S. border states. (A more extensive treatment of
colonias can be found in Ward 1999.)
A chapter entitled “The Cultural Landscapes of North American Economic
Integration” addresses the process of integration and the impact of U.S.
culture on Mexico’s border urban landscape. Key elements explored are tourism
and shopping plazas. Tourism in border towns has two components: the
foreign-tourist stereotype of a Mexican street, and the attempt to bring
national cultural heritage to the border. Using the case of Tijuana’s
Revolution Avenue, we learn that a manufactured stereotype of rural Mexican life
and cheap trinket-ware is offered up to tourists. This, of course, is not true
or real, but a media image, a “frame” of reference that distorts Mexico’s
heritage.
As a contrast to Revolution Avenue is Mexitlán, a cultural theme park
designed to educate and entertain with content from the Mexico’s heartland.
This enterprise has not attracted many foreign tourists. It appears that
cultural tourism, at least on the border, needs to be defined narrowly in order
to meet the market test. Mexitlán’s inability to bring vernacular culture to
the North American tourist is not new. Prior attempts by the Mexican government
to present more accurate cultural content have also failed.
How then does the plaza, a basic element of traditional Mexican town
design fare along the border? Herzog points out that plazas, unfortunately, are
not important elements, but shopping malls are. An analysis of Tijuana shopping
centers demonstrates that U.S. style centers are preferred to more
“Mexicanized-colonial” centers.
A powerful chapter, “Culture and Place: The Border Architects Speak,”
is a series of interviews with Mexican and U.S. architects and planners. In the
voices of Mexican architects, we hear a longing to bring to the border the
richness embedded in Mexican cities farther south where one can have “a real
Mexican conversation”… and that “the essence of Tijuana can still be
Mexican” (179). A Mexican architect says, “So since we’re neither from the
north nor from the heartland of the south, things become difficult here in the
hour of architecture. We’re disoriented” (147). This disorientation, as to
where to focus a transcultural architectural style, is a consistent interview
theme.
From the architects of the north (all from San Diego), we hear a desire
to include in their work the essence of Mexico and its cultural traditions. What
they admire about Tijuana (and maybe by extension other border cities) is its
pedestrian vitality and its sense of color. Street placement, monu-mentalism,
and use of form guiding elements are valued here. Revolution Avenue, the
gaudiest of Tijuana’s major streets, is cited for its excitement. Yet, like
the Las Vegas “strip,” Revolution Avenue responds to tourism demands for
artificial diversion, not cultural authenticity.
In closing, Herzog argues that the San Diego-Tijuana border landscape
offers “a glimpse into the emerging prototype city in the next century—the
transcultural cities” (202). This argument is based on observation of only the
built environment. A more robust analysis of transcultural cities calls for a
discussion of the labor force (on both sides) as well as the type of transaction
flows that ties the cities together. The tension that exists at this
intersection of cultures is real. It reflects the memory of the past (the Aztec)
and the desire for better future (the high-tech).
This work presents some important messages including the difficulties in
understanding a country’s culture simply from its border towns, and the
immense influence that economic dominance plays in social relations,
place-making, and architectural form (the same can be said for relations between
countries such as Germany and Czechoslovakia). This book makes a solid
contribution to the literature related to border studies, and raises many
interesting questions on how to craft urban design policy appropriate to
emerging transcultural cities.
This is an ambitious book touching on many subjects related to border
history, landscape, cultural, and social relations. The reader looking for
indepth analysis and examples outside the San Diego-Tijuana region may not be
satisfied with this volume. The book is for the reader interested in cultural
landscapes, ethnic studies, or border planning and has something for those
studying development and change. Good companion reading from a broader societal
perspective includes Marilyn Davis’s Mexican Voices: American Dreams (1990)
and, for greater coverage of the Texas, New Mexican and Arizona experience, Dan
Arreola and James Curtis’s The Mexican Border Cities (1993). n References Arreola, Dan, and James
Curtis. 1993. The Mexican Border Cities. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Davis, Marilyn. 1990. Mexican
Voices: American Dreams. New York: Holt. Ward, Peter. 1999. Colonias
and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico: Urbanization by Stealth. Austin:
University of Texas Press. Neighborhood Recovery:
Reinvestment Policy for the New Hometown John Kromer New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press 2000. 243 pages. $55 (HB), $22
(PB) Review by Barbara Lukermann Center for Urban and Regional
Affairs University of Minnesota In this book, Kromer provides
a valuable addition to the literature on neighborhood disinvestment and what it
takes to turn around this process. As stated in his introduction, the book is
“part war-story“ recounting his experiences as the director of
Philadelphia’s Office of Housing and Community Development under Mayor Rendell,
“part how-to manual” for practitioners who work in city bureaucracies (and
who hope-fully will be in positions of leadership), and “part advocacy for
more effective public policy” (2). The three parts are well glued together in
a seamless transition from one to the next in each chapter. The Philadelphia
experience is readily translated into a series of “lessons learned” that are
useful for anyone’s hometown. The book is light on academic bibliography but
rich in experiential learning that has important implications for theory and
conceptual frameworks.
This is a thoughtful reflection on what-has-worked-and-why from someone
who has been a neighborhood organizer, a campaign volunteer, and the head of a
large city agency. Written in a style that makes for relatively quick reading,
the book is likely to serve the needs of several audiences. It will be a useful
addition for teaching college courses on community and economic development
(particularly useful for workshops or studio projects in planning and design
programs) as well as valuable reading for practitioners working in the trenches.
I recommend it for elected officials whose role in sustaining policy is key, and
Kromer does an excellent job of illustrating the interdependencies between
planning and politics. One important lesson learned, according to Kromer, is the
value added by having eight years of sustained leadership and commitment to a
neighborhood recovery process and the trust levels created between a mayor and a
planning director. Repositioning a neighborhood’s role in the economy cannot
be achieved over the short run, and it is unlikely that new ideas will be
accepted and acted upon if that trust is missing. The author makes effective use
of a technique of starting chapters by describing a situation and then taking
that unique experience to illustrate broader trends, principles and policy
implications. In some respects Kromer follows in the footsteps of Allan Jacobs
(1978) in applying this technique, but without Jacobs’ detailed case
studies—only a snippet that serves as a backdrop to points he wants to make
later in the chapter. The snippets are useful for the “how to” part of the
book. For example, Chapter 2 discusses what a neighborhood strategic plan should
accomplish and how it should be designed as a marketing and presentation tool
but begins by showing how students worked with community organizations and city
staff in Philadelphia to assist in that process.
I found the first half of the book to be more powerful than the last. In
these early chapters, we get more emphasis on the ingredients necessary for
successful intervention, how (and why) times have changed so that strategies
that worked in the 1960s and 1970s will not work today, and how strategies that
work in one location will not necessarily work in another. In other words, one
size does not fit all when it comes to creating an action plan. On the other
hand, Kromer clearly proffers his views on what should be the generic underlying
principles for intervention. He has an interesting, but not particularly
innovative chapter, on community development corporations (CDCs), in which he
points out that CDCs operate in weak markets and “cannot realistically be
expected to have the effect of pumping up property values” (124). His view is
that CDCs have limited capacity and should not be allowed to expand into being a
new “neighborhood level bureaucracy” (116).
Later in the book, the author shifts more directly to housing issues with
a lot of detail on the pros and cons of federal housing policies (public housing
and Section 8) and homelessness. Racial issues and integration at the
neighborhood level are not given much prominence. In these later chapters, we
get a lot of normative statements on what ought to be and the discussions on
advocacy and grassroots participation with interesting examples to illustrate
opportunities and pitfalls. The chapters give flesh to many insights put forward
elsewhere in the literature but with no sudden “ah-ha, now I finally
understand how it works!” His description of “pay-off advocacy” as the
inappropriate use of litigation by advocacy groups suing him and his agency to
provide more housing for homeless households tell us once again that where you
stand depends on where you sit. He does make a good point that successfully
defending practices and resource allocations within a city is only practical if
there is a well-articulated set of neighborhood strategies in place.
Chapter 3, “Trophies and Landmarks,” is particularly intriguing and
should generate a lot of debate. His assertion that a city should divest its
charitable contributions programs (i.e., funds going to nonprofit neighborhood
social service organizations) because it drains limited resources for housing
production is likely to raise several eyebrows. His example of how a city can
maximize its borrowing capacity through the HUD Section 108 program was news to
me, although maybe not to others working in the field. In this chapter, he also
comes up with a number of useful terms. He defines a trophy project as having
strong political support but not meeting basic underwriting standards (82). Many
practitioners will have their own stories to tell on trophy projects. A landmark
is a “signature” venture identified with a mayor’s leadership and Kromer
tells us that every mayor should have one identified within the first 18 months
of taking office—preferably a housing production activity as a top community
development project. This is the Mayor’s legacy for the community but needs
the synergy of personal choice combined with staff capability to deliver and the
timing of the venture. Kromer used housing initiatives for his examples, but
this is also true for initiatives such as riverfront development.
Overall, this author tells a persuasive story with a lot of pithy
findings that practitioners will be able to relate to and learn from. It is
certainly a book I want for my own bookshelf. n References
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