Social Work Practice with Immigrants and Refugees, edited by Pallassana Balgopal.
New York: Columbia University Press. 2000. 288 pages. $49.50 (hardback), $21.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by John Gaber
Associate Professor
Department of Community and Regional Planning
University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Social Work Practice with Immigrants and Refugees (2000), edited by Pallassana Balgopal, comes at a time when city and small town social planners are coming to grips with a new infusion of international residents into the United States. Social planners are having to think more about the social and economic impact as well as the opportunities associated with these new residents in their communities. This edited volume takes an ambitious approach in trying to capture the essence of immigrants and refugees who have arrived in the United States since 1965. The book uses 1965 as a beginning point of reference because it contends that the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act had a significant impact in altering the type of immigrants who have came to the United States. According to Balgopal, “the social welfare needs of these immigrant groups are often different from those immigrants before 1965, so social work responsibilities have changed as well” (p. 2).

The book is organized into seven chapters. Outside of the introductory chapter (“Social Work Practice with Immigrants and Refugees: An Overview” by Pallassana Balgopal), chapter 6 (“Refugees in the 1990s: A U.S. Perspective” by Nazeen Mayadas and Uma Segal), and the conclusion chapter (“Conclusion” by Pallassana Balgopal), the remaining four chapters focus on the more substantive elements of contemporary immigrants. These four chapters analyze immigrants by their geographic and ethnic origins: Asian immigrants (chapter 2), Latino American immigrants (chapter 3), African-descent immigrants (chapter 4), and European immigrants (chapter 5).

What ties all of the chapters together is the ecological perspective to which the contributing authors tried to adhere. The ecological perspective analyzes the relationship “between individuals and their social and physical environment” and how the mixture of these elements flow in and out of harmony as individuals and/or the environment change (p. x). It is the ecological perspective that sets up the reader for the false expectation that the substantive focus of the manuscript will be in line with a type of settlement house movement analysis of immigrants and refugees in various U.S. settings. Unfortunately, that never materializes because the authors only analyze the characteristics of specific immigrant groups without relating them to the social and physical environment (place). This shortcoming ties into the goal of the book, which focuses on helping social service professionals to gain a better understanding of “immigrants from a particular region and how their demographic and cultural characteristic affect their adaptation to the new environment” (p. xi) rather than providing an environmental scan.

Each of the substantive chapters is generally organized into three sections. The first section provides a historical/demographic overview of the different subcountries and how their immigration patterns to the United States have changed in the past 35 years. The second section of these chapters looks at the “salient cultural factors” (culture, traditions, values, etc.) that are shared by all the different countries in a particular world region, for example, the Pacific Rim. Reading some of these “salient cultural factors” was problematic in terms of how most of the authors would combine disparate immigrant/refugee groups into one subpopulation. For example, in chapter 2, the authors generalize that Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodia, and Laotian immigrants can all be lumped into “Asian immigrants.” Any informed social planner working with immigrant and refugees communities knows that generalizing such a wide range of immigrant and refugees groups as Asian is not useful because the lived experiences of Vietnamese, for example, are not transitive to those lived experiences of Koreans. Furthermore, such a generalization is insulting to the particular social, economic, cultural, and political achievements and barriers that affect immigrants and refugees differently per country of origin (Light 1972; Light and Bonacich 1991; Portes and Rumbaut 1990). Another difficulty in combining different countries into one group is that it also combines immigrants and refugees into a single population. Immigrants and refugees come to the United States for very different reasons. Immigrants “more or less voluntarily choose to move,” while refugees “are by definition involuntary newcomers” (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001, 27). Research analyzing the social and economic impact of the resettlement of refugees in the United States is just starting to emerge, and more work is needed to flesh out the differences and similarities between refugees and immigrants (Gaber 1999; Pfeifer and Jackiewicz 2000). The only exceptions in the manuscript that differentiate immigrants from refugees are Longres and Paterson in their analysis of Latino American immigrants and Mayadas and Segal’s overview of refugees resettled in the United States. The final section of the chapters identifies micro-social work practices that are to assist social service providers on how to better serve the needs of a particular regional immigrant, for example, cultural mediators for European immigrants.

Social Work Practice with Immigrants and Refugees is not without it’s gems. Longres and Patterson’s chapter on Latino American immigrants and refugees is nothing short of excellent and should be mandatory reading for all social planners interested in a concise analysis of issues related to illegal/legal Latino immigration and the resettlement of Latino refugees. The chapter covers several Latino issues ranging from elderly, gender, labor markets, and lesbian and gay issues. The other gem in the edited volume is Madados and Segal’s analysis of refugees in the United States. This is a well-researched chapter that provides a great historical discussion of refugees in the United States as well as an overview of different policies and programs that relate to the resettlement of refugees in the United States. The authors in this chapter make a very important observation regarding the significant difference between refugees and immigrants.

What ever the outcome, it is important to remember that the refugee experience in itself is terrible, and when coupled with the reception in the resettlement country, surpasses the negative experiences of other immigrants and minority groups. This is a crucial point to bear in mind when designing services for the refugee population. (P. 213)

The only minor problem with this chapter is it’s weak empirical analysis on the enumeration of refugees coming into the United States. This research should be coupled with some empirical analysis of the resettlement of refugees in the United States (e.g., see Gaber 1999). As Table 1 shows, the number of refugees resettled in the United States can have a sizeable impact on cities and towns.

Social Work Practice with Immigrants and Refugees is designed for undergraduate and graduate students. I cannot recommend this book beyond undergraduate students due to it’s overly basic take on refugees and immigrants in the United States. I highly recommend the two good chapters in the book, but I cannot recommend this book to be used as either a textbook or a resource book for immigrant/refugees planning researchers. The book is timely in terms of topic, but the value of the material is limited.

Appendix.

Pertinent (Refugee-Related) Web Sites

www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/orr
www.searac.org
www.immigrationforum.org
www.unhcr.ch/
www.usinfo.state.gov/

References

Gaber, John. 1999. Refugees in Western Planner states: Who are they and how do we plan for them. Western Planner 20 (7): 7-9.

Light, Ivan. 1972. Ethnic enterprise in America: Business and welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Light, Ivan, and Edna Bonacich. 1991. Immigrant entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles 1965-1982. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pfeifer, Mark, and Edward Jackiewicz. 2000. Refugee resettlement, family reunion, and ethnic identity: Evolving Patterson of Vietnamese residence in two American metropolitan areas. The North American Geographer 2 (1): 9-32.

Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben Rumbaut. 1990. Immigrant America: A portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Suárez-Orozco, Carola, and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco. 2001. Children of immigration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement. 2001. “Refugees Resettled in the U.S. 1983-2000.”

The Economics of Planning, by Eric J. Heikkila.
New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers. 2000. 228 pages. $24.95 (hardback).

Reviewed by Ardeshir Anjomani
Professor
City and Regional Planning Program
University of Texas at Arlington

The field of economics has taken tremendous strides for more than a century and has contributed greatly to the understanding of almost all aspects of life. Its contribution to city and regional planning, perhaps, should be rated as one of the highest compared with the contribution of the other fields of social science. As such, students of planning need to have a major exposure to principles of economics and their applications to planning problems and issues. Most accredited graduate planning programs either offer one or more courses that cover these principles and their applications or cover different segments in a session or two of a related course, such as housing or transportation. Therefore, there is definitely a need for textbooks similar to the one being reviewed to help instructors teaching these principles. However, economics, like most other disciplines, has its own views and biases. Historically, up until recently, economists have been ignorant of space and spatial analysis, which are two of the fundamental forces in urban planning. Similar to what Eric J. Heikkila states in the introduction to his book regarding planning practitioners and economics (p. xix), economists dabbling in the field of planning without truly understanding the principles of planning may produce seemingly sophisticated analysis and discussions—as found in some of the articles that appear in our allied and planning journals—that will be of little use to urban planners. The role of this review, then, is to discuss Heikkila’s book and its potential use for students of planning and also to provide possible direction to authors of this new generation of useful books for planners, including the future editions of this welcomed book.

Heikkila has written a useful book that is both informative and enjoyable to read. The book is intended to both teach the principles of economic reasoning and focus on its applications to a set of topics likely to be of direct interest to planners. The book tries to achieve this without assuming any prior knowledge of or training in economics on the part of the reader and attempts to approach this in a highly graphical orientation with a minimum of mathematical equations. The topics include land use zoning, urban structure, housing, traffic congestion, public goods, fiscal impacts, cost-benefit analysis, entitlements, and institutions. The author states, “While the primary purpose of the book is formal instruction on the economic foundations of planning and development, it is also written as a kind of handbook for [the planning] practitioner on the economics of planning and urban development” (p. xxi). Heikkila also states that a practitioner confronting a particular problem can consult that particular chapter of the handbook without needing to read the previous chapters. (However, the book constantly refers to previous and upcoming chapters and diagrams, sometimes even without giving their numbers.) The author anticipates that many students will take the book out of the classroom and into their professional practices. Even though the book in general is good, this objective of meeting the need of professionals and being useful in professional practice is the book’s weak point. As such, I will review each chapter and attempt to stress the strengths and weaknesses of each individual chapter, especially with regard to this objective.

The author tackles the difficult task of introducing planning graduate students, who come from a variety of backgrounds, often with no knowledge of economics, to the fundamental tools of economic analysis in chapter 1. He does a good job in explaining total, average, and marginal functions. Similarly, this is followed by a section that in a clear way introduces the students to the concept of present values using a simple and interesting planning-related example. However, the explanations get fuzzy and somewhat confusing toward the end of the chapter. This fuzziness, along with not labeling some of the graphs and the author’s assumption that students know some of the concepts, such as annuities, makes understanding this section difficult.

Chapter 2 deals with economics of land use zoning. The chapter attempts to deal with economic efficiency of zoning (land use allocation) by using variations of a single diagram based on an extensive modification of an instructional article by the author in this journal. The chapter proceeds with an abstract example of allocating two land uses, total residential and total commercial land uses, in a city with a fixed supply of land. This well-written chapter uses interesting examples to introduce the relationship of demand and marginal net benefit, market inefficiency and market failure, and planning-related intervention in market. In sum, this chapter is a good intellectual exercise for conveying economic principles rather than helping planning practitioners in their land use planning efforts. This is not the author’s fault but, as indicated earlier, is the shortcoming of the economics discipline (especially the microeconomics approach that underlies several chapters of this book) that, for the most part, has been ignorant of space and its implications. Urban planners very rarely are concerned with total residential versus total commercial (or other) land uses in a city. In fact, it is well known that the majority of cities zone a sizable percentage more than what is needed for commercial use. In terms of land use, cities are most often concerned with the spatial distribution, adjacency, dimensions, and space requirements of different land uses, given the locational characteristics of different areas of the city.

The third chapter provides an overview of the economics of housing. This chapter discusses in detail the multifaceted housing stock and the flow of housing services as the fundamental issues related to housing. Important related topics such as rent control, mortgage financing, and owning versus renting are covered thoroughly in this chapter. Significant topics, such as housing abandonment, filtering, neighborhood effects, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, are missing from the housing chapter; however, these could be supplemented by a housing chapter from an urban economics textbook such as Mills and Hamilton (1994). The housing stocks and flows section provides useful general financial information about dividends, capital gains, and the like. The author explains all this very clearly and succinctly. Perhaps it would have been better to have this very useful section as part of the introductory chapter (key technical concepts) so that students in courses in which the housing chapter is omitted would not miss this section.

Next (chapter 4) is a chapter that briefly touches on some of the aspects of urban structure. Accessibility and bid rent curves in monocentric cities, the impact of improvements in transportation technologies on rent gradient, and subcentering and urban sprawl discussions are dealt with in this chapter. However, allied discussions, such as density gradients (population, employment, firms, etc.), market areas, and activity location patterns are missing from this chapter. All these topics are important and can be very useful for practicing planners; however, the chapter can be used as a good introduction only for some of the topics.

The urban structure chapter is followed by a chapter (chapter 5) on public goods and public choice. As in other chapters that are more of an economic nature, Heikkila does a good job in explaining some of the complex concepts. The topics include public versus private and goods versus providers, which discuss the important concept of rival and nonrival goods, Tiebout hypothesis, and privatization debate.

Chapter 6 is about the economics of traffic congestion based on expanding the general treatment of the topic in urban economic texts. This chapter is an improvement on an instructional article by the author in this journal that uses a series of diagrams to illustrate the economic principles of traffic congestion. These diagrams facilitate discussions related to a base policy of do nothing and the subsequent three policy alternatives of expanding supply, restricting demand, and implementing tolls to recapture the dissipated benefits lost to congestion. The chapter concludes with a section comparing the four alternatives. The chapter does a good job of treating the subject of congestion; however, other important implications of economics for transportation planning, such as analysis of demand for transportation and optimum size of transportation facilities, have not been dealt with in this book.

The next two chapters, “Rethinking Fiscal Impacts” (chapter 7) and “Understanding Cost-Benefit Analysis” (chapter 8), are not very suitable for this book, since this is a textbook to familiarize future planners with economic aspects and methods. Neither chapter teaches students what these topics are or how to do fiscal impact or cost-benefit analysis. The fiscal impact chapter is adopted from an article of which Heikkila is a coauthor and discusses the inadequacy of the conventional fiscal impact methods. However, the article and the chapter do not provide a solid implementable new way of estimating fiscal impacts. The discussions in the chapter are in the early stages of development, and it seems they have not been fully operationalized yet. The explanations and examples are scanty at best, and it is difficult to get a complete picture of their theory and applications from this chapter. The cost-benefit analysis chapter (chapter 8) covers interesting discussions, mostly related to the concept of shadow price, but also covers other related topics, including common mistakes in applications and distinguishing cost-benefit from other project evaluation methods. The chapter, although interesting, is on a different level than the rest of the book.

Finally, the last two chapters cover the economics of entitlements (chapter 9), potentially a useful chapter for planners, and the new institutional economics (chapter 10). This later chapter, again somewhat on a different level, revisits Coase theorem and transaction cost. It also contains a section on planning for developing and transition economies. This latter section, as opposed to the Coase section, which will be somewhat difficult for students, provides a good ending for the book, especially considering an interesting explanation of a set of propositions by Douglass North. The entitlement chapter (chapter 9), however, suffers from a heavy emphasis on marginal analysis, a lack of a direct planning-related example, and a problem mentioned earlier regarding the mainstream economic literature that seemingly has difficulty embracing space and spatial factors in economic analysis.

The overall emphasis of the book on marginal analysis would make the book difficult for planning students, the majority of whom do not have economic backgrounds. Being familiar with the “marginal revolution,” my experience in teaching similar materials is that these students understand analysis based on total cost or benefits much easier than the marginal costs and benefits. However, I concur that they should be exposed to marginal analysis, and for certain topics, when it is unavoidable, marginal analysis should be presented.

Heikkila, as one of very few economists directly involved in teaching and research in planning, has made a major effort to close the gap that exists between economists and planners. Overall, I think his book is a welcome addition to this newly recognized needed knowledge area, and it will serve planners well in their understanding the economics of planning. I would use the book in conjunction with similar books, such as Levy’s 1995 book, a microeconomics book written by a planner, in a semester-long course on the economics of planning. Similarly, several of the chapters can individually supplement reading materials in courses related to urban structure, housing, transportation, evaluation, and so on.

References

Levy, John M. 1995. Essential microeconomics for public policy analysis. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Mills, Edwin S., and Bruce W. Hamilton. 1994. Urban Economics. New York: HarperCollins College.

Open Moral Communities, by Seymour J. Mandelbaum. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2000. 258 pages. $30. (hardcover).

Reviewed by Robert Ogilvie
Assistant Professor
Department of City and Regional Planning
University of California, Berkeley

It is not until the fifth chapter of Open Moral Communities that Seymour J. Mandelbaum tells us that he thinks of himself as a member of a small community of urbanists who are concerned with theories of planning and who are heirs to the dream “that it is possible to develop a shared understanding of the social world” and “that the understanding will support a consensual repair of that world” (pp. 57-58). It is in this chapter that he begins to outline the guidelines that he feels will help us to achieve this dream. These guidelines involve the use of theories, stories, interpretations of time, planning tools, decision-making structures in cities, and plans for shaping myths and setting goals in pluralistic, present-day America. Until that point, Mandelbaum elaborates the theoretical underpinnings for this exercise in applied moral philosophy.

In this book, Mandelbaum brings together a series of essays written during the past twenty years that are united by their goal of understanding and creating open moral communities. Covering an incredibly wide intellectual terrain—from literary-like fables, stylized myths, and formal moral political philosophy to case studies of the MOVE firebombing in Philadelphia and New Jersey land use and urban policy in the aftermath of that state’s Supreme Court Mt. Laurel decision—Mandelbaum looks at American cities to understand why they have not developed a “synthetic conception and practice of communication planning” (p. 226). This breadth of terrain and time make for challenging reading. While the book is organized into three distinct sections—the theoretical first four chapters; the instrumental, subsequent six chapters; and the quasi-empirical final three chapters—pinning down the central argument takes some time, due to the multi-layered nature of the work and to the reflective voice that the author employs.

Unlike other members of this community of urbanists whose dream is grounded in the belief that one day, with the techniques of either deep moral communities or contractual communities, we can approach social consensus, Mandel- baum believes that in our large, pluralistic nation, we need to abandon the notion of attaining consensual social knowledge. Only then, he states, can we embrace the fact that “we live in worlds in which conflicting communal myths sustain and re-create one another, in which our instrumental judgements are intractably ambiguous and dilemmatic, and in which our plainest words are subject to diverse interpretations” (p. 59).

At the heart of his argument is the concept of the open moral community, which is the instrument with which we can develop a shared understanding of our social world and consensually repair that world. In an open moral community, association is essentially voluntary, and although the community’s origins may have been in a compact among the initial members, its maintenance depends on its strategic style, its practice. Thus, while the community may begin in compact, it lives in discourse. Community, for Mandelbaum, “is the construction of individuals and organizations as members with rights and obligations. If there are no members, and if there is no process to create and maintain rights and obligations, there is no community” (p. 227).

Early in the book, Mandelbaum outlines the issues with which those concerned with constructing such communities would have to concern themselves. These issues include changing the conditions of membership and terms of exclusion and altering the relations between members and nonmembers; altering the process of recruitment, socialization, and discipline; strengthening a community’s competence to command resources and to satisfy its members; shifting commitments to moral objects and the relations of objects and subjects; and changing the discursive practice of the community and its field (p. 12). Mandelbaum admits that this is a cryptic list that only hints at the techniques necessary for what is a large but contested task. Any more than this, he seems to fear, would smack of coercion, a charge that classical liberals love to level at communitarians.

Mandelbaum sees the open moral type of community as distinct from the other types, or myths, of communities—the contractual moral communities and the deep moral communities. Contractual moral communities are those that are voluntarily joined by members who agree to its practices and are the type that liberals, as typified by John Rawls, favor. Deep moral communities, on the other hand, are composed of people who share an identity as “a people.” The open moral community is the best possible realistic option for a pluralist society, one in which the boundaries are contested and emergent. That is because in America today, communities are overlapping, they are located in a shifting and amorphous field, they do not fully control their conversational forms, they mean different things to their different members, and their continued existence is predicated on the development of a bargaining process that leads to “a workable public discursive order” (p. 43).

Although the work of a planning theorist, Open Moral Communities engages very little of the planning theory literature, save for Mandelbaum’s own writings. Instead, the dialogue in this book is primarily with such political and sociological theorists as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Nancy Rosenblum, Robert Bellah, and Charles Lindblom. Mandelbaum is signaling a move beyond the confines of planning theory to the wider terrain of social theory concerned with urban life, with communication and with interpretation. His aim seems to be to bring the insights of the communicative turn in planning theory to the communitarian social agenda. This is a valuable service, as the communitarians could benefit from learning more about the significance of storytelling and of myth shaping for the collective social good.

Like the prescriptions of his communitarian brethren, Mandelbaum’s are classically conservative. Communities, as he notes, can be formed through compacts (i.e., social contracts) or through practices (i.e., discourse and ways of being). When they are formed and maintained through practices, as communitarians prefer, then the design of the new communities appears to be a classically conservative act, as “it appears to be engaged more with daily life than with commanding visions; with routines, social bonds, and the web of interactions (albeit new ones) more than with charisma” (p. 15).

This is conservatism that he seems comfortable with, as planning “is a cautious, petit-bourgeois craft” (p. 207). Due to the contingency of knowledge claims, “professional processes of intelligence and scheming” such as ours should “resist the reduction of ethical practice to strong mandates” (p. 207). This is a realistic and likely an accurate vision of planning and what it can accomplish in America today. Such caution is too bad, because while Open Moral Communities is full of sharp insights and although it suggests powerful ways to think about how we can reconceptualize some of the thorny social issues that we face in America today, it stops short of providing fully developed answers to the questions that it raises or to the dilemmas that it points out.

Small Town and Rural Economic Development: A Case Studies Approach, edited by Peter V. Schaeffer and Scott Loveridge.
Westport, CT: Praeger. 2000. 289 pages. $62.50 (hardback).

Reviewed by John C. Allen
Director
Center for Applied Rural Innovation
University of Nebraska–Lincoln

If you are looking for a handbook that touches on a wide variety of community and economic processes and philosophies, this book is for you. Whether your focus is community capacity building, planning street changes, enhancing economic activity in your community, managing local conflict, or recruiting large-scale industry, this collection of essays and case studies will be of value to you. Drawing on case studies from across the United States and Europe, the authors look at real-life examples of development in small towns and rural areas. The editors point out that the primary reason for their using a case study approach “is that the term ‘rural areas’ can easily mislead us into thinking of rural regions as homogenous places” (p. xiiii). This collection is aimed at reflecting the diversity among rural places with case studies of different industries, regions, and cultures.

The book is organized into three sections, the first of which deals with community capacity building and community engagement. Even though the second section contains examples of enhancing and maintaining existing local enterprises, the concept of community capacity and engagement is not lost. Here the authors argue that enhancing local enterprises goes beyond the old adage that most new jobs are created by existing businesses. They point out, quite accurately, that the argument needs to move beyond simply direct job creation to other factors; for example, jobs that are retained through maintaining local businesses are just as important as those gained through expansion or from start-ups or attracting a new firm to an area. In addition, the health of existing industries is a key indicator to potential investors as to how the community is prospering and in what direction development is headed within the area.

The book’s third section focuses on the area in which a majority of resources are expended in rural development in the United States—the recruitment of large-scale industry. In this section, the authors suggest that attracting large-scale industry is not the same as rural development. This portion of the book is the most sophisticated in terms of the breadth of perspectives presented. Here, the case studies range from recruiting agricultural processing facilities in the Great Plains to Letterfrack, Ireland, where a community development organization collaborated with Ireland’s Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology to invigorate the Irish furniture industry.

As the case studies unfold, Flora and Luther lay the foundation of building community capacity, stressing that community capacity building can be contrasted with technical assistance. They argue that technical assistance focuses on tasks, while community capacity building places emphasis on the process of community development. Not all of the authors follow this line of reasoning wherein capacity building is the primary goal. Also presented are offerings from several experts associated with universities or government, and their focus is on the technical expertise that an individual can bring to a community or region.

The case studies begin with a public meeting of local residents in Yuma, Colorado. The process is briefly identified, and a summary is included. Two important points are highlighted in the first several chapters. The first is the difference between community capacity building and technical assistance. The authors argue that community capacity building provides a platform for local people to identify and solve problems collectively, whereas technical assistance relies on “science” to solve the problem. The second noteworthy point is that community capacity building is not a onetime activity; it is a constant process of “massaging” community. While the overview essays and case studies are informative, the lack of a clear theoretical base is a bit troubling. As in community capacity building, it would have been possible to draw on interactional field theory as articulated by Ken Wilkinson (1991) in his book The Community in Rural America. As Wilkinson stated, “The community field . . .  represents the capacity of local residents to work together for their own well-being, and community development builds that capacity” (pp. 81, 91). Providing a brief theoretical discussion would add to the depth of the case studies and to an understanding of the subtleties one finds while reading how communities work toward a positive future.

The issue of public-private partnerships is addressed in several of the studies, including a community festival in Hawaii, a micro-loan program in West Virginia, and a Nordic community in which nonprofit organizations act on behalf of the public sector. This selection of case studies provides intriguing insight into the issue of structure when creating public-private partnerships that focus on development. Schaefer states that “the term ‘partnership’ has the further disadvantage of emotional connotations” (p. 187). The author states that often, economic development partnerships are between agencies and organizations that have never worked together, thus creating new and often difficult group dynamics that must be dealt with.

One great strength of this compilation of essays and case studies is the mix of success stories with those of development attempts that were not successful. The book is also organized in a user-friendly fashion, with each chapter including a short conclusion and summary section; the addition of study questions at the end of each chapter makes the book an excellent reader for planning, community development, and upper- division social science courses that emphasize community. Another strength is the stature and expertise of the authors themselves; some of the best rural development thinkers and practitioners in the country and around the world are represented.

Despite the strengths of the case studies, however, one important aspect of development is afforded only peripheral treatment. Missing is adequate theoretical support to enable the reader to better understand what is behind the different techniques or processes used by the practitioners. I found the lack of reference to theory or a conceptual framework to be the most bothersome aspect of the collection, although understandable given the usual constraints faced by editors to limit a volume’s length. As a result, the reader is frequently watching development attempts in very real communities but without the knowledge of the “insider” who understands why the community, the practitioners, or the government agency have chosen a particular direction.

Overall, this book will prove to be a valuable reference to scholars, students, and practitioners as they return to the case studies to see why a process worked or failed. Students will find the case studies a fast read; and with support from an instructor, they should gain a broader understanding of small-town and rural development. This book does one thing very well. It shows us that rural areas are very diversified and that no one technique or process works in all places at all times.

Reference

Wilkinson, Kenneth P. 1991. The community in rural America. Madison, WI: Social Ecology Press.

The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, by Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton.
Washington, DC: Island Press. 2001. 304 pages. $55.00 (hardback), $35.00 (paperback).

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.
New York: North Point Press. 2000. 293 pages. $35.00 (hardback), $18.00 (paperback).

Reviewed by Carl Abbott
Professor
School of Urban Studies and Planning
Portland State University

For the past decade, California-based Peter Calthorpe and Floridians Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have been preaching and practicing the New Urbanism. Here, in two new books, are their sermons and their good works—their manifestos for a better style of city making illustrated by examples of their regional plans, community designs, and planning ordinances. Both books are about sprawl: why we have it, what is wrong with it, how to end it. Each appends the Charter of the New Urbanism. They are designed to be readable and eye-catching, with lots of illustrations packed into volumes whose odd dimensions say, “Designer at work.”

Despite their common values and shared mission, the books are substantially different. In the distinction made famous by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Duany and Plater-Zyberk are hedgehogs. They know one big thing and they stick to it. Calthorpe and Fulton are a bit more foxlike, trying to show the interactions and tradeoffs among a larger number of problems. Suburban Nation starts at the microscale of individual neighborhood design and makes only token bows to the problems of regionalism. Regional City, as its title implies, starts at the larger scale of urbanized regions and offers prescriptions for improving a variety of urban districts.

In Suburban Nation, we learn that the design of contemporary American neighborhoods is bad, has been getting worse, but could be better if we changed our ways. The authors introduce the book as “a study of two different models of urban growth: the traditional neighborhood and suburban sprawl. They are polar opposites in appearance, function, and character: they look different, they act differently, and they affect us in different ways” (p. 3). The problems are rigid zoning, misapplied engineering standards, and building codes that make it easy to build sprawl and hard to build fine-grained neighborhoods. The social deadness of sprawl is the result of designing cities out of technical manuals rather than envisioning good places. The authors walk us through the problems of suburban zoning and transportation planning, offer timeless principles for livable neighborhoods, tout the importance of master plans, and advocate the new approach to land use regulation that Duany has been promoting for a number of years.

Because they have one point to make, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck pack a lot of punch into their pages. Anyone who has heard Duany speak knows that he is a persuasive phrase maker: streets are “traffic sewers” (p. 64); suburbia offers “no honorable sites for honorable buildings” (p. 35). The chapters are organized around lists of hits and misses, dos and don’ts. According to the publicity materials that accompanied my copy, the book has found many fans in the popular press.

This is a book by doers, not scholars. The authors know that there is a “healthy and natural” way for cities to develop. They draw on newspaper articles for examples, on polemical literature for arguments, and on classics of urban scholarship as touchstones rather than sources of analytical concepts. They accept popular myths (the existence of “road rage,” the General Motors conspiracy) that support their points. The bibliography has no references to the growing scholarly literature in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of the American Planning Association, and many other sources that try to empirically evaluate the claims of the New Urbanists. Since Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck “know” that suburbia is dysfunctional (p. 14), they do not need to prove it so.

Suburban Nation is at its best when dealing with design at the scale of the street and neighborhood. Its principles indeed encapsulate much of what we like about older communities and are similar to those described by journalist Mike Green- berg (1995) in Poetics of Cities: Designing Neighborhoods that Work. But the authors of Suburban Nation are essentially utopians. They rely on the compelling force of pure reason and have little interest in the messy processes of political change. Citizens need to see the light and demand change. State transportation departments need to cast off their highway building orientation: sure, but how? Tried to redirect a huge public agency lately? Seen a big bureaucracy that has easily reinvented itself? Problems of persuasion, power, institutional inertia, and community resistance are left by the side.

The message of The Regional City is complementary to that of Suburban Nation. Calthorpe and Fulton argue that twenty-first-century cities have to be understood, built, and managed as urban regions. In their organic model, historic city cores, aging suburbs, and edge cities are all integral parts of a larger whole whose boundaries span multiple counties. In effect, they want us to forget the metropolitan statistical area—a concept from the 1940s and 1950s—and look instead to the urbanized corridors and regions that the Census Bureau tries to capture as Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (CMSAs)

Their prescription is comprehensive planning that integrates neighborhood revitalization, suburbanization, transit investment, open space acquisition, school policy, and housing programs around a unifying vision of urban form. Linking planning for all parts of the regional city should be a common design ethic: that communities at the regional or neighborhood scale should have active centers, should respect their history and ecology, and should husband diversity. The challenge is to clarify the connections and shape both neighborhood and region into healthy, sustainable forms-into Regional Cities. The missing link for many communities has been the loss of some simple and basic urban-design principles. These principles are (as they have always been) to create places that are walkable and human scaled, that are diverse in population and varied in uses, and that are shaped around public spaces that are meaningful and memorable. (p. 8)

Each of these principles, of course, embodies values that challenge apparently common preferences for class-segregated communities of inward-turned houses for automobile-dependent households.

These authors cover more conceptual territory than Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck. They offer a quick argument for the reality of economic and ecological regions; assert the positive social consequences of good design and urban form; and summarize the policies that support such design, including urban growth boundaries, integrated land use and transportation planning, fair share housing, tax-base sharing, and public school reform. These are essentially the same principles, of course, that we find in Anthony Downs’s (1995) New Visions for Metropolitan America, Myron Orfield’s (1997) Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community & Stability, and David Rusk’s (1999) Inside Game/Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America.

What differentiates this book from these predecessors is its emphasis on the crafting of cityscapes and its abundant color illustrations of Calthorpe plans, proposals, and projects. At the heart of the book are detailed narratives of the steps toward regional city–hood taken in Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, with the first two drawing on some of the most important work from Calthorpe’s own professional practice. The discussions recognize that change comes through small increments that slowly build institutional and political momentum. But even for fractious Seattle, the portraits emphasize rationality: people visualize together, test scenarios together, plan together, and finally implement together. It may sound a bit too easy in summary. Where are the dissenting voices? What are the hidden agendas of the growth machine? Who loses or fears to lose in the preferred scenario? It is great that the Salt Lake City and Portland processes elicited survey feedback from 15 to 20 thousand people, but what do the silent millions think? Even for Portland, as “rational” a community as we are likely to find, the wheels are a little wobbly on the growth management/light rail juggernaut. This book describes the steps in our planning process but not our politics. In a word, I miss the detailed depiction of the everyday battles over land use that makes Fulton’s (1997) book on Los Angeles planning, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics or Urban Growth in Los Angeles, such a valuable read.

The remaining chapters briefly critique state and regional planning efforts in Florida, Maryland, and Minnesota; discuss infill and redevelopment of suburban “greyfield” sites such as closed military bases, outmoded industrial parks, and derelict shopping malls; and offer a hopeful description of the Hope VI program. The neighborhood discussions also draw on many Calthorpe projects, although with less detail than the Salt Lake City and Portland case studies. Readers need to be very careful in reading the captions on the color plates to figure out what exists only as a design suggestion, what is an adopted site plan, and what is actually standing. Someone unfamiliar with a particular city could easily read phrases such as “here a traditional mall and a strip retail center are transformed” (p. 142) or “crossing the highway is a new limited-access pedestrian street” (p. 145) and think that these features exist on the ground as well as in the virtual reality of Calthorpe’s drawings.

What goes around, comes around. The prescription in both books for planners to craft comprehensive regional designs sounds a lot like the goals of Edward Bennett, Thomas Adams, and Harland Bartholomew in the 1920s and 1930s. The idea of a “favored quarter” of a metropolis reworks Homer Hoyt’s sector model of 1939. Calthorpe’s Palo Alto plan and the Duany/Plater-Zyberk plan for Cornell, Ontario, look like sets of Clarence Perry neighborhood units of the sort that Perry advocated in 1929. I suspect that both author teams are quite comfortable with such comparisons, since one of their goals is to save cities from the abstraction of hyperdetailed zoning codes. My own experience in Portland suggests that they are on the right track and that designs—maps and renderings of urban places—are much more persuasive than disembodied policies.

Who are these books for? Their ideas are not so much new as comprehensively packaged and accessibly (and passionately) presented. I would not use either for a graduate planning class because of their tendencies to assert rather than analyze and because of the limited and idiosyncratic bibliogra-phies. Either might work well in an introductory class for undergraduates. The Regional City, with its wider range, would offer more points of attachment for lectures and discussion. A general reader might start with Suburban Nation, with its single line of argument, and then move on to Calthorpe and Fulton. I might also suggest that my sister-in-law, a township supervisor in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, give copies of both books to people she wants to convert to the cause; for her it would be a good follow-up to Tom Hylton’s (1995) Save Our Land, Save Our Towns: A Plan for Pennsylvania.

I do not want this review to sound cranky. I agree with the several authors about the social benefits of compact cities and traditionally designed neighborhoods. I also agree that a picture is often worth a thousand words of impenetrable zoning code. One of the challenges for planners trained in the social science and policy tradition is to realize the importance of visualizing future states and depicting them in concrete imagery, which is something that comes naturally to the architect-authors being reviewed. I would, as a citizen, be happy if these ardent sermons brought converts to the cause.

But this is also a review of nonacademic books for an academic journal. I worry, as a scholar, that we not repeat the suburb bashing of the 1950s, as detailed so nicely in Scott Donaldson (1966) The Suburban Myth. I want planning students to critique as well as accept the arguments for compact cities and New Urbanism. For example, F. Kaid Benfield, Matthew D. Raimi, and Donald D. T. Chen’s (1999) Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl Is Undermining America’s Environment, Economy, and Social Fabric is a far less sprightly read but does acknowledge that there may be evidence on behalf of competing arguments. So if I had an acquaintance or an undergraduate class who would read only one book on the subject, I would suggest Suburban Nation. As an accessible gateway for those who might want to pursue the topic, I suggest The Regional City with follow-up recommendations to Downs (1995), Orfield (1997), and Rusk (1999).

References

Benfield, F. Kaid, Matthew D. Raimi, and Donald D. T. Chen, eds. 1999. Once there were greenfields: How urban sprawl is undermining America’s environment, economy, and social fabric. New York: Natural Resources Defense Council.

Donaldson, Scott. 1966. The suburban myth. New York: Columbia University Press.

Downs, Anthony. 1995. New visions for metropolitan America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Fulton, William. 1997. The reluctant metropolis: The politics of urban growth in Los Angeles. Point Arena, CA: Solano Press Books.

Greenberg, Mike. 1995. Poetics of cities: Designing neighborhoods that work. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Hylton, Tom, ed. 1995. Save our land, save our towns: A plan for Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, PA: Rb Books.

Orfield, Myron W. 1997. Metropolitics: A regional agenda for community & stability. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Rusk, David. 1999. Inside game/outside game: Winning strategies for saving urban America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, edited by Nezar AlSayyad.
London: Routledge. 2001. 310 pages. $75.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Paul F. Wilkinson
Professor
Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University

The impetus for this edited book arose out of questioning “basic assumptions about the nature of national identities, national heritages, and the commercial dimensions of traditional environments” (p. vii). The chapters are based on presentations from the Sixth Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, held in Cairo, Egypt, in December 1998. (It is important to note, however, that unlike many edited volumes with origins in conferences, the authors were asked by the editor to rewrite their papers with a common set of themes in mind. The resulting superior quality of the book is evident.) Titled “Manufacturing Heritage and Consuming Tradition: Development, Preservation and Tourism in the Age of Globalization,” the conference had as a key theme exploring . . . how nations, regions and cities have utilized and exploited vernacular built heritage to attract international investors at a time of ever-tightening global economic competition, and how the tourist industry has introduced new paradigms of the vernacular and/or tradition, based on the production of entire communities and social spaces that cater almost exclusively to the “other.” (P. vii)

This book differs from recent books on the production of cultural landscapes and the making and selling of traditional objects in that its primary emphases are on the built environment and on tourism.

The book consists of five sections: a prologue setting the stage, three papers providing a theoretical context, two sections of three case studies each, and an epilogue. Representing a range of disciplines, the authors include backgrounds in architecture, planning, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, politics, tourism, and architectural history. The case studies span different types of environments, various scales of settlement, and a variety of geographical locales.

In the prologue, AlSayyad begins by stating that “the twentieth century has been the century of travel and tourism” (p. 1). As a result, many countries, especially those marginalized in the global industrial and information economy, have viewed tourism development as the only hope of surviving in the global era. With tourism having been described by other authors as an “unstoppable juggernaut, erasing all that is local and particular” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), AlSayyad points out that many nations are faced with an increasing demand for built environments that promise unique cultural experiences [for foreign tourists]. Many nations . . . are resorting to heritage preservation, the invention of tradition, and the rewriting of history as forms of self-definition. (P. 2)

Tourism development has consequently intensified, producing entire communities that cater almost wholly to, or are even inhabited year-round by the “other”. This new norm appears to be the outright manufacture of heritage coupled with the active consumption of tradition in the built environment. (P. 3)

AlSayyad then goes on to lay the stage for the rest of the book by presenting discussions of the intersections of manufacture, consumption, heritage, and tradition; historicizing the new tourist landscape; and presenting a typology of constructing the “other.”

The next section, titled “Tradition and Tourism: Rethinking the ‘Other,’” deals with conceptual frameworks of encounters with otherness that underlie tourism. Robinson focuses on the nature of international tourism, its role as a vector of cultural exchange, and the importance of the built environment in that exchange. He concludes that tourism involves unequal cultural relationships because it usually does not occur based on consent and frequently excludes mutual cultural understanding. From an anthropological point of view, Graburn then examines heritage, tradition, and consumption, concluding that heritage is both constructed and manufactured, created and re-created. Finally, Mugerauer focuses on the tension between modernity and traditional environments and peoples, arguing that because modernity negatively defines the other (i.e., the traditional) as lacking and disadvantaged, current forms of tourism do not allow for a true mutual appreciation of cultures. Instead, for example, local people dress up in traditional costumes for touristic consumption.

In the first of the two case study sections, titled “Imaging and Manufacturing Heritage,” the focus is on how heritage environments are manufactured. Gregory shows how “tradition” was manufactured and consumed in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt, particularly in terms of how Thomas Cook and Sons, the pioneering touring company, represented the colonial power of opening up the Nile River to the beginnings of mass tourism after a period of individual aristocratic tourists spent much time and money on tours for small parties. He does show, however, how Egyptian agents and actors resisted this colonial domination of the authentic Egypt. In contrast to the emphasis in the historical literature on tourism in the western United States in the nineteenth century as being focussed on the grandeur of the natural environment, Gruen shows that tourists visiting San Francisco were interested in not only the “world class” city image of early San Francisco as promoted by guidebooks and official publications but also the everyday life of the city that made it whole and vibrant. Last, Oliver’s chapter on open-air museums demonstrates that culture can be both literally manufactured and subsequently consumed but that this may be the presentation of a past that never existed. While such museums may prevent the destruction of parts of the historic built environment, they may result in their consumption in new ways.

The second case study section, titled “Manufacturing and Consuming: Global and Local,” argues that “although the global heritage dialogue tends to present the built environment as an empty container, places of heritage remain places where real people live and where real conflicts may arise” (p. 22). Mitchell analyzes the history of New Gurna, a “model village” proposal designed to boost tourism in post–World War II Egypt by removing dwellers of a village located on top of parts of the Theban Necropolis. Based on Egyptian government policy and World Bank funding, this project involved no local participation in the process. One result was the death of several local people in a riot. The conflict goes on today. LeVine then examines the marginalization of Old Jaffa’s Arab residents after the founding of Israel and the absorption of that historic city into the exploding metropolis of Tel Aviv. Although little evidence is provided in the chapter itself about the growing importance of tourism to Tel Aviv, this is the story of how the politics of national identity in Israel erased Arab tradition through the application of the international style and then reclaimed it through postmodernist discourses of heritage, resulting in a struggle by the Arab minority to maintain and assert its own culture. Last, Broudehoux, in a description and critique of city marketing and image making in the Third World, shows how the government of Rio de Janeiro has used public-works programs to restore the city’s fading image in an attempt to retain investment and make the city competitive for international tourism. She argues that such efforts are unsustainable and may actually be counterproductive but that such attempts at social control and exclusion will not go unchallenged as people excluded from the dominant image find ways to express their resistance.

In a brief epilogue titled “‘Authentic’ Anxieties,” Upton concludes that the previous chapters demonstrate that

the manufacture of heritage and the consumption of tradition become more difficult to define and equally difficult to distinguish in their effects from authentic and indigenous practices. The dichotomies of modernity lose their persuasiveness in the process. The focus of critical analysis begins to drift far away from cultural effects and to move toward political-economic cause. (P. 303)

The unstated implication is that planners (and others) involved in studying past and current forms and planning for the future forms of urban centers in terms of both tradition and heritage in the developed as well as the underdeveloped world should adopt as one of their forms of analysis a political economy approach that considers both the local per se and its global context.

There is no statement in the book as to the intended audience. The high level of sophistication and detail of the theoret-ical discussions, particularly with their strong postmodernist bases, along with the in-depth case study analyses, suggest that it would be useful as either a text in a graduate-level seminar in planning, architecture, or tourism or as reference material for a knowledgeable academic, researcher, or professional. It is probably not suited to an undergraduate audience. As noted above, there appears to be no comparable work. As such, it would undoubtedly be a valuable addition to the libraries of planning educators and researchers.

One major strength of the book lies in the mixture of both theory and case studies, with constant linkages between the two. Similarly, the geographical range and the scale of examples and case studies is impressive, with valuable lessons to be learned from colonial Williamsburg, Celebration (Disney- world’s “new urbanism” creation), a village on the Nile River, and the megalopolis of Rio de Janeiro. Another strength is the variety of qualitative research methods employed in the analyses, including Gregory’s use of historical documents to the current political economy analyses of LeVine and Broudehoux. Finally, the breadth and depth of information in the endnotes and bibliographies demonstrates a high level of scholarship and provides a great learning resource.

These strengths also represent the book’s only major weakness: for those not already immersed in or comfortable with postmodern approaches to cultural issues, the book is neither an easy nor fast read. In particular, the first four chapters might deter the student of tourism—as opposed to the student of postmodernity—or the practicing professional planner or architect from proceeding to the case studies, which in and of themselves are both fascinating academically and useful professionally.

Reference

Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson. 1992. Beyond culture: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 1 (1): 6-23.