Reviews

Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services, edited by C. Eugene Steuerle, Van Doorn Ooms, George Peterson, and Robert D. Reischauer. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. 2000. 550 pages. $52.95 (hardback), $22.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by John J. Betancur
Associate Professor
Urban Planning and Policy Program
University of Illinois at Chicago

For residents of public housing in U.S. cities, the mere mention of vouchers brings up all the drama of public housing reform—rationale, displacement, hearings, court challenges, racial conflicts, and dominant discourses informing social policy. Equally dramatic, but still at a more experimental stage, are ongoing initiatives to improve public education and to provide health insurance for low-income individuals via vouchers. In contrast, vouchers have become better established and less contested in higher education, child care, and the subsidization of food.

Today, practically every public service program is experimenting with vouchers. Indeed, a growing sector in the policy field views them as the best approach to the provision of public services due to their use of private market mechanisms. Politicians and policy analysts have joined the search for new designs as part of a generalized effort to remove the state from the direct provision of public services. In this way, vouchers have become perhaps the most visible, and controversial, public policy tools today. The book Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services captures very well the complexity and wealth of this debate. An impressive collection of seventeen chapters and twenty-four authors or coauthors provides an excellent survey of vouchers and their multiple applications, from food stamps, housing, child care, general assistance, and education to employment and training, health care, environmental protection, criminal justice, and transportation. Based on thorough reviews of literature and experiences, experts in each of these fields examine the pros and cons, challenges and possibilities, and lessons gained from each major voucher program. The book includes impressive discussions of the economic, political, and legal issues associated with vouchers either generally or in some of their specific uses. The authors call attention to their complexity, the difficulties of their implementation, the uniqueness of each field of intervention, and the need for much more experience and experimentation. As Steuerle argues in chapter 1,

None of the preceding goals—choice and efficiency, choice and equity, replacement of other programs, restriction of choice, increased competition, budget control, and both open-ended and capped subsidies—are necessarily met better by a voucher than by any and all alternatives. Again, the voucher must simply be considered one of several tools that are available. (P. 12, emphasis added)

The main audience for this work is policy analysts. However, the book is perfectly accessible to those interested in a closer understanding of vouchers, from the construction of high-quality, feasible programs, through the examination of their differential impacts, to their costs. In this sense, it provides excellent materials for courses or public discussions. Although highly synchronized, each of the chapters addresses a different program or issue. In “The Economics of  Vouchers,” David F. Bradford and Daniel N. Shaviro examine the consumer and supplier sides of vouchers. In a careful discussion of politics, Burdett Loomis points to the increasing acceptance of vouchers while identifying major interests with political clout standing in their way. His comments on the crucial role of policy images in policy formulation are particularly strong. These authors provide the general context for the discussion of specific programs.

In his evaluation of food stamps, Robert A. Moffitt identifies the characteristics explaining the success of this program and the lessons for other programs. In turn, George E. Peterson presents a realistic analysis of housing vouchers while insisting on the benefits of choice and cost. Drawing on the experiences of various countries, Hugo Priemus examines their experiences with housing allowances and vouchers to recommend property subsidies as a temporary measure and housing allowances for “normal” situations.

Douglas J. Besharov and Nazanin Samari look at the implementation of child care vouchers. According to them, vouchers may best serve the heterogeneity of parental tastes and needs. Along these lines, Arthur M. Hauptman examines the success of vouchers in higher education while identifying conditions, special circumstances, and requirements for success. In contrast, Burt S. Barnow argues that “vouchers alone are insufficient to guarantee that training programs are effective” (p. 245). This brings us to perhaps the most complex fields of K-12 education and health care. Regarding the former, Isabel V. Sawhill and Shannon L. Smith conclude that results are mixed but modestly encouraging. On this same front, Michael W. McConnell points very sharply to the weaknesses of the constitutional argument against educational vouchers and the team of Elliot M. Mincberg and Judith E. Schaeffer stresses the unique policy and legal concerns related to the funding of religious schools. Regarding the latter (health care), Robert D. Reischauer finds so many problems with a voucher approach to Medicare that “it would take at least a decade to implement a workable Medicare program that relied solely on vouchers” (p. 432). Similarly, Linda T. Bilheimer calls attention to the difficulty of a health care program based on subsidies.

The book closes with Robert Lerman and C. Eugene Steuerle’s proposal of the bundling of vouchers and with Paul Posner, Robert Yetvin, Mark Schneiderman, Christopher Spiro, and Andrea Barnett’s survey of voucher use. The first argues for the combination of vouchers to produce greater flexibility and choice to reduce transaction costs and inequities. The second presents a summary of voucher programs that illustrates their width and diversity. The authors call attention to the complexity of administering vouchers and hence the need for a variety of institutions and processes to deal with the multiple goals involved.

Each chapter conducts a thorough review of existing research and experiences that the authors enhance with their criticisms, insights, and proposals. Altogether, the book brings the reader up to speed in the subjects covered and the perspectives used. The authors provide an excellent picture of the high complexity of vouchers, while pointing to the need for much more research and experimentation. The book is particularly strong in the technical, legal, academic, and practical intricacies of vouchers. It illuminates well the difficulties of balancing economic, political, and ethical goals. Meanwhile, the collection leaves to others the political economy of vouchers—their role in the ongoing project of dismantling the welfare state, their impact on the construction of community, the redistribution of power, improvements in the quality and humanness of public services, their performance in nonmarket considerations vis-à-vis other tools, and similar others. To complete the picture illustrated by this book, we need to hear the perspectives of public housing residents left out by the voucher reform; of minority and other low-income students inadequately served by otherwise successful voucher programs in higher education; of class issues behind voucher programs at lower educational levels; of children, seniors, and millions of others deprived of health insurance because they represent a high risk to the private sector; of those stigmatized by voucher designs for the provision of public services; and of the “explanations” of poverty and deprivation underlying voucher designs. It is the time for the users of vouchers to speak their word. The authors of the book recognized some of these issues, leaving the discussion for others to develop.

Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together, by Manuel Pastor Jr., Peter Dreier, J. Eugene Grigsby III, and Maria Lopez-Garza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2000. 296 pages. $19.95 (paperback).

Urban-Suburban Interdependencies, edited by Rosalind Greenstein and Wim Wiewel. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 2000. 204 pages. $18.00 (paperback).

When Corporations Leave Town: The Costs and Benefits of Metropolitan Job Sprawl, by Joseph Persky and Wim Wiewel. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 2000. 189 pages. $19.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Ernest Sternberg
Associate Professor
Department of Planning, School of Architecture and Planning
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
The New Metropolitanism

At the very inception of planning thought at the start of the twentieth century, Patrick Geddes warned about cities spreading like ink stains and grease spots, covering the landscape in new conurbations. The expanding urban tentacles would smother river basins and historic landscapes and rip apart the ancient complementarities between urban and pastoral ways of life. Along with student Lewis Mumford, Geddes observed that “neotechnic” innovations, such as automobile travel and the long-distance transmission of electricity, would accelerate this metropolitan expansion.

Lewis Mumford took up the theme in acrimonious attacks on activity that claimed to be regional planning but was actually metropolitan planning—it was meant merely for the efficient expansion of the city. Instead of resolving the evils of the Victorian industrial city, this expansion would, Mumford feared, generate new evils. He called on planners to engage in true regional planning, which would shape a permanent (read “sustainable”) regional community in which settlements are reintegrated with natural region and local heritage.

Sixty years later, the three books under review here respond to the bitter fruit of metropolitan expansion: the old industrial city that combined squalor and dynamism has been transformed into the postindustrial urban expanse, differentiated by economic, ethnic, and class divisions between city and suburb.

Pastor and colleagues’ Regions That Work presents a fully developed, book-length argument about opportunities to resolve city-suburban disparities. It compiles evidence that city and suburb are, after all, intertwined in a common economic fate. Blacks and Latinos are moving to the inner suburbs (although the deepest poverty remains in the central cities), city and suburb succumb in common to global industrial change, industrial clusters operate throughout the metropolis to keep up with global competition, and, as some empirical studies have found, regional income equity coincides with prosperity, whereas high central-city poverty coincides with low metrowide economic performance. The authors cite new theories that see metro-area networks as competitive assets in a global economy.

Since city and suburb are economically intertwined, the authors propose a new metro coalition: one that combines “community builders,” who work to relieve poverty through neighborhood initiatives, with “new regionalists,” who are proponents of multijurisdictional collaborative governance but generally leave community activists out of this collaboration. Their coalition would bring proponents of neighborhood redevelopment to the table with mainstream economic developers.

Much of the authors’ reasoning builds on their own studies of the Los Angeles area. They document that most of L.A.’s poor households have members who are participants in the work force, and yet the metro area’s cluster-based economic development strategies have neglected the poor households’ roles in generating a flexible economy. Then the authors draw on social capital theory to assert that dense networks of social relations across the metro area can provide bonds through which poor black and Latino households can gain entry into the firms engaged in globally competitive sectors of the economy, while the same networks provide to economic strategists a means to strengthen the metro area’s overall competitiveness. Their three case studies (Boston, San Jose, and Charlotte metro areas), chosen because of these areas’ progress in both poverty reduction and economic growth, indeed appear to exhibit such city-suburban linkages (although in this part of their book, it seems too easy to select the examples of collaboration that confirm the authors’ thesis).

Among Pastor and colleagues’ prescriptions, the most distinctive and pointed runs as follows: policy makers should stop “ghettoizing” community antipoverty efforts, and community activists should stop their insular neighborhood-based tactics, in favor of collaboration on a new strategy that connects neighborhood and metropolis. It is a conclusion reached through wide-ranging and insightful study. It is a reassuring reflection on the breadth and depth of contemporary urban scholarship that Urban-Suburban Interdependencies, the collection edited by Greenstein and Wiewel, has results that variously confirm, extend, and question those of Pastor and colleagues (although of course the books do not cite each other, having been published more or less simultaneously).

Complementing Pastor and colleagues’ focus on their own research, Paul Gottlieb’s article reviews the empirical literature in general, showing the variety of approaches that have been used in the study of urban-suburban economic interdependence and suggesting their respective advantages and shortfalls. Richard Voith revisits questions of preferences versus public policy—such as mortgage tax deductions and highway investments—on urban versus suburban residential choice. Kathryn Foster studies differences between accomplished and unaccomplished metro regions, selecting them on grounds of reputation and governance structure. Her list of the accomplished areas consists of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Portland, with only the fourth, Charlotte, bridging her list and that of Pastor et al. As compared to the former book, she stresses cultural, legal, and structural explanations for differences in the success of metrowide governance.

Then Allen Scott’s article expands the range of argument, declaring that the changing roles of the metro region take place in the midst of a historic transformation in global capitalism, turning city-regions into the “basic economic motors of the world economy” (p. 120). They have taken on this role, Scott writes, because local business agglomerations, local arrangements for specialized learning and innovation, localized labor skills and aptitudes, and local business cultures and institutions have jointly made regional proximity a vital asset in global competition. This effect is so pervasive that Scott foresees new forms of citizenship with loyalties to city-region rather than nation-state.

Bennett Harrison’s somewhat rambling essay, which appears to have been the last he wrote before he died (so it was never fully revised), further searches for the current state of urban-suburban interdependence, finally calling for a theoretical synthesis between old urban economics, new business cluster approaches, and the work, which Scott’s contribution exemplifies, on the changing roles of metro regions in word markets. In light of the rest of the work under review here, what is particularly notable about Scott’s and Harrison’s pieces is the tension between explanations they favor, based on global capitalist dynamics, and many of the foregoing arguments built on painstaking analyses of census and poverty data, often at one time period.

The Persky and Wiewel volume, When Corporations Leave Town, is no less accomplished than the first two books, but more specialized in topic. It also has a slightly misleading title, since it is not about the out-migration of corporations to other parts of the country or world, but specifically about their movements from the city to suburb.

The conventional explanation is that firms now seek uncontaminated greenfield properties with large single-story buildings, good road access, and plenty of parking, often in a campuslike setting. In doing so, firms are thought to be maximizing private benefit by seeking lower cost land, lower taxes, and proximity to well-trained labor—all factors taking them out of the city. Persky and Wiewel respond through a cost-benefit analysis, taking into account both private and social costs and benefits. They find that, if we take into account the public costs of greenfield development, as for highway and housing subsidies, and the negative externalities, including traffic congestion and elimination of open space, then social costs turn out to have about the same magnitude as private benefits. They conclude with a nicely classified review of policies for tackling metropolitan deconcentration: policies that constrain it through congestion pricing, impact fees, and growth management; policies that redistribute its benefits, as through reverse commuting and affordable housing in the suburbs; policies to attract growth back to central cities; and regional governance.

Overall, the volumes are satisfying especially because they demonstrate the range of perspectives and types of research through which our field can inform public debates that would otherwise flounder in pessimism or rest on simple panaceas. Less intentionally, the books also put the usual theoretical culprits on display. Empirical policy analysis and microeconomic applications sit uncomfortably alongside theories of social capital and civil society, concepts of business clusters, and post-Marxist regional geography, with little or no direct debate among them, as if some credit accrued for not ruffling feathers. And the books also have striking omissions.

Local literature, folklore, history, media, subcultures—the very features that give regions their identity—are nowhere to be seen. Only Foster’s article (disclosure: she is this reviewer’s departmental colleague) in the Greenstein and Wiewel volume raises the possibility that there are historic and cultural endowments that make a metropolitan area behave as a region, although her terms “structural capital,” “legal capital,” “socioeconomic capital,” and the like for classifying these endowments are clearly exploratory and need further development before they can fully do justice to the subject. Except for passing mentions, there is barely a recognition in all three works of region as an environmental setting.

Mountain divides, river basins, waterfronts, architectural endowments, and indigenous heritage (or rather multiple heritages) disappear in an abstract urban space, differentiated by income levels, jurisdictional boundaries, and commuting distances. The downtown turns into urban core, occupations into a labor shed, and countryside into open space. Lacking any connection to place, dwellers in undifferentiated space—is it a surprise?—differentiate themselves according to commuting distances, real estate values, racial categories, and mutual suspicions.

Except for perfunctory nods to what seems to be taken as a quaint past, these writings also ignore the planning discipline’s distinguished early traditions in regional planning. Although the authors sometimes label their area of concern as “new regionalism,” in light of the Geddes and Mumford classics their work would more accurately be referred to as a “new metropolitanism,” one that replays the concerns of the 1930s about metro expansion, to the neglect of the cultural and environmental region.

In calling for a new regional citizenship, Scott (despite his disparagement of romanticism) is unknowingly restating the late-romantic regional civics movement, the one that none other than Patrick Geddes championed for engaging citizens in their regions. No doubt, city-suburban coalitions, the kinds that Pastor et al. and others call for, are essential for the reconstruction of region. But coalitions are just combinations of self-interested participants, their agreements dependent on the shifting economic calculation that the rich are better off working with the poor than abandoning and containing them.

It is by valuing an ancient tree, a bend in the river, a fine building, a local custom, and a conjunction of heritages that citizens truly come to grips with the uniqueness of region. Lacking an art for depicting icons of region or a discipline for the reconstruction of shared environments, the analysts represented here may be unwittingly taking for granted the very conditions that generate the self-interested social dispersion they decry. If we do not want to reinforce the ever more debased metropolitanism in which anonymous conurbations compete on a global scale, then we may yet want to revisit the classical traditions of regional planning, from which we still have much to learn.

Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience, by Jerrold S. Kayden. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 2000. 349 pages. $49.95 (hardback).

Reviewed by Elliot Sclar
Professor
Department of Urban Planning
Columbia University

The phrase “privately owned public space” has an oxymoronic quality to it, as the authors of this work point out (p. 21). In common usage, the terms “public” and “private” connote polar opposites in meaning. The phrase describes a type of land use regulation that originated about forty years ago in New York City. It has since spread to other American cities. It refers to the use of zoning incentives to create public benefits in private developments. In the case in point, the benefits are public spaces. This particular benefit has its origins in the 1961 revision of New York City’s zoning ordinance. Under the revision, private developers were granted the automatic right to add marketable square footage to their projects in exchange for the creation of useful public spaces. These public spaces included plazas, arcades, sidewalk widenings, and through building concourses. The idea is simple. In exchange for say one new square foot of public space, a developer would be permitted to add three additional square feet of marketable space to their project. This added space is over and above that which the underlying zoning permits. The public space is to be maintained privately in perpetuity for public enjoyment. Thus, the phrase “privately owned public space” takes on a clear legal meaning.

How well does this blurring of the line between public and private space work in practice? Answering that question is the central focus of this book. One of the main failings of much of our planning and public policy practice is that we do not do enough policy evaluation research. The authors of this book redress this imbalance. They provide us with a dispassionate and rigorous evaluation of New York’s forty-year experience with the use of incentive zoning to create public space. The authors represent a somewhat unconventional but highly knowledgeable group of researchers. Formally, the book’s authorship is credited to one individual author, Jerrold Kayden, and two organizations, the New York City Department of City Planning (a public agency) and the Municipal Art Society (a nonprofit citizens advocacy organization). Jerrold Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, is a lawyer and urban planner expert on matters pertaining to the intersection of law and urban planning. The New York City Department of City Planning is the agency of municipal government that primarily oversees the policy and regulatory impacts of the zoning ordinance. The Municipal Art Society is one of the nation’s premier advocacy groups for sound urban planning.

The research findings, which constitute the bulk of this book, are a series of intensive evaluations of all 503 public spaces created in the 320 projects that were completed or are still under construction from 1961 until the time of this research (2000) that took advantage of the incentive zoning program. The first portion of the book provides a concise historic and legal analysis of New York’s public space regulation. The emphasis of the analysis is on the period from 1961 forward, when the new incentive zoning was put in place.

Their findings are mixed. On one hand, this zoning has resulted in the creation of highly valuable public spaces that would not otherwise exist. On the other hand, many of them “are nothing more than empty strips or expanses of untended surface, while others have been privatized by locked gates, missing amenities and usurpation by adjacent commercial activities, in contravention of the spirit or letter of applicable legal requirements” (p. 1). In quantitative terms, the authors conclude that 41 percent of the 503 spaces surveyed were of “marginal value” (p. 1).

Over time, the city’s planners learned a great deal about the design requirements of good public space. However, this came at a cost. The simple idea of the 1961 zoning revision has evolved into a highly complex vocabulary of urban design. What started out simply enough as an incentive to create plazas soon evolved into a panoply of different and precisely defined types of public spaces. These include arcades, urban plazas, residential plazas, sidewalk widenings, open-air concourses, covered pedestrian spaces, through block arcades, through block connections, through block gallerias, elevated plazas, and sunken plazas! It has requirements that go into minute detail about area lengths, depths, heights, quantity of required public seating, the need for stairs and elevators, and so forth. As the public planners learned more and began to regulate more, the design improved. The authors trace the improvement in the regulatory process from the initial disappointments with the open expanses of nothingness that constituted the first plazas to the richly designed recent additions to the city that they have been able to affect.

Ironically, the authors find that the greatest degree of private usurpation (privatization) of these mandated public spaces takes place precisely where regulation has had the greatest success in creating good urban design. This finding exposes the Achilles’ heel of incentive zoning. Thoughtful design regulations can induce developers to create attractive public spaces in exchange for an immediate reward in the form of added salable built space. It is an especially handsome reward because the added space typically goes to the top floors of the building, the portion that commands the highest selling or rental prices. The public space then exists in perpetuity. From the property owner’s point of view, there is no longer any incentive to maintain the public space. It is just a continuing cost. In fact, the owners believe that to the extent that they can exclude the general public and restrict the use to the private needs of the building’s occupants it adds to the market value of the site. Even if public access expands social value, it detracts from private value. As a consequence, the research team found that property owners often use subterfuge and other means to keep the general public out of the spaces. Unless the city vigilantly polices the open-to-the-public requirements, public access evaporates. But as the authors demonstrate, present enforcement methods are largely cumbersome and ineffective.

Given the complexity of the authorship, it is not surprising that this volume avoids suggesting solutions. However, one lesson seems clear. It is one thing to get a privately built public space; it is another to ensure its long-term maintenance. As complex as the regulations for creating the space become to create and administer, it is only half of the policy battle. It is also necessary to require that revenue from the project support an agency to maintain these spaces in the public interest. If incentive zoning is to create spaces that are of more than “marginal value,” then the program has to be more comprehensive than design guidelines alone. It must include a consideration of long-term maintenance and regulatory costs.

The book is useful for anyone engaged in the study of zoning policy. It could be useful in an advanced course in land use planning or courses in land use law. It is an exemplary work of policy evaluation research.

Monitoring Land Supply with Geographic Information Systems: Theory, Practice and Parcel-Based Approaches, edited by Anne Vernez Moudon and Michael Hubner. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 2000. 335 pages. $100.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Ann-Margaret Esnard
Assistant Professor
Department of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University

With guidance and support from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, this book has emerged more than a decade after Godschalk et al. (1986) and Dueker and DeLacy (1990) made strong cases for a systematic inventory and monitoring of land supply. It masterfully and coherently relates theory, techniques, and practice and delivers on one of its objectives to “provide planners and policy makers with an assessment of where land-supply and capacity monitoring is and where it needs to go” (p. 12). The specific focus is on parcel-based geographic information systems (PBGIS) for land-supply and capacity monitoring (LSCM).

The book’s chapters and commentaries are written by several leading scholars and experts on urban planning, urban studies, urban design, land markets, growth management, geography, GIScience, GIS technology, and urban simulation modeling. The main authors are Marina Alberti, William Beyers, Scott A. Bollens, Kenneth J. Dueker, Miles Erickson, David R. Godschalk, McShane Hope, Lewis D. Hopkins, Michael Hubner (editor), Gerrit J. Knaap, Anne Vernez Moudon (editor), Zorica Nedovic-Budic, Lori Peckol, George Rolfe, Nancy Tosta, Ric Vrana, Paul Waddell, and Frank Westerlund.

The book is organized into three main parts (Part I: An Overview; Part II: Case Studies That Feature Portland Metro in Oregon, Montgomery County, Maryland and Puget Sound, Washington; and Part III: Thematic Issues). Commentaries at the end of the chapters in Parts II and III agreeably “enrich the chapters’ contributions by introducing different and even conflicting interpretations of the issues involved” (p. 5). Appendix A, “Survey of Land Supply Monitoring Practice,” provides detailed information on who is doing what, database design, methods of analysis, assumptions, and working definitions. Appendix B, “Selected Case Summaries” (eleven in total and all based in the United States), provides an overview, GIS capabilities, approach to LSCM, contacts, and sources.

The book focuses on “land monitoring in urbanized regions as opposed to areas in primarily rural or agricultural use and wilderness areas” (p. 1) and is not meant to promote one particular approach or to provide specific instructions on how to create a parcel-based GIS. On the contrary, the strength of the book lies in the information provided on the opportunities and challenges attendant on the lack of uniformity of terms, differing definitions, concepts, standards, and meanings between localities and among professions.

A more fundamental issue is the design of PBGISs that balance short-term trends and site-development practices with long-range planning and dynamic land markets. For example, in the land-transformation process (from raw land supply to occupancy or from one mode of development to another), “the transition events are not all transitions of parcels and they do not necessarily apply to parcels homogeneously” (p. 82). The different boundaries for policy and regulatory tools (such as zoning) and differing transactions for nonresidential land uses add to the complexity for database designers and modelers. For example, “most retail and commercial turnovers involve a change in tenancy but not necessarily a change in parcelization record” (p. 160). Against some of this backdrop, two of the authors outlined the pros and cons of alternative approaches: dynamic parcels versus multiple spatial units. Other challenges and viable research opportunities discussed are effective real-time monitoring that serves the needs of the public and private sectors, “comparability of repeat measures of supply or capacity over time” (p. 62), spatiotemporal representation models (pp. 163-65), the need to factor “surprise events” such as fires and economic cycles into LSCM (p. 173), and attaining truly decentralized, distributed multijurisdictional coordination (p. 186).

So, what would have made this book even better? We get little teasers throughout the book highlighting the potential for redevelopment and infill to add capacity (pp. 49, 114) and for GIS technologies that can help public administrators capitalize on the reported trend that “urban development may selectively and unexpectedly be turning inward on the existing urban fabric” (p. 224). Inclusion of more content on successful and/or failed attempts to combine planning and market data for regional, local, and site-specific decision making by planners and developers would have been useful. This could have been accomplished by expanding the thought-provoking commentary on public versus private interests in land monitoring (pp. 90-95). Second, local community advocates for sensible development and land use management have a vested interest in providing input on the demand and capacity components of such parcel-based systems. There was little, if any, discussion of appropriate approaches (Web-GIS or otherwise) for integrating local knowledge from the wider community, with other planning and private sector data sets.

Despite these minor deficiencies, this book is a valuable resource for planning and development practitioners and educators, technicians and administrators, tax assessors, GIS beginners, and GIS experts. If you are a land use planning or GIS educator, this is the place to go for good case studies for your students. More impressive is the fact that every planner is bound to find some useful content. The authors move beyond thinking of LSCM as a strict land use planning activity by highlighting its overlap with economic and community development and housing, environmental planning, and protection and public service provision (pp. 182-83). I applaud the authors for this timely piece for several reasons: its solid foundation, for fleshing out the barriers, the viable approaches with just the right amount of technical sophistication, the broad range of examples and case studies, and for laying out an agenda for urban planning, urban studies, urban design, land markets, growth management, builders and users of PBGIS for land supply, and capacity monitoring.

References

Dueker, K. J., and P. Barton DeLacy. 1990. GIS in the land development planning process: Balancing the needs of land use planners and real estate developers. Journal of the American Planning Association Autumn:483-91.

Godschalk, D. R., S. A. Bollens, J. S. Hekman, and M. E. Miles. 1986. Land supply monitoring: A guide for improving public and private urban development decisions. Boston: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, in association with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research: Underlying Assumptions, Research Problems and Methodologies, edited by Seymour Wapner, Jack Demick, C. Takiji Yamamoto, and Hirofumi Minami. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. 1999. 306 pages. $80.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Nancy M. Wells
Assistant Professor
Department of Design and Environmental Analysis
Cornell University

With disciplinary roots in fields as diverse as urban and regional planning, psychology, geography, architecture, sociology, and anthropology, environment-behavior studies has long struggled with issues of identity. In their volume Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research, editors Seymour Wapner, Jack Demick, C. Takiji Yamamoto, and Hirofumi Minami provide a context for the exploration and articulation of assumptions underlying environment-behavior research and the linkage of those assumptions to a wide variety of research topics. Their overall goal, to advance both research and practice in the field of environment-behavior, is inspired by Altman’s (1997) “Environment and Behavior Studies: A Discipline? Not a Discipline? Becoming a Discipline?” Altman suggests that the field would be advanced by a greater “understanding [of] who we are, why we do what we do, and the connections and gaps between scholars and practitioners adopting diverse perspectives” (p. 423).

The greatest strength of this book is its breadth and variety. In twenty-three brief chapters, the editors present a rich array of environment-behavior research topics including the reduction of toxic household product use (Werner and Altman, “Humans and Nature”), feminist perspectives in environment-behavior research (Churchman, “Women and the Environment”), hospital design (Nagasawa, “The Geography of Hospitals”), housing transitions among disaster-struck populations (Kobayahi and Miura, “Natural Disaster and Restoration Housing”), the impact of multiple stressors on impoverished urban youth (Evans and Saegert, “Residential Crowding in the Context of Inner City Poverty”), environmental perception and ambient vision (Ohno, “A Hypothetical Model of Environmental Perception”), and theoretical assumptions in design and architectural education (Takahashi, “Sympathetic Methods in Environmental Design and Education”). The book presents a range of topics that is fairly reflective of the diversity of research interests within environment-behavior studies.

Appropriately, there is also variety in the theoretical perspectives and underlying research assumptions presented. The authors describe research focusing on varied units of analysis (e.g., the behavior setting, person-in-environment, personal projects) and diverse methodological approaches ranging from traditional quantitative approaches to narrative and phenomenological strategies. Each of the authors also presents his or her worldview or the unique philosophical underpinnings of his or her work. One particularly engaging example is Herb Childress’s “A Storyteller’s Beliefs: Narrative and Existential Research.” Childress articulates the beliefs and values underlying his study of adolescence. Childress embraces an interdisciplinary approach as he focuses on what can be learned from the experiences of individuals. He suggests that because people are more than the sum of their parts, they can best be portrayed and understood through narrative. He is not interested in collecting large samples nor using Likert scales but is passionate about “research that is memorable, that captures the reader through the presentation of people struggling with significant decisions” (p. 186) and which is likely to have an impact on policy and decision making. Furthermore, he does not strive for objectivity in his work but rather is “only interested in those questions for which objectivity is impossible.” This chapter provides a particularly fine example of the thoughtful examination of assumptions underlying environment-behavior research provided in this volume.

While the strength of this book is its breadth, a weakness, unsurprisingly, is a lack of depth. This limitation seems inevitable for a volume that attempts to capture the variety of interests and perspectives that exist in environment-behavior research. While providing a broad cross section of research topics, methods, and theoretical assumptions, it is unable to provide a focused look at any one area. A second criticism is that with the exception of the Werner and Altman chapter, there is a relative neglect of natural environment topics. The book would be enhanced by one or two additional chapters addressing environment-behavior themes of relevance to urban foresters, landscape architects, and natural resource professionals, who constitute a substantial proportion of environment-behavior researchers and practitioners.

This volume would be particularly valuable to educators who hope to provide their environment-behavior students with a grounding in the breadth of the topics explored and methods used, as well as an exposure to the varied assumptions under- lying environment-behavior work. The book would be particularly appropriate for an interdisciplinary graduate seminar. For this audience, the historical background of environment-behavior studies provided in several chapters may be particularly of interest. Leann Rivlin, for example, tells of her early involvement with environment-behavior research, when she joined Proshansky and Ittleson to study psychiatric hospitals. The time, she describes, was an era when there was significant governmental interest in “real problems,” such as facilities design. The research addressing these issues was generally conducted in the field, representing a dramatic divergence from “laboratory-staged, experimental” research, typical of psychology research at the time (p. 55). Similarly, Robert Bechtel reflects on the history and evolution of ecological psychology, dating back to the 1950s. Barker and Wright, he states, “were the first to emphasize the environmental dimension to behavior . . . [and] stood virtually alone . . . until the transactional and organismic theories evolved” (p. 62). These brief historical references not only educate the environment-behavior newcomer but also describe a field characterized by a daring to diverge from tradition and to embrace real problems. Furthermore, a sense of the field’s history provides a connection to the heritage of environment-behavior research, contributing a historical depth and resonance to a field still attempting to find stable footing.

Researchers are also likely to find the volume useful, particularly if they are engaged in reflection with respect to the assumptions underlying their own work. As Werner and Altman report, this process may be valuable:

we have found articulating research assumptions to be quite liberating. By putting traditional assumptions in perspective, we recognize they are just one of several ways of doing research. We feel comfortable trying out alternative approaches and exploring new ways of thinking about and studying phenomenon. . . . Indeed, being aware of alternative ways of knowing has helped us see limitations in traditional psychological approaches. In our own work, it helps us see where we have been, where we could go, as well as enabling us to see what we have overlooked. (P. 22)

The book is a valuable addition to the environment- behavior library of both educators and researchers. Time will tell whether the editors of this volume succeed in their goal of ad-vancing both research and practice in environment-behavior studies and contributing to the development of a more coherent, integrated field. Yet they have certainly succeeded in stimulating further reflection with respect to underlying assumptions in the diverse arena of environment-behavior research.

Reference

Altman, I. 1997. Environment and behavior studies: A discipline? Not a discipline? Becoming a discipline? In Handbook of Japan-United States environment-behavior research, edited by S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and T. Takahashi, 423-34. New York: Plenum.