[We appreciate Nathan Landau's willingness to review this book on
H-Urban.]

Posted by Nathan Landau <NAL1@ci.berkeley.ca.us>

REINVENTING CITIES--EQUITY PLANNERS TELL THEIR STORIES
Norman Krumholz and Pierre Clavel
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994
xvi + 253 pp., $22.95 paper  ($49.95 hardcover)

City planning is often thought of as a fairly dull occupation, where
faceless bureaucrats toil in the obscurity they prefer. Planning is
viewed as a politically "neutral," technical affair, where planners
merely carry out policies ordained from elsewhere. REINVENTING
CITIES--EQUITY PLANNERS TELL THEIR STORIES presents a radically
different view of planning. In REINVENTING CITIES, 12 planners present
very personal accounts of how they actively sought to use their
positions to advance the interests of low-income, working class, and/or
non-White people in their cities.  While there are a number of valuable
books on equity planning work in individual cities, such as
Burlington (Vermont), Cleveland, and Chicago, REINVENTING CITIES is the
only current overview of local practice. (1) Not only planners and
would-be planners, but anyone interested in what city governments can
achieve, should read this book.

REINVENTING CITIES consists primarily of interviews with equity
planners  (broadly defined) from 9 cities. The cities range
geographically from Boston to San Diego, in size from Chicago to Santa
Monica, which has less than 100,000 residents.  Northeastern,
Midwestern, and Western cities are represented, but there are no
examples from the South. (However, Krumholz and Clavel do not claim
that the book is comprehensive, asserting--no doubt correctly--that
there are many more planners also doing equity planning.)  Each
interview is preceded by a "snapshot" of the city--a helpful
introduction to the city's demographic characteristics and recent
political history. The chapters conclude with mini-bibliographies about
a key issue the planner worked on (e.g. neighborhood economic
development).

These interview chapters are bracketed by an initial chapter by Clavel
tracing the roots of equity planning as a professional activity and a
final chapter summarizing "lessons learned" from the interviews.
Krumholz -- as the equity-minded former Planning Director of Cleveland
(under Mayor Kucinich) and Clavel, a planning professor who has long
studied equity planning -- have ideal backgrounds to write about this
subject.  The roles and activities of the "planners" interviewed are
equally various.  For example, Margaret Strachan from Portland (Oregon)
was an elected city commissioner, who guided the Central City Plan -- a
comprehensive plan for the area -- to approval. Rick Cohen was Planning
Director of Jersey City, who concentrated on gaining "linkage" funds
for low income housing from the large commercial projects being
developed on the city's Manhattan facing riverfront. Robert Mier was
Chicago Mayor Harold Washington's appointed Commissioner of Economic
Development, who sought to make a variety of projects more beneficial
to low income and Black Chicagoans.  The planners' work generally took
place between roughly 1982 and 1992, although Dale Bertsch's
unparalleled efforts to place low income housing in Dayton's suburbs
date back as far as the late 1960's.

The diversity of the planners' activities is a strength of the book,
because it indicates that planners can pursue equity goals in a variety
of ways. Equity planning emerges as an orientation to many kinds of
work, not an artificially delineated  "subfield" of planning.  The
interviews give a vivid sense of the progress and pitfalls of equity
planning.  Dale Bertsch -- proposing an ultimately approved plan to
scatter low income housing to Dayton's suburbs -- describes a hellish
(emphasis original) summer of 54 generally hostile public meetings,
some of them attended by people with guns.  Rick Cohen notes that the
next City administration fired him and quickly undid many of his
initiatives, even sending housing linkage fees he had collected back to
developers!  The lack of federal support for local initiatives was also
an ever-present constraint.  Nonetheless, Kari Moe notes that in
Chicago they were able to do the first neighborhood-oriented capital
improvements bond in 25 years, and to focus on neighborhood industrial
retention, maintaining jobs for working class residents.  Strachan got
Portland's Central City Plan to treat SROs (residential hotels) as a
low-cost housing resource rather than a blight to be eliminated.

The planners also describe the strategies they used to attain their
goals, such as building supportive coalitions both inside City Hall and
in the community, winning over key business leaders, and developing
participatory planning processes (although citizen participants did not
always support the planners' goals). They also discuss the personal
history that led them onto the atypical "career path" of equity
planning. Their career paths are not smooth--only 2 of the 12 planners
interviewed are still doing the job they discuss in the book.

One weakness of the book is the format in which the interviews are
presented.  They are published simply as a text, broken up by subheads,
but with no questions noted. The planners interviewed do use language
that suggests they were "speaking," but it would be useful to know what
questions they were asked, and what questions they were not asked.

Because REINVENTING CITIES covers so much ground, the book's "case
studies" are its chief value, rather than any general theory of equity
planning.  Krumholz's concluding chapter does gamely seek to identify
some common themes. He notes the importance of building supportive
coalitions for policy innovations. Equity planners must be persistent,
and must find ways to capture public attention for their proposals --
whether through formal Plan documents, public presentations, or work
with local media. Krumholz spotlights the centrality of race as an
issue for equity planners, a fact which emerged with particular
starkness in Black-White confrontations in Chicago.  Finally Krumholz
offers suggestions as to how both planning schools and "mainstream"
planners can improve their practice. Nonetheless, as he notes, every
city has its own particular circumstances, but he hopes the book will
offer new ideas to city planners everywhere.

Too often, the federal government is seen as the sole locus of public
policy innovation. But in an era where the federal government has --
ever more insistently -- refused to aid cities or their needy
populations, city governments have increasingly been forced to develop
their own solutions as best they can. REINVENTING CITIES is one of the
best books to date on how they have done so.

_______________________________________________________
(1) One somewhat parallel book is FIRE IN THE HEARTH: THE RADICAL
POLITICS OF PLACE IN AMERICA, edited by Mike Davis, Steven Hiatt and 3
others (Verso: New York and London, 1990).  This collection of 14
articles focuses on the political issues in and socioeconomic
background for radical local politics in the United States, Canada, and
Mexico.

Nathan Landau
City of Berkeley (institution for identification only)
NAL1@ci.berkeley.ca.us

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