The Profession of City Planning: Changes, Images and Challenges: 1950-2000, edited by Lloyd Rodwin and Bishwapriya Sanyal.
New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research. 2000. 416 pages. $49.95 (hardback), $29.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Lewis D. Hopkins
Professor
Department of Urban and Regional Planning
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The stated intents of the five parts of this collection of thirty-five essays from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty seminar are to provide (1) a historical perspective, (2) images of the profession from the inside, (3) an examination of sectors such as housing and environment, (4) images of the profession from the public, and (5) future challenges. The result is a kind of scatter diagram of what many major players in the field find important to say. Authors include Judith Innes, Donald Schon, Robert Yaro, Is Stollman, Chester Hartman, Anthony Downs, Martin Wachs, Bennet Harrison, William Alonso, John Forester, Ann Markusen, Michael Teitz, and others mentioned specifically below. There is, however, relatively little direct engagement between authors or direct interpretation of any patterns that emerge. The essays do, however, provide focused and useful disagreements as illustrated below.

The intended audience is not explicitly identified, but many of the essays retain the spontaneity of a seminar. Thus, other academics and graduate students have the opportunity to sit quietly in the back row. Most of the images of practice and images of public perception in parts 2 and 4 are short, pointed, and not otherwise available, but others are reprints or brief reprises of familiar authors and work. Other chapters are fully developed and refined articles such as Andrew Isserman’s review of economic base studies and Leonard Ortolano’s review of environmental planning in part 3. Selections from this book may be useful in courses, but the combination is too idiosyncratic for wide use in courses as an aggregate.

The editors’ essays sandwich the contributors and, more by contrast than interpretation, provide a way to identify emergent themes. The lead essay by Lloyd Rodwin compares planning to economics, political science, philosophy, and literature as described in a series of essays in Daedalus (Winter 1997). Rodwin argues that five issues—“what the focus of the field ought to be; whether adequate attention was paid to the basic professional, or service, functions; the key interest groups served; and how to equilibrate professional skills and [intellectual] capital formation with ethics and values” (pp. 13-14)— characterize the recent history of these four fields and of city planning. Thus, planning faces dilemmas more similar to other fields than is sometimes assumed.

Three themes emerge from Rodwin’s history of planning: (1) the demise of physical planning as comprehensive planning failed to sustain its claims in practice or intellectually, (2) a shift from design and engineering to social science to build an intellectual basis for the field, and (3) a centering on the substance of urban and regional problems rather than on planning as an approach to problems. These themes tie planners to social scientists who, according to Charles Lindblom’s assessment of political science in the Daedalus (Winter 1997) series, lack credibility as experts because they are scholarly purveyors of common or unnecessary knowledge. Several of the essays in parts 2 and 4, especially those by Allan Jacobs, Witold Rybczinski, and Alex Krieger, call for a return to expertise with physical development as a substantive focus and plans as a procedural focus. Markusen provides a provocatively different perspective on the aspirations and successes of economics and planning in terms of philosophy and craft.

Bishwapriya Sanyal’s closing essay is wide ranging. In considering briefly the success of planning as a field, he makes surprisingly strong claims for its accomplishments. He is fully confident that we have solved the problem of commitment to equity. He argues that advances in environmental impact assessment, dispute resolution, and real estate analysis demonstrate that planning’s contributions to intellectual capital in the past fifty years are greater than those of political science or philosophy. Other authors of preceding essays are less certain on either count.

Sanyal notes that one of the motivating questions for the seminar was future challenges that suggest changes to planning curricula. Acknowledging that the preceding essays reveal little call for such changes other than familiar advocacy of more physical design or more social commitment, Sanyal identifies three challenges: “a new synthesis of physical and social planning,” “new procedural theories about” effective planning, and “new normative theories to justify government involve- ment in shaping the destinies of cities and regions” (p. 313). These challenges, “if not addressed, eventually will fracture the fragile intellectual coherence of the profession” (p. 313).

Sanyal’s prescription for the first, in simplified terms, is studio classes that bring together design processes and systematic knowledge from the social and environmental sciences. Such studios (or workshops) have been used frequently at many programs since at least the 1970s, which does not mean that they are a bad idea, but they are hardly a new idea to face a new challenge. This approach has also been among the most successful integrators of physical planning and community social action, as exemplified by the East St. Louis Action Research Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and similar programs elsewhere, many tracing their roots to the 1960s.

Sanyal addresses the second challenge by attacking current planning theory as too focused on inequity and too abstracted from practice. Ironically, Sanyal’s conclusion seems to be that the major issue of concern is how planners gain autonomy to make plans. Much of recent planning theory, which he largely rejects, focuses on how much autonomy is appropriate and how it is and should be achieved in practice. His claim that the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) requires “at least one course” in planning theory is incorrect. The PAB has no requirements for courses per se, only guidelines for subject matter that must be addressed in the curriculum in aggregate. I doubt his assertion that theory, statistics, and microeconomics are the core curriculum for most planning programs. The PAB guidelines include structure and function of human settlements; history and theory of planning processes and practices; administrative, legal, and political aspects of plan making and policy implementation; problem formulation, research skills, and data gathering; written, oral, and graphic communication; collaborative problem solving, plan making, and program design; synthesis and application of knowledge to practice; and values and ethics. Each accredited program ensures that its curriculum exposes all of its students to these components.

In addressing the third challenge, Sanyal treats “planning, defined broadly, as government intervention” (p. 327). The essays by Allan Jacobs, Nathan Glazer, and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., recognize distinctions among planning, regulation, and government. Jacobs advocates plans. Warner notes that people like making plans but not regulation or government. Glazer describes a public perception of planning as bothersome regulation. Sanyal, avoiding these distinctions, argues, “the most important challenge for the planning profession” is to create among citizens “a worldview that government, market, and civil society must complement each other” (p. 332). He sees the “the reconstruction of a normative argument for govern- ment intervention in the economy and society” (p. 332) as an important focus for a coherent identity, curriculum revision, and intellectual capital formation in the field of planning.

This argument suggests that the most important intellectual capital challenge of the field of planning is identical to one of the fundamental questions of political science. If, as Sanyal contends, political science and economics with tremendous intellectual resources have failed to add intellectual capital in the past fifty years, why should we redirect the efforts of planning to political science? Is the opportunity implied by Warner and Jacobs potentially more productive? Recognize that people like to plan—privately, as community groups, or with government—and that people care about their local physical and social environment. Build intellectual capital for a profession that has confidence in its expertise to use plans to create healthier and more equitable human settlements. In this view, regulation and government are relevant but are not the foundation of the profession.

The strength of this collection is the strongly stated and diverse views. The book demonstrates the potential for productive disagreement but leaves the task of bringing it into focus largely to the reader.

Renewing Hope within Neighborhoods of Despair: The Community- Based Development Model, by Herbert J. Rubin.
Albany: State University of New York Press. 2000. 320 pages. $73.50 (hardback), $24.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Pierre Clavel
Professor
Department of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University

From the standpoint of neighborhood organizations, the question that dominated their agendas from the 1960s on was how to give voice to the poor while the power and funding lay in other, often hostile, hands. This was a problem in the 1960s, when the advocate planners first started in large numbers. It became even more of a problem in the 1980s. It was not simply that the federal government hoped to defund protest; a large part of the academic establishment theorized the difficulty, if not impossibility, of its task.

Renewing Hope within Neighborhoods of Despair: The Community- Based Development Model argues the contrary point. Herbert J. Rubin not only strengthens the evidence that a form of neighborhood organization went through a robust increase in numbers and capacities during the 1980s and 1990s, but also provides a cogent theoretical argument why this form of organization did so without fatally compromising its original redistributive and democratizing missions.

Renewing Hope is among the most important pieces of evidence for the trajectory of one side of the grassroots movement in the United States. The book is about “community based development organizations” (CBDOs), mainly community development corporations (CDCs). A few score of these, offshoots of the 1960s poverty programs, started businesses and provided services in poor neighborhoods with federal funding during the 1970s. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan’s budget director proposed to “defund the left,” one would not have had much hope for their survival.

Instead, they multiplied. There were two thousand CDCs by 1990, and as many as thirty-six hundred in 1997 (National Congress for Community Economic Development 1989). For reasons that are only partly understood, federal government hostility, rather than eliminating the majority of the CDCs, stimulated a wave of state and local support. Foundations responded to their calls for aid. Cities opened up their funds. Advocacy organizations created more CDCs that began to provide services, particularly the development of affordable housing as rehabs and small developments of new units. For this, they received encouragement from the 1986 federal tax reform creating the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC), which made possible the creation of pools of funding that CDCs could use as well as profit from developer fees. At about the same time, a wave of bank mergers triggered the mechanism of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Community development forces complained that any favorable results tended to come after time-consuming local organizing, but many found that CRA organizing was as valuable for the creation of a local constituency as for the funding it produced.

Rubin picks up the story at the end of the 1980s, when he began interviewing CDC leaders within driving distance of his job in the sociology department at Northern Illinois University. He went to seventeen cities in Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio. He financed almost all of the work himself. He interviewed people in seventy-three CBDOs and forty-one support organizations, foundations, and “intermediaries.” He traveled to meetings of the industry association, the National Congress of Community Development Organizations. He interviewed several hundred people and created 204 transcripts totaling 2 million words, transcribing one-third of it himself. The entire project took Rubin one decade to complete and has to stand as one of the important research efforts connected with the field of city and regional planning.

By the time Rubin was doing his interviews, there was some soul searching within the community development movement and the configuration of organizations that constituted it. CBDOs experienced pressure to operate more efficiently and, in particular, to achieve a larger scale of production in terms of bricks and mortar. Responding to these pressures resulted in a kind of “professionalization” of the organizations. Staff members neglected organizing and even neglected relationships with their governing boards of local residents, so that over time their political bases might weaken. These developments caused bitter complaints, and many debates occurred in the professional and trade association literature.

Rubin’s research documents some of this but also reports counteracting moves. After pushing organizations to achieve larger scale, foundations also responded in some cases by supporting organizing. Umbrella organizations appeared, themselves taking on the organizing and political advocacy roles while CDCs stuck to construction and building developer roles.

What no one really knows is the extent to which the CBDOs generally are maintaining their roles as part of a general democratizing force at the grassroots, as opposed to so much focusing on “production” that their erstwhile membership is turned into apathetic consumers. The anecdotal evidence is that both things are going on, but it would be a massive job to collect enough evidence to tell for sure. Moreover, even if we had “objective” data—say, from surveys—we might not know how to interpret them. And we are doubly baffled by the state of social theory. Most of the main approaches suggest that democratizing forces at the grassroots will be few and far between and will not last long. But here, Rubin offers a different kind of help: a theoretical interpretation of his evidence that suggests some hope for democracy in the neighborhoods.

The theory with which Rubin begins is called “new institutionalism,” a development in sociology in the past few decades that posits a world of organizations interacting loosely in networks. But some organizations are larger than others, the theory goes, and these set the agendas for the smaller, weaker ones. It is not a level playing field, and events are explained or predicted for the larger set of organizations based on the policies and agendas of those larger organizations.

Rubin, applying this theory to the development of the CBDOs over the past twenty years or so, finds an elaboration according to the dictates of the theory. The CBDOs begin to grow somewhat as the (larger) funding intermediaries set up by foundations begin to take up the slack in affordable housing finance and take steps to implement the distribution of funds made available by the LIHTC. There is then some evidence of pressures to avoid grassroots organizing, to professionalize the CBDOs at the expense of alienating the membership bases. But Rubin also documents the ability of many CBDOs to innovate and influence the direction taken in the community development networks overall, despite their often small size and power relative to the other larger units providing funding and political authority. What explains this?

Rubin suggests an interesting theory, one that is missing in the theoretical apparatus with which he begins. At the risk of oversimplification, I will suggest four main ideas in summary. (1) The more powerful parts of the community development network—governments, foundations, and intermediaries—formulate funding strategies that are oversimplified or even destructive, such as the pressure on CBDOs to achieve large-scale production targets at the expense of local consent. (2) Nevertheless, these powerful organizations are relatively open to ideas from the grass roots, perhaps realizing the complexity of urban problems and the need to get local consent to succeed. (3) “Organic intellectuals,” individuals drawn from the neighborhoods or identified with them through long association and trust, oppose the funders and frame issues and formulate positions that can influence the network as a whole, despite the inequalities in power and resources that exist. This idea, loosely drawn from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, is oddly lacking in the work of mainstream American academics—not only the work of the new institutionalism scholars in sociology but also other fields in which scholars have attempted to work on the community development movement. (4) Because of their success in formulating alternative strategies of use compared with the larger network, “local knowledge” is valued at the top as well as the bottom of this unequal system and leverages resources downward. This formulation is a gross oversimplification. Rubin’s idea of how the weak influence the mighty is richly laid out—much of it in the words of the participants themselves.

One can find fault with this volume. Rubin may have collected 2 million words of transcripts, but too much remains in the book, leaving one wanting to read more of Rubin and less of his informants—despite the vibrant immediacy of contact the quoted passages convey. And I feel that Rubin gets Gramsci partly wrong: it is inconceivable that the Italian thinker, steeped in the work of Marx, Lenin, and Luxembourg, as well as Croce, did not find the work of “intellectuals” rooted in the class economic basis they came from and received support from. Gramsci did not subscribe to class determinism, nor would one call him a “structuralist,” but he was aware of and paid attention to the economic roots of political positions and influence. Rubin does not address this: what emerging class or other economic force nurtures the CBDOs and their intellectuals? This question should be the next one for Rubin and others to address.

But Renewing Hope is a terrific book, pathbreaking in sociology and urban studies and planning alike. I hope many people read it.

Reference

National Congress for Community Economic Development. 1989. Coming of age: Trends and achievements of community-based development organizations. Washington, DC: National Congress for Community Economic Development.

Unhealthy Places: The Ecology of Risk in the Urban Landscape, by Kevin Fitzpatrick and Mark LaGory.
New York: Routledge. 2000. 288 pages. $75.00 (hardback), $22.99 (paperback).

Reviewed by Wendy A. Kellogg
Associate Professor
Maxine Goodman, Levin College of Urban Affairs, Urban
Planning, Design and Development
Cleveland State University

Once in a while, a book from outside the mainstream of planning provokes us to look anew at our understanding of the urban condition. Unhealthy Places: The Ecology of Risk in the Urban Landscape is such a book. Sociologists Kevin Fitzpatrick and Mark LaGory provide an interesting and stimulating exploration of health and the city that deserves the attention of us all. While we have vanquished many of the sanitation problems in major cities of the United States that gave rise to planning in the nineteenth century, we are only beginning to understand the effect of environmental hazards and ambient conditions on human health and well-being. The authors combine the “mosaic” framework of landscape ecology with urban and medical sociology to help us understand more about the city as human habitat. The authors make the argument that one’s health is most directly influenced by one’s geographic place in a metropolitan area. Health, which is defined as the full flowering of human physical and psychological potential, is a result of the effects from hazards to which one is exposed mediated by the resources one can mobilize to protect oneself, both of which are determined in great part by one’s place in the city.

Chapter 1, “The Importance of Place,” presents this argument in detail, drawing on the work of Wilson (1987, 1996), Massey and Denton (1993), and Beck (1992). As a factor in determining one’s physical and psychological health, place (physical territory socially, culturally, economically, politically, and psychologically defined) matters. Place of residence has the most dramatic consequence for individual health and well-being, shaping the prevalence and incidence of risks for a host of physical and mental health conditions. In U.S. cities, spatial and nonspatial barriers to health and well-being persist because residential space is most fundamentally defined as segregated space. These spaces create a topography of risk and protection that tends to follow the shape and structure of the larger society.

Place of residence structures both “life chance and risk” and “social resources.” Each place we live in has a certain risk (or probability) of hazard (a situation that could lead to damage or harm to a human being or population). Risk might come from the environment (e.g., chemical agents, pollutants, bacteria), from the quality and arrangement of the built form (e.g., building quality, density, landscaping), or from conditions that overload people psychologically (e.g., density or number of people). “Risk spaces” develop out of inequalities of place and class, are not distributed randomly over urban space, and give rise to spatially differentiated health outcomes. Each place is also a “resource space” in which goods and services capable of protecting inhabitants from hazards are distributed. Following Wilson’s (1996) argument, inner-city neighborhoods are less able to respond to hazards because they are socially disorganized. Protection from risk, in terms of availability of health care professionals, community resources, and supportive networks, tends to be inversely related to risk and risk spaces. The greater the spatial segregation in a given city, the more likely those at greatest risk for harm will have the least access to social resources to protect themselves. Inner-city residents thus face an “urban health penalty” (p. 17), which is a result of the hazards to health that are concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods and the constraints to protection that arise from spatial isolation and economic disadvantage.

Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the relevance of place for people. Chapter 2, “Humans As Spatial Animals,” addresses the role of territoriality in humans, including how the spaces in which we reside affect our thought and action. Chapter 3, “The Ecology of Everyday Urban Life,” describes the micro level of internal building environments and residence and the macro level of the features that differentiate one urban space from another, which together create the varied experiences of urban life. Spatial differentiation of these features influences choice and action with regard to health risks and protection.

Chapters 4 and 5 present a theoretical framework for the ecology of health. Chapter 4, “The Sociology of Health,” reviews four models of health: health beliefs, health lifestyles, risk and protective factors, and psychosocial resources. The authors present a synthetic model of the ecology of health, primarily based on the risk and protective factors model, that serves as the basis of their place-based explanation of health disparities that exist among urban dwellers. Chapter 5, “Cities As Mosaics of Risk and Protective Factors,” describes the urban environment as these factors are spatially differentiated according to concentrations of poverty and segregation by race and class. Chapters 6 and 7 apply the framework to a set of health-related issues for several inner-city populations: the socially disadvantaged, with particular attention to the homeless and racial and ethnic minorities, and the elderly and children.

Finally, chapter 8, “The Ecology of Health Promotion and Service Delivery,” proposes a strategy for health promotion in the inner city. The authors argue that comprehensive community-based approaches to health are likely to be the most successful because these recognize individual choices with regard to risk and protective health behaviors in the context of social and environmental conditions rooted in one’s territorial place in the city. Place-based health care delivery and health promotion strategies can address both socially based and individually based behaviors and serve to strengthen community institutions.

The one concern I had is that because the book presents such a bleak picture of the urban conditions that lead to poor health, a reader with narrow exposure to urban literature might conclude that cities are no place to live and are better off abandoned. Many affluent city residents have taken just such an approach.

The strength of the book comes from its effort to cut across traditional academic and policy boundaries, integrating public health literature with that of landscape ecology, environmental quality and risk, sociological studies of race and class, and spatial differentiation studies in geography. Such a holistic approach is critical to our understanding of the health of urban residents. The authors bring alive the life of the urban inner-city resident with all its hazards and opportunities as these are constrained by the characteristics of place. The book is relevant for planners interested in public health, environmental justice, sustainable cities, and community development. Because its stated purpose is to understand the role that place plays in the health and well-being of urban residents, the book should also be of interest to planners concerned with spatially differentiated phenomena as these affect urban residents. For planners and planning academicians interested in urban sustainability, this book successfully illustrates why “sustainable cities” efforts must include concern with the conditions that promote and support healthy existence for residents. It helps us to understand the full effect of city living on more vulnerable populations so that we might plan for cities that provide a decent quality of life and health for all.

References

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. 1993. American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, William J. 1987. The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

¾¾¾. 1996. When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Vintage Press.

Confronting Suburban Decline: Strategic Planning for Metropolitan Renewal, by William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips.
Washington, DC: Island Press. 2000. 384 pages. $35.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Ethan P. Seltzer
Director
Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies
Portland State University

William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips have provided us with a useful and interesting book, Confronting Suburban Decline: Strategic Planning for Metropolitan Renewal. Their latest collaboration tells the story of a kind of suburban reality that is different from the one most often associated with metropolitan America. In the typical story of post–World War II cities and suburbs, disinvestment, decay, abandonment, and concentrated poverty are the hallmarks of central cities, while growth, stability, peace, safety, and prosperity are the rule for suburban realms.

However, the story simply does not work out that cleanly. By assessing the relative health of communities in a metropolitan area through a variety of measures, Lucy and Phillips assert that we have entered a “postsuburban era,” a time when some suburbs are beginning to decline at faster rates than central cities and some central cities are outpacing their suburban neighbors. Furthermore, the dynamics of development and change in metropolitan areas in this postsuburban environment provide cause for reassessing some of our most closely held assumptions about patterns of metropolitan development, household locational choice, and regional governance.

The notion that things are changing in metropolitan America is not new to readers of the rapidly expanding literature on metropolitan regionalism. What Lucy and Phillips provide is a review of many of the key ideas associated with metropolitan spatial structure in light of changing demographics and household characteristics in what have previously been regarded, and often analyzed, as monolithic suburban realms. In a nutshell, suburbs simply are not what they used to be, and consequently our ideas about them and how they fit into a metropolitan context are in need of serious realignment.

The book begins with an overview of what the authors document as “suburban decline.” The point is not that all suburbs are declining, but that a good many are, particularly as they reach a critical point in their life cycle where major reinvestment is called for. The authors then present these postsuburban community characteristics in the context of the dynamics that have yielded the continued outward expansion of metropolitan areas and urban sprawl. Here, the book provides a useful and relatively concise description of the forces and choices that have spawned metropolitan settlement patterns as we know them.

The authors then introduce a modified strategic planning model as the framework for investigating the causes and consequences of suburban decline. This presentation will look familiar to those engaged in strategic planning, with the familiar “strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats” analysis modified slightly to replace “threats” with “dangers.” The authors use the analysis of dangers as a diagnostic tool to understand the genesis of downward trends and to underscore the need to use that understanding of trends as a means for creating policy responses to counter decline or its antecedents. The message is to take action, and the authors usefully employ strategic planning to remind the reader that their analysis is intended to promote thoughtful change.

The book then turns to two chapters that present various facets of the notion of suburban decline and the postsuburban era. Through extensive use of case studies, drawn from the area in and around Washington, D.C., and the states of Maryland and Virginia, the basic characteristics of suburban decline are identified and described. Here, the authors describe how different communities have experienced different results in the postsuburban era and how efforts to create compact, mixed-use communities have enabled some jurisdictions to perform far better than might ordinarily be expected.

The authors use this examination of local cases to expand their view to a set of national comparisons of metropolitan areas, cities, and suburbs. Longitudinal analyses of census data are used to examine why some cities do well, why and how some suburbs decline, and how housing conditions can serve as indicators (or not) of potential or real decline.

In the final two chapters, the authors present case studies of nine responses to the circumstances that can yield suburban decline and a set of policy prescriptions for countering suburban decline in metropolitan America. None of the prescriptions—compact regional development, promoting reinvestment, creating mobility choices, place making, improving educational opportunities, and regional revenue sharing— will look unfamiliar to those concerned with metropolitan growth and change, and the authors point this out. What is different is the development of a rationale for these policy proposals, most often linked with concerns about urban decline, based on an analysis of the sources and manifestation of suburban decline.

This, in fact, is the strength of this book. Rather than suggesting that residents of a region ought to act together because a new political coalition will force them to, or because of arguments based on city-suburban interdependencies, this book provides a new and compelling rationale: the current alignment of market forces and institutional mechanisms will not simply isolate and destabilize cities, they will actually take an even bigger bite out of suburbs.

This is not an argument that will work for everyone. In fact, there are few arguments for regionalism that will ever work for everyone. However, it should be useful for creating new support in some suburban quarters for thinking and acting regionally because it carefully assesses the implications of (erroneously) assuming that suburbs are immune to experiencing the economic and consequent social devastation that has fallen on many central cities.

That said, there are several weaknesses that ought to be kept in mind. First, issues of race receive little attention. The history of suburbanization is not simply one of markets and transportation systems, and this book does not adequately bring issues of race, much less ethnicity, into the discussion of current realities or future prospects. This omission ought to be addressed in future editions.

Second, this book presents a tremendous amount of information, but the information is presented in a confusing style— I found myself getting lost in the hierarchy of section headings—and the use of maps and other appropriate graphical tools is insufficient. Many of the pictures added little to the presentation. Often, I found myself paging through chapters hoping to find maps or other summary tables and illustrations for what was being described in long and dry passages.

Third, although I support the intent of using strategic planning as a vehicle for ensuring that readers see this work as the foundation for creating new policy initiatives, at times it seems a bit contrived. The often incessant plea to “be strategic” seems out of place and mostly out of context and is ultimately loosely connected to the concluding chapters.

That said, this book should be on the bookshelf of anyone concerned about metropolitan growth and change, regional planning, and metropolitan spatial structure. The authors provide an intriguing and carefully executed analysis of the prospects for aging suburbs in a metropolitan context. It would be a worthy addition to a graduate seminar or class, most effectively as part of a survey of emerging work on metropolitan planning, policy, and politics.

Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice, by Norman Tyler.
New York: W. W. Norton. 2000. 254 pages. $25.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Gordon Scholz
Professor
Department of Community and Regional Planning
University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Norman Tyler’s Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice is a welcome addition to the few books that are adaptable for general purpose texts in historic preservation courses. This concisely written introductory text includes a broader range of content than most other historic preservation textbooks that have attained prominence in the field over the past dozen years—Fitch (1990), Lee (1992), Murtagh (1997), Schuster, de Monchaux, and Riley (1997), and Stipe and Lee (1987). Tyler authored a 1994 edition of his book under the title Issues in Historic Preservation that is no longer in print.

Tyler’s stated purpose is to provide a “reference for students, home-owners, local officials, and community leaders” (p. 9). To satisfy this targeted readership, Tyler has written a practical introduction to historic preservation using nontechnical language. Tyler, a registered architect and certified planner, teaches in the historic preservation master’s degree program at Eastern Michigan University, where he is also director of the urban and regional planning program.

The book’s abbreviated coverage of a wide range of topics—historical architectural styles, land use law, building materials technology, real estate economics, architectural design, and economic development, to name a few—may cause specialists in these areas to wince. Nonetheless, this book offers in one source a useful introductory discussion of selected aspects of these subjects specifically relevant to historic preservation. Faculty using the book as a textbook for teaching historic preservation courses likely will add supplemental readings to provide desired emphases and depth to their courses, expanding on the basic framework provided by the book.

The book’s eleven chapters begin with a brief discussion of preservation philosophies, followed by a short chapter on the history of preservation in the United States. While some other texts touch on historic preservation in other countries, Tyler focuses solely upon the U.S. preservation system.

Chapters 3 through 10 address applied preservation topics: historic districts and ordinances, preservation law, documentation and designation of individual historic properties, key characteristics of architectural styles, design issues (e.g., contextualism, design guidelines, etc.), preservation technology, downtown revitalization, and economics of preservation.

The chapter on preservation economics describes the evolution of federal tax laws pertaining to historic preservation and includes a case study pro forma analysis of a commercial rehabilitation project. Even though Tyler’s brief explanations of tax law provisions and pro forma analysis may be insufficient for some readers, he successfully captures the essential points of these important subjects relative to historic preservation.

While focusing mostly on the nuts and bolts of historic preservation, the book also connects preservation to a wider scope of issues that are of concern to planners. In chapter 9, “Downtown Revitalization,” Tyler discusses the health of downtown areas in terms of overall planning policy, emphasizing that “a program intent only on saving downtown buildings is not enough, for the issue is not just the deterioration of the physical environment of the downtown but also the decline of its economic and social environment” (p. 172). The National Main Street Center’s four-point downtown revitalization approach (organization, promotion, design, and economic restructuring) is used to illustrate the need for holistic thinking when communities wish to pursue historic preservation in traditional downtown areas. The book’s closing chapter, “Other Preservation Issues,” also touches on a range of broader issues, including the relationship of preservation to rural areas (i.e., the protection of prime agricultural farmland from development—or sprawl), gentrification, preservation and minorities, preservation and the federal highway program, tourism, and economic development. Even though each of these issues receives barely a page—some only a paragraph—in this chapter, their mere inclusion in the book adds content that is probably not discussed enough in most historic preservation courses.

One of the book’s two appendixes lists two dozen U.S. and international organizations involved with preservation information dissemination, research, training, lobbying, and networking. Brief descriptions, addresses, and Web sites of these organizations are included. The second appendix lists graduate and undergraduate programs in historic preservation at U.S. universities. Because academic program offerings in historic preservation are continually changing, this appendix should have also referred to the more comprehensive and detailed list of programs that is published annually by the National Council for Preservation Education in the National Trust’s bimonthly Preservation magazine.

The book’s back matter also contains a useful list of about seventy sources for further reading, including nine preservation-related periodicals and their Web sites, nine architectural style identification references, and nearly fifty books on a variety of subjects related closely to historic preservation.

A five-page glossary of architectural terminology is helpful to readers unfamiliar with the language used to describe building components and architectural styles. In addition to written definitions of terms, Tyler includes two dozen of his own sketches to illustrate selected terms.

The book contains 116 illustrations, 103 of which are the author’s freehand pen-and-ink sketches, evenly dispersed throughout the book. While many of these drawings are useful in depicting buildings and places mentioned in the text, some, such as the sketch of the worker chiseling a masonry joint or of the character actor settler at Plimoth Plantation, are marginally informative. The sparingly rendered and controlled style of the drawings suggests that they are tracings of photographic images. While these drawings achieve graphic consistency throughout the book, the abstraction inherent in the sketches unfortunately compromises full representation of building materials and contextual elements; photographs would have provided more of the unedited visual information that is useful for understanding and appreciating the significance and context of historic buildings and places. The graphic mix incorporated in chapter 5, consisting of two Tyler sketches, a historical photograph, a lithograph, a measured drawing sketch, a Sanborn map vignette, a documentation drawing, and a digitized photograph, provides a visual richness that could have enhanced the book’s other chapters as well.

Overall, Historic Preservation is a good, basic textbook choice for historic preservation courses in either planning or architecture academic programs. Its succinct, straightforward, and practical style will be most appealing to faculty and students who are interested in teaching and learning about the professional practice aspects of architectural preservation and historic preservation planning.

References

Fitch, James Marston. 1990. Historic preservation: Curatorial management of the built world. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Lee, Antoinette J., ed. 1992. Past meets future: Saving America’s historic environments. Washington, DC: Preservation Press.

Murtagh, William J. 1997. Keeping time: The history and theory of preservation in America. Rev. ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Schuster, J. Mark, John de Monchaux, and Charles A. Riley, II, eds. 1997. Preserving the built heritage: Tools for implementation. Hanover and London: Salzburg Seminar published by University Press of New England.

Stipe, Robert E., and Antoinette J. Lee, eds. 1987. The American mosaic: Preserving a nation’s heritage. Washington, DC: US/ICOMOS.

Tyler, Norman. 1994. Issues in historic preservation. Columbus, OH: Greyden Press.