BOOK REVIEWS
CONTENTS Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, by Alice Sparberg Alexiou. Review by Darel E. Paul ................................................................................. Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City Building in a Global Era, by Lawrence A. Herzog. Review by Richard N. Gioioso .... Should Britain Leave the EU? An Economic Analysis of a Troubled Relationship, by Patrick Minford, Vidya Mahambare, and Eric Nowell. Review by Robert Read ................................................................... Foreign Direct Investment and the Regional Economy, by Jonathan Jones and Colin Wren. Review by James R. Hines Jr ........................... The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, by David Blackbourn. Review by Antoine Bailly ..... The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia, by Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova, and Ilya Zaslavsky. Review by Steven E. Nafziger .................................................................................... Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, by Oren Yiftachel. Review by Harold Brodsky ................................................ Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment, by Matthew E. Kahn. Review by John I. Carruthers .............................................
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Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, by Alice Sparberg Alexiou. 2006. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 232 + x. ISBN 0-8135-3792-4, $24.95. This book is a rich telling of the public life of Jane Jacobs, one of the twentieth century’s most heterodox spirits and influential writers on the city. Published just months after Jacobs’s death, journalist Alice Sparberg Alexiou ably surveys the entire sweep of Jacobs’s life from a child in economically stagnating pre-Depression Scranton (Pennsylvania) to the grande dame of late twentieth-century cosmopolitan Toronto. The core of the biography, however, is Jacobs’s life and work in New York City and her everlasting moniker as the “woman who stood up to Robert Moses” (p. ix). At the same time, Alexiou’s book is more than that—she so ably weaves together Jane Jacobs’s public life with the lives of the cities she called home, and with the changing way we think about the city thanks to Jacobs’s work, that it is more apt to see the book as a popular overview of the recent history of urban planning as much as a biography of its most iconoclastic critic. In the early chapters, Alexiou lays the personal foundations for Jacobs’s role as the consummate outsider to the realms of urban planning, architecture, and the academy in general. Jacobs had no formal training or education in planning—indeed, never earned a college degree in any subject. She came to the field as a journalist writing for the magazine Architectural Forum in the 1950s, and her knowledge was amassed almost solely through observation, on-the-job training, and opportunities afforded her by writing about cities. Alexiou depicts Jacobs’s personal dislike of formal education and of expertise of all kinds as the cornerstone of her ability both to think radically and to cling stubbornly to her own opinions in the face of oftentimes withering professional criticism (pp. 188–189)—thus her status as “urban visionary” per the subtitle of the book. Alexiou also emphasizes repeatedly Jacobs’s gender as a source of her contrary thinking. For example, planning is described as integral to “male interests” (p. 84), while Jacobs’s organic view of the city plays upon “a mother’s concerns” and “maternal feeling” (p. 87). The author praises Jacobs for her “distinctly female voice against the status quo” and places her (as many others have done) alongside Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson as a member of a perhaps necessarily female trio whose polemics fundamentally unsettled the assumptions of postwar white middle-class America (p. 86). It is not too far to say that throughout all the early chapters, Alexiou holds up Jacobs as a feminist hero, highlighting repeatedly her ability to show up men, casually throw off their disdain, gain their begrudging respect, or, with Robert Moses especially, engage in direct political combat and emerge victorious. The centerpiece of the biography, just as it is of Jacobs’s public life, is her pivotal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Alexiou reminds us that many terms and ideas instilled in our public discourse about the city originate here: “social capital,” “mixed use,” “eyes on the street,” and waterfront revitalization among them (p. 76). She also stresses Jacobs’s talent for wordcraft and political theater as much as the ideas conveyed through them. Not only does Alexiou frequently liken Jacobs’s prose to poetry (pp. 116, 120, 173, 187), she even attributes a significant degree of her guru status to a “combination of logic sweetened with carefully crafted words, [which] charm us and therefore convince us” (p. 175). Through a retelling of Jacobs’s career during the 1950s and 1960s, Alexiou demonstrates how much Death and Life and Jacobs herself are products of New York. Jacobs,
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of course, dedicated the book to her adopted city, but Alexiou goes beyond the obvious and painstakingly shows us how Jacobs’s rather parochial and even mundane love for and pride in her own Greenwich Village neighborhood drove so much of her passion and formed the basis of her intellectual challenge to urban planning. This passion for New York is obviously shared by Alexiou as well. Despite Jacobs’s departure from the city in 1968, only one chapter is devoted to her 38 years in Toronto and one other serves to review Jacobs’s three books on economics and cities written after Death and Life. Thus, much of what Jacobs wrote concerning the city in its broader national and global economic contexts remains distinctly in the background. That being said, Alexiou does a remarkable job of sketching out the political philosophy of a woman who always claimed never to have one (p. 117). Perhaps unwittingly and never by name, Jacobs emerges from this biography as a left libertarian, especially hostile to state power and authority of all kinds. Her embrace of community, diversity and “chaos” as the essential qualities of the city is the product of her deep conviction that urban life is inherently spontaneous and even “natural,” and thus ultimately unable to be planned. While never clearly investigated by Alexiou, Jacobs is shown to have believed that the market was also part of this natural environment—hence her support in the 1980s for the broad privatization of Ontario’s public services (p. 187) as well as her claim that the nation was an economically “unnatural entity” (p. 185). Despite the near hero worship of the first half of the book, Alexiou does not shrink from showing us criticisms of Jacobs’s ideas. She even devotes an entire chapter to a sustained if friendly critique of Jacobs’s neglect of race and its connection to her implicit support for gentrification. The author’s effort at an emendation of Death and Life on this matter—a brief study of South Bronx “through the Jacobs spectrum” (p. 139)—largely falls short as a contribution to Jacobs’s ideas, but it does highlight one of the most prominent shortcomings of her work and does so in a welcome manner that highlights the importance of power and politics rather than simply the market. Reading the book as a biography, I found several personal relationships I would very much have enjoyed seeing discussed much more. Despite Jacobs’s passionate contempt for high modernism and for high-rise buildings in particular, we discover that her husband was “a devotee of Le Corbusier’s ideas” (p. 36). Lewis Mumford, the famous urban historian and Jacobs’s frequent correspondent and early backer, appears both as a warm supporter and an especially caustic detractor, which Jacobs’ herself repaid in spades. Perhaps most importantly, Jacobs’s intimate relationship with New York itself was severed unceremoniously by her abrupt move to Toronto in 1968 at the height of her political activism. These relationships are potentially fascinating for their combination of intimacy and conflict, but Alexiou leaves the reader with only speculation as to what might have transpired beyond the public eye. After Jacobs’s death in April 2006, others with specialist training summed up her work and her influence in far more rigorous and penetrating ways. Alexiou’s short volume does something else, however, showing us how big and creative Jacobs’s thinking was. Even as it soared to more distant realms, Jacobs’s ideas were always rooted in her own practical experiences of life in the city. For this reason alone, this book is worth reading. Darel E. Paul Department of Political Science Williams College
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Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City Building in a Global Era, by Lawrence A. Herzog. 2006. Series: Roger Fullington Series in Architecture. Austin: University of Texas Press. 274 + xxi. ISBN 0-292-71261-8, cloth, $55; ISBN 0-292-71262-6, paper, $24.95. Modern or postmodern? Public or private? Individual or collective? Real or virtual? Original or remodeled? On foot, by car, or in mass transport? These are questions often raised by social scientists, particularly geographers, when discussing the dynamics of contemporary American cities, usually provoking great debate and disagreement. Lawrence Herzog addresses these questions in his most recent book, comparatively evaluating Spain and Mexico, where he analyzes the evolution of the use and meaning of public space along the historical trajectory of the creation and cultivation of city life. In periods past and present, Herzog shows that public space and public life are in flux. He critiques both the modernist and postmodernist turns in urban planning and architecture that have given rise to chaotic and destructive trends in cities around the world. Through the discussion of four concrete examples—Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, and Quer´etaro and Mexico City in Mexico—he illustrates contrasting paths to address the dynamics of contemporary urbanism, and concludes that urban salvation must be sought by returning to the center of the city, through rediscovering and rebuilding central districts. Herzog discusses Spain and Mexico under the rubric of Latino/Mediterranean city space, in which settlement (or public) space has been the main setting for life, while the dwelling (or private) space figures less importantly, as one among many elements of life’s entirety. In Spain, the contemporary concept of public space has been shaped by the influences of the many waves of conquering societies that have inhabited its peninsula over the past two millennia. The Romans and Moors left an unforgettable imprint, fusing to create public space in which “there is a sense of order and tolerance, an unwritten rule that strangers have the right to maintain their privacy . . . .” (p. 34). Embodied in the plaza, or public square, Spanish public space offered open discourse, spontaneous public life, and a connection to the history and identity of its people. Since the time of the Spanish kings in the late sixteenth century, the plaza has served as a space where all of Spanish society could gather. “In effect, the plaza became the transitional space between the private realm of the home and the public realm” (p. 41). Things changed. In Madrid, a radical shift in the use and meaning of public space began as early as the 1950s, as the city grew toward the periphery following the modernist trend of the twentieth century. The high-rise block apartment building—antithetical to Latino/Mediterranean public space as a place of encounter and discourse—began to dominate the urban landscape. Public space was challenged by further physical expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, and “without the proper planning and design guidelines to control it,” Madrid plummeted into spatial chaos, a state of fragmentation and distortion (p. 62). By the mid-1970s, the onslaught of automobiles, which favor individuality (versus collectivity) and isolation (versus community), turned plazas into routes of traffic circulation, challenging their previous function as places of social reunion and relaxation. Urban design, planning, and architecture projects have left many public spaces in Madrid void of identity (e.g., La Plaza Col´on), or more spectacle than genuine place ˜ connected to the past (e.g., La Plaza Espana). While Herzog describes the failure of Madrid to maintain and cultivate its public spaces in the face of contemporary urban challenges, he demonstrates why and how Barcelona has become a celebrated urban design success story of the late twentieth C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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century. Headed by Catalan architect Oriol Bohigas, in the 1980s and 1990s Barcelona’s urban planning and design team crafted “a dramatic redevelopment strategy anchored around the use of public space” (p. 92). It placed neighborhoods at the center of all redevelopment. The strategy not only revitalized the meaning and functionality of public spaces, but also succeeded in reflecting the Catalan spirit of independence, expressed through the desire and ability to walk. Politicians, planners, and designers have oriented traffic away from the city center, constructed underground parking lots, reclaimed and renovated the waterfront, recycled abandoned spaces for parks, plazas, and other public usages, and filled those spaces with public art and sculpture (p. 98). While the challenges—expansion, traffic congestion, overcrowding, housing shortages, crime— were the same in both cities, the Catalan response produced a vibrant manifestation of public space and public life infused with function and meaning in the built urban environment. Herzog traces the movement of the Latino/Mediterranean public space across the Atlantic to Mexico, where the Spanish imposed concepts of Iberian urbanism after they conquered indigenous civilizations. In Mexico, we see an example of the fusion of European and indigenous influences on city life and design, generating a unique Spanish colonial urbanism. As in Spain, the plaza was the focus of public life. Coincidentally, both indigenous and Spanish urbanism included the plaza as an outdoor space. The Spanish crown, however, monopolized the plaza, which had had a religiously ceremonial function in indigenous culture, and utilized it to demonstrate its ambition and grandiose plans for the Americas. This move produced the vast scale of the Mexican plaza. By the twentieth century, most Mexican plazas were adorned with vegetation, benches, and kiosks, which brought a surge in economic activity to the plaza and converted it into a vital commercial space within the city. From its inception, however, the Mexican plaza was also politicized. “Public spaces frequently become the focal points of strategic political battles over the future of Mexican urbanism” (p. 138). They also served well as symbolic places to implement the national government’s agenda. They have of late, however, become less central spaces, frequented by leisure occupants, workers, and passersby. Anarchic urban growth and the oversaturation of transportation, especially automobiles, have contributed to a crisis in quality of life and to the declining quality and functional relevance of public space. Mexican city centers face their own set of challenges to maintain a dynamic and meaningful downtown urbanism. Quer´etaro, a medium-sized city two hours north of Mexico City, remained at colonial scale until 1950, then experienced significant growth due to an industrial boom in the next decade. While this growth led to spatial decentralization, the regional tradition of pride in local history and respect for the past motivated city officials and residents to organize efforts to counteract further fragmentation and chaos. As early as the 1970s, they organized a revitalization of Quer´etaro’s historic center, emphasizing its protection from automobile traffic and reintroducing pedestrian space. Mexico City’s future, on the other hand, seems somewhat more complicated. Herzog argues that urban life there rests on the intersection between two sets of conditions: increased globalization and the changing political landscape in Mexico (i.e., democratization and decentralization of political power). The city faces a laundry list of quality of life problems, including traffic, chaos, noise, pollution, deterioration, and abandonment. Furthermore, the confrontation of forces contesting public space pits the popular sector (the lower and working classes) against the private sector (Mexican and other North American commercial and development interests). The former aims for the construction C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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of affordable housing in the city center, and utilizes public spaces as a forum for political protest; the latter favors the conversion of the downtown historic city center into a privatized international tourism zone, along with its tertiarization, dominated by banks, offices, and commerce. Herzog shows that the cultural patrimony of Mexico City’s historic center will undoubtedly play a decisive role in the outcome of future development. While downtown is no longer the primary node of commerce and office activity, it holds important symbolic value for the Mexican people. Herzog heeds caution, for “new technology, global media, transnational investment, and free trade imply a new kind of city building that could disrupt or even destroy the strong neighborhood identity, the dynamic street life, and pedestrian scale of much of the central urban core, and the active and convivial spaces that have survived modernization in the 1900s” (p. 165). Herzog takes his analysis of public space a step further and demonstrates its relevance to Mexico’s neighbor to the north. Much of the American Southwest developed in a similar way to the Mexican examples above, first as part of the Spanish colonial empire for 300 years and subsequently for another 50 years as part of independent Mexico before the United States annexed it. Cities such as Santa Fe, Tucson, and San Antonio are examples of Spanish colonial urbanism, seen in the existence and centrality of the plaza. Furthermore, the movement of capital and culture in contemporary times along the long-shared border between Mexico and the U.S. fuses Mexican and American notions of public space. This fusion offers creative uses and meanings of public space in the border region, perhaps what might be called a Latino-American (my term) notion of public space. Latino communities in the American Southwest utilize public space to express ethnic pride and celebrate their sense of history. For example, Herzog argues the existence of “Latino street culture,” in which people interact spontaneously on the streets in American cities (p. 219). Cultural meanings and contexts of public space continue to prove fluid and flexible, perhaps especially so in the age of rapid globalizations. Ultimately, Herzog argues that American cities would do well to pay attention to their histories, especially their inherited Latino histories, and use them as a basis to cultivate vibrant city spaces. Overall, we find in Herzog’s work a caveat directed to urban planners, architects, politicians, and residents of the city. He reminds us that public spaces—in Spain, Mexico, and the United States—are infused with memory and must be protected from forces that empty them of their historical significance and convert them into mere transit pathways. City centers, and the public spaces they comprise, are expressions of identity, and offer those who use them the opportunity for spontaneous encounter and exchange. The task of conserving and/or revitalizing these spaces is daunting. Some cities, like Madrid and Mexico City, struggle and fail to conserve meaning and connection; others, like Barcelona and Quer´etaro, succeed. Along with the desire to “return” to the city center—itself a contested issue—solid and creative planning can counteract the trend of deteriorating public spaces and boost the spirit of public life they engender. As Herzog effectively shows, driving through cities on the way to suburban shopping malls is a fact of contemporary urban living. Walking through and enjoying a city plaza, though, is a richer and more meaningful experience, an experience that should not be erased from the urban landscape. Richard N. Gioioso Department of International Relations and Geography Florida International University C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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Should Britain Leave the EU? An Economic Analysis of a Troubled Relationship, by Patrick Minford, Vidya Mahambare, and Eric Nowell. 2005. Cheltenham, U.K. and Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar, in association with the Institute of Economic Affairs (U.K.). 254 + xvi. ISBN 1-84542-136-1, cloth, $90; ISBN 1-84542-379-8, paper, $24. The UK’s relationship with the European Union (EU), in its various guises, has been a source of increasingly acrimonious domestic dispute that began even before its first incarnation in 1958. This friction is bound up in long-standing internal debates concerning the UK’s declining (relative) international economic and political influence after 1945 and its appropriate place within contemporary Europe. This dispute has, at times, been a bitter bone of contention both within and between the major UK political parties and the progenitor of much internecine conflict that has contributed to the undermining of the credibility of government. The UK’s love-hate relationship with the European vision dates back at least to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s fatal hesitation regarding prospective membership during the final rounds of founding negotiations that followed the 1955 Messina Conference based upon Paul-Henri Spaak’s detailed blueprint for a European Economic Community (EEC). This was followed by an almost immediate reconsideration of the UK position and the subsequent volta face of the 1961membership application, only to be dashed by President de Gaulle’s humiliating veto. This hesitation and consequent exclusion enabled the leading powers of the nascent EEC, France and West Germany, to impose their own “continental” vision in formulating the guiding economic and political dirigisme over Anglo-Saxon laissez faire. Eventual entry in 1973 was too late to prevent the institutional dominance of dirigiste interventionism and political expediency. Many of the subsequent disputes with its European partners have been over the high cost and inefficiency of this intervention and UK efforts to place more reliance (and trust) in the market mechanism. Arguably, the advent of the Single European Market in 1993 and the successive reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since 1995, with positive knock-on effects on global agricultural trade reform, reflect the growing influence of the UK vision within a greatly enlarged EU and a weakening of its dirigiste tendencies. Patrick Minford is a well-known and long-standing opponent of UK membership of the EU. He is a persuasive writer and speaker who makes no secret of his views, reflected in the somewhat provocative title of this book. He and his coauthors provide a quantitative economic assessment of the monetary costs and benefits of UK membership, and, given that they find these to be in deficit, propose that the UK should therefore cut its losses, withdraw, and “go it alone.” This is probably the most comprehensive attempt to quantify the costs and benefits of UK membership of the EU, certainly in recent years. Although advocates of withdrawal exist, and there is even one minor right-wing political party dedicated exclusively to withdrawal, the debate has largely subsided since the 1975 Referendum and the focus of debate has shifted to specific policy issues. The first chapter, subtitled “Why the UK Should Renegotiate or Leave,” provides a brief summary of the findings regarding the six areas investigated: agriculture, manufacturing, services, monetary policy, social/fiscal harmonization, and public finances, along with policy recommendations for UK withdrawal. The high costs of the CAP, not only to the UK, are well known, estimated here at 0.3–0.4 percent of UK GDP. The costs of manufacturing are estimated at 2–3 percent. Eurozone membership is argued C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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to leave overall currency instability unchanged. Full social harmonization could raise unemployment by 5.7 percent and reduce output by 6.4 percent. Finally, the magnitude of public finance deficits in France, Italy, and Germany could cost EU members such as the UK some 7 percent of GDP. The remaining chapters in Part 1, Chapters 2 and 3, are brief and the authors focus on the evaluation of European trading agreements and currency, regulation, and public finance issues, respectively. The core of the book lies in Part 2, which contains three chapters devoted to in-depth analyses of the agriculture, manufacturing, and services sectors together with a final chapter that evaluates the costs and benefits of EU trade arrangements. Part 3 contains a brief final chapter that asks, pace Vladimir Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” The key chapters in the study are concerned with the quantitative analyses of the impact on the UK agricultural and manufacturing sectors. These make some use of partial equilibrium techniques but are based primarily on a more robust general equilibrium approach to quantifying the sectoral impacts and economy-wide interactions. While it is difficult to fault the quantitative techniques and therefore the results produced, the underlying assumptions and counterfactuals require more consideration given the magnitude of the negative effects produced for both UK agriculture and manufacturing. The baseline comparator for both sectors is “world prices,” which, at least in the partial equilibrium diagrams, appear to be assumed to be perfectly competitive with infinite supply elasticity. Global agricultural trade liberalization is expected to raise world food prices as a consequence of cuts in subsidies—and output—by the EU and US. Further, while perfectly competitive conditions might hold for some (limited) agricultural prices, it is certainly not the case for many (branded) manufactures because of the dominance of large global firms. In the UK, that is exacerbated by high concentration in distribution and retailing, so raising food and durable good prices to consumers well above the “competitive” market level. The analysis of services is inevitably more complex given the data limitations, and the study is limited to interpreting existing empirical work and drawing broad-based conclusions. In Chapter 7, the authors then attempt to evaluate the likely impact of UK withdrawal on these sectors as well as unilateral EU trade liberalization—both of which result in substantial (expected) gains. The discussions of monetary policy, social/fiscal harmonization, and public finances are more polemical, particularly that justifying the abolition of the minimum wage and employee health and safety legislation of the European Social Chapter. A critical weakness of the study is that it treats the pure economics of the UK’s membership of the EU in isolation from broader issues of international relations and political economy. There is little consideration of the policy maneuverings of successive UK Prime Ministers and governments. For example, the supposedly anti-EU Margaret Thatcher (for whom Minford was a policy advisor) was responsible for the disastrous decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the signing the Treaty of European Union (Maastricht Treaty), as well as securing the controversial budget rebate. The evolution of EU policy is a function of decisions made by sovereign governments; compromise and quid pro concessions have always been the outcomes of intergovernmental negotiations. The authors’ assumption that the UK can function effectively as an “independent” nation without the EU might also be regarded as somewhat unrealistic. Many of the arguments they present here implicitly highlight weaknesses in the “pure” economic
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theory of customs unions, which regards the distribution of gains and losses between constituent members as subordinate to the overall efficiency gains and losses at the supranational level. For example, the CAP is a logical outcome of international political economy but not of standard economic theory, which can only quantify the CAP’s inherent irrationality and inefficiency. The study is an interesting and deliberately provocative one that makes an important contribution to a long-standing debate in the UK. It will certainly provide heavy ammunition for the anti-EU brigade in the form of substantive quantitative estimates of the costs (and benefits) of UK membership. It should also be required reading for those favorably disposed toward the EU; the at times uneasy relationship that does exist is not (always) based upon xenophobia alone but reflects a different set of economic, political, and social ideals and objectives. Robert Read Department of Economics Management School Lancaster University Foreign Direct Investment and the Regional Economy, by Jonathan Jones and Colin Wren. 2006. Aldershot, U.K. and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. 248 + ii. ISBN 0-7546-4522-3, $99.95. There is a broad consensus that foreign direct investment (FDI) confers economic advantages on local economies. FDI brings capital investment, new jobs, new technologies, and a host of other goodies wherever it goes, so it is naturally considered an unadorned good thing. Look at China, after all, or at India, or Ireland, where rapid economic growth is clearly associated with rising levels of foreign investment. Viewed from this perspective, studies of the impact of FDI serve largely to offer statistical details that can be cited to justify the warm glow everyone feels when a large foreign firm announces it is coming to town. Jones and Wren simply refuse to share the good feeling about FDI without first processing some numbers. In doing so, they take a detached and serious look at the consequences of foreign direct investment in one area, the northeastern region of England. They have access to excellent data on the regional operations of foreign-owned plants from 1985 to 1999, and use these data to answer important questions about FDI in the region. How large are the benefits that FDI brings, as measured by new plant and equipment investment? How many jobs were created or retained? Did foreign investors create as many jobs as they promised the government when starting their investment projects? And did FDI come to stay, or perhaps instead contribute to regional economic instability by opening new operations only to close them shortly afterward? The evidence is mixed. Yes, foreign investors made significant new capital investments in the region (about £1 billion per year during this period, corresponding to 4–5 percent of regional GDP), contributing to the local economy and creating significant employment opportunities. The activities of foreign investors were relatively capitalintensive, however, and thereby created fewer employment opportunities than was characteristic of similar investments by domestic firms. Despite this tendency, more than 35 percent of the manufacturing labor force in northeast England worked for foreign-owned
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firms by 1999. Aggregate employment in foreign-owned plants in 1999 was only 80 percent of that promised initially. And foreign investment tended to be rather footloose, one quarter of foreign plants shutting down within 10 years of initial investment, and three quarters shutting down within 15 years. The big question, of course, is whether regional FDI is worth the government subsidies, regulatory laxity, and high-profile attention that politicians lavish on it. The book does not actually offer an answer, which is a pity, and even a bit surprising. It seems that one should be able to sum the benefits of FDI, compare to the costs, and deliver an assessment. The absence of a sharp bottom line may frustrate some readers who feel that after slogging through all the data description, statistical estimation, and other quantitative analysis, it is only fair that they be rewarded with an answer. To be sure, there are hints here and there that maybe the consequences of FDI are not nearly as rosy as popular opinion would have it, but a cold hard tally of what you get and what you give seems to be missing. So what is the answer—is regional FDI worth the hype? Any careful assessment of the merits of encouraging FDI needs to consider what would happen in the absence of favorable treatment. That is very hard to do, and Jones and Wren do not really attempt it. There is, for example, no effort to identify what regional employment would be in the absence of FDI, or any net effects of FDI on other aspects of regional economic activity. The authors rely on a brief and rather uncritical survey of the published FDI literature to conclude that there is no systematic evidence of beneficial economic spillovers from FDI. While this is a fair summary of the conclusions of much of the surveyed literature, the discerning critic has to be uneasy with drawing much of an inference at all from this body of evidence. Using their detailed data on regional FDI activity, the authors might have offered their own estimates of FDI spillover effects, but alas, they do not. Hence, it would be fair to say that the literature does not tell us, and unfortunately, we still do not know the extent to which FDI improves regional economic outcomes. This is not the only frustration that readers of the book will encounter. Individual words are clearly missing from the text in several places, and one memorable paragraph (the first on page 158), omits all of the upper-case letters. While it makes an excellent parlor game to fill in the vacancies, it is probably a distraction from the serious business at hand. More importantly, the book’s skimpy and rather quirky index offers patchy assistance to readers seeking information on individual topics. Evoking images of a s´eance, the index includes entries for “knowledge,” and “foreseen events,” but not for “wages,” “profits,” or “subsidies.” One of the nice functions of this book is to serve as a guide to the FDI literature, but here the index is distinctly unhelpful. While the book’s bibliography includes cited works by hundreds of authors (even counting Mira Wilkins as a single person, despite her two separate listings in the bibliography), the index directs readers only to a handful of text references, chosen apparently on the basis of perceived prominence of the authors. Despite these frustrations, it is an important and useful book, one to be kept in an easily accessible spot on the shelf. We are starving for good information on foreign direct investment, and the book is crammed full of information. The story of northeastern England—a declining manufacturing job base being replaced slowly and unevenly with service sector employment—is a story retold all over the developed world. What happens to these places during the decline of manufacturing, and what role foreign investment plays in softening the adjustment process, are critical questions for all our futures. This
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book does not provide the answers, but it offers juicy nuggets that readers can savor and digest on their own ways to finding the answers. James R. Hines Jr. Department of Economics University of Michigan and National Bureau of Economic Research The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, by David Blackbourn. 2006. New York: W. W. Norton. 466 + xii. ISBN 0393-06212-0, $29.95. Inspired by the U.S. “New Western” historians, David Blackbourn, professor at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, started his research in 1995 and wrote this amazing, 466 page-book between 1999 and 2005. Well written, The Conquest of Nature tells the story of how German people built their landscape from a major natural element, water. This epic account brings together culture, economics, politics, history, and geography in a global perspective. The development of habitable land from swampland and a wild Rhine gives the root of a modern German nation. Most of this history leads to a belief in the power of culture to master nature, and the superiority of the German culture, which gave root to Nazi policies. The book has six chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter is about Prussia in the eighteenth century, the second about the Rhine—“The Man Who Tamed the Wild Rhine: Remaking Germany’s River in the Nineteenth Century,” that man being Johann Gottfried Tulla. Chapters 3 and 4 are on the period from the 1848 Revolution to World War II, the second including some history of dam-building. Chapter 5 is on “Race and Reclamation: National Socialism in Germany and Europe” and Chapter 6 on the postwar period. The book is extremely well illustrated with many historical images and 17 maps. Blackbourn’s book looks far away from regional science, but by reading it in detail, we can see the constant reference to “Raum” or space (Lebensraum, Grossraum, ¨ Europaischer Raum . . .). And in the chapter on the period of National Socialism, Blackbourn even quotes Walter Christaller (“something of an outsider in his discipline,” p. 260) in writing about “the narrowness of space, the domination of space, the magic of space” (ibid.), which explains the German dream of an East European Raum for the future. A dream shown in the book on maps of the Nazi planning of Kutno, a region in Poland, clearly inspired by Christaller’s central places (p. 300). This planning obliged the homecoming Germans to adopt themselves organically to the order and discipline of the German Reich. In that same chapter Blackbourn notes the parallel that many Germans saw between the East in their history and the West in American history. “The Volga must be our Mississippi,” Hitler said in 1941 (p. 293). Blackbourn also notes that the economist Gustav Schmoller “explicitly compared the German east with the American west. Another great public figure, the sociologist Max Weber, did so implicitly” (p. 294). The mystique of the eastern frontier was found in schoolbooks, popular histories, party propaganda, with a belief in German superiority to organize the colonization. The General Plan for the East, prepared during World War II, “calculated that 3,345,805 settlers would be needed in all over a period of 25 to 30 years. Set against this maniacally precise number, the plan identified on the other side of the ledger a pool of potential
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settlers approaching six million, two-thirds of whom would come from the “old Reich’” (p. 301). The defeat of the Nazi regime brought an end to this colonization process and to the expulsion (ethnic cleansing) of the previous inhabitants. David Blackbourn’s book is a fascinating work of global history, which raises a modern question on the limits of our efforts to conquer nature. Is it why the “Greens” are so active in Germany? Blackbourn does not answer that question, but ends the book on the debates about “renaturing” waterways in Germany today. A new view on the Conquest of Nature. Antoine Bailly Department of Geography University of Geneva The End of Peasantry? The Disintegration of Rural Russia, by Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova, and Ilya Zaslavsky. 2006. Series: Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. 258 + xi. ISBN 0-8229-4295-X, cloth, $60; ISBN 0-8229-5941-0, paper, $27.95. The crumbling remnants of former collective farms are stark reminders of what social and economic life used to be like in rural Russia. Agricultural communities that once thrived under support from the Soviet state have been reduced to collections of rusting machinery, aging and disinterested workforces, and dilapidated housing stocks. Sporadic efforts at land reform in the 1990s—culminating in the 2003 Land Code—have failed either to modernize the collective farm sector or to pave the way for successful commercial farming. As a result, a growing portion of Russia’s declining agricultural production is taking place on small, garden-like plots of land governed by uncertain property rights. Only in a few semiurban or especially fertile locations have former collective farms given way to private enterprises employing substantial labor forces and modern production technologies. With the reduction of employment opportunities in agriculture, rural depopulation has emerged as an especially prominent feature of Russia’s demographic crisis. The multidimensional decline of agrarian Russia is the subject of Ioffe, Nefedova, and Zaslavsky’s book. While they do follow some trends back to the 19th century, they are particularly interested in developments since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. They provide an impressive amount of empirical evidence on two critical aspects of rural decline: depopulation and changes in the organization (and productivity) of agriculture. As geographers, their primary focus is on how those two processes—which they see as fundamentally interrelated—varied spatially across European Russia. They argue that it is only by considering the geography of agricultural and demographic change that one can diagnose accurately the current and future status of rural Russia. Ioffe and his coauthors make clear that agrarian decline in the post-Soviet era has not been uniform across Russia. This is a convincing story: data they bring to bear does indicate a strong spatial dimension to socioeconomic change in rural Russia. However, several editorial difficulties and problems with their analytical approaches make their conclusions about the role of geography more suggestive than definitive. In the first two chapters of the book, the authors do a fine job of surveying the historical and institutional development of agriculture and, more generally, rural Russian society. Their consideration of post-1991 developments in Chapter 2 is particularly well formulated. Here, they make good use of media accounts and aggregate statistics C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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to describe the evolution of property rights and the organization of agricultural production in the 1990s. They note that institutional factors—from serfdom, through Soviet collectivization policies, to current experiences with ill-defined land reforms—have long lowered efficiency in Russian agriculture. At the same time, they end Chapter 2 by suggesting that these institutional difficulties are of secondary importance to “constraints that arise from Russia’s environment (physical and social alike)” (p. 44). Thus, their work contributes in a novel way to the recent debate among social scientists regarding the primacy of institutions or (geographic) factor endowments in the process of economic development. In Chapters 3 and 4 the authors utilize provincial-level data to outline the existence of several types of spatial gradients in Russia, which they argue have become more prominent since 1991. In Chapter 3, they describe patterns of declining agricultural productivity as one either moves west to east across Russia or from major urban centers to increasingly peripheral rural areas. In Chapter 4, the focus is on various aspects of demographic and labor-market changes. These include spatially differentiated migration and population growth, problems of adverse selection among those who remain in rural settlements, ethnic variation in alcoholism and seasonal work, and what they see as growing moral “degradation” among rural residents (p. 94). The most interesting and infuriating parts of the book are Chapters 5 and 6. Here, the authors endeavor to show that the deterioration of the rural labor force is reinforcing the spatial contrasts in land use and agricultural productivity (Chapter 5) in a process that has divided agrarian Russia into an “archipelago” of agriculturally viable areas that are surrounded by “black holes” of severe social and economic decline (both terms appear throughout Chapter 6, pp. 145–155). The authors utilize a rich, districtlevel (approximately like a U.S. county) data set on population and agricultural production and present fascinating maps documenting the spatial variation they are concerned with. These data appear to be a great improvement upon existing sources on rural Russia since 1991. Unfortunately, Ioffe and his coauthors don’t give sufficient detail on their data to allow the reader to appreciate fully their contribution (the absence of discussion of sources and the inadequate documentation of statistics and casual observations are annoyances throughout the book), nor do they formulate any sort of conceptual framework that would help untangle the difficult issues of causality underlying their argument. In the absence of any sort of agricultural “production function,” or any detailed formulation of how rural labor markets function in modern Russia, the central question of what change is driving which other changes is never answered with any degree of certainty. For example, is the decline in the rural population (in both quantity and quality) an exogenous reduction in labor inputs or a response to rising urban wage premiums? This problem of indeterminacy is compounded by the limited discussion of geographic variation in agricultural investment, and how it has changed since the end of central planning. The authors do a fine job of describing how the organization of production has shifted away from collective farms and toward household plots, but do little with the implications for investment, beyond simply acknowledging it has fallen sharply since 1991. The lack of attention certainly is driven by data limitations, but it is difficult to interpret their findings in the absence of a more complete analysis of all factors of production. All in all, these two chapters offer a plethora of interesting statistical correlations that could fit any number of explanations. This criticism is not meant to discount the overall value of the study. Indeed, it should serve as the starting point for anyone interested in how rural development since C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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the fall of the Soviet Union has varied across space. The last two substantive chapters offer much of interest along those lines. Based on the spatial variation the authors document in earlier chapters, in Chapter 7 they offer a new “regionalization” of Russia in terms of physical geography, proximity to cities, and ethnic composition. In Chapter 8, they focus on case studies of agrarian change in four regions of European Russia, and the chapter provides enlightening insights into how the processes of agricultural and labor market change have played out in diverse post-1991 settings, from Moscow to the North Caucuses. In their concluding Chapter 9, the authors describe their study as an effort to “monitor and interpret changes unfolding in post-Soviet Russia” (p. 221) along geographic lines. As such, they do a great job on the “monitoring” part, and leave plenty of opportunities for future interesting work on the “interpretation” front. Steven E. Nafziger Department of Economics Williams College Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, by Oren Yiftachel. 2006. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 350 + xi. ISBN 0-8122-3927X, $69.95. Oren Yiftachel, the author of Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Development at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel. He holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Western Australia, and in architecture and town planning from the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel. He has written articles in planning journals familiar to many readers of Journal of Regional Science. In his view, Israel is an ethnocracy, because one ethnic group—Jews, and more specifically Jews of western origin—dominate all other ethnic groups in that country by appropriating the state apparatus to further its own interests. Consequently, he holds that Israel may appear to be a democracy but this is only a fac¸ ade because this state fails to offer its Arab/Palestinian and non-Western Jewish minorities equal treatment. The word “ethnocracy” while not new is also not common. None of the dictionaries I have at home shows an entry for it. On line, I checked the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, and Oxford English Dictionary, but as of January 2007, none had an entry for ethnocracy either. However, The New York Times archives yielded four citations, the first in 1947, where ethnocracy was defined as “rule by a race.” The second appeared years later, in 1996, and was about Russian nationalists who seek to establish an ethnocracy by a “cleansing of foreign elements.” A year later, in 1997, Rwanda was described as a Tutsi military ethnocracy. In 2002, ethnocracy in Rwanda was associated with genocide. In the above examples, the term ethnocracy stands in contrast to democracy, which in the western world has a favorable connotation. Israel is normally classified as a democracy, but this standing is called into question by Yichtafel’s book and his refereed articles on which it is based. Yiftachel stated that he has made a contribution by developing a “critical ethnocratic theory” (p. 6). I tried to follow his theoretical framework under the assumption that it has a logical basis. If so, it should suggest a consistent and objective method for categorization, since an ethnocratic regime forms “a distinct identifiable type” (p. 11). C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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He cautions however, that “Ethnocratic regimes may emerge in a variety of forms, including cases of ethnic dictatorships or regimes implementing violent strategies of ethnic cleansing, as occurred in Rwanda and Serbia, and those whose strategies consist of control and exclusion, as happened in Sudan and pre-1994 South Africa. . . . ” (p. 12). Additional examples of states that used violent methods to implement their ethnic goals are nineteenth-century Australia, Canada, and the United States. He also could have included Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. However, Yiftachel’s interest lies not with these dictatorial regimes. Rather he wants to extend the term “ethnocracy” to include nations that “ . . . represent themselves as democratic and uphold several formal democratic mechanisms, such as elections, civil rights such as freedom of movement, a parliamentary system, and a relatively open system of media and communication . . . , ” but actually “ . . . facilitate an undemocratic expansion of the dominant ethnonation” (p. 12). He labels such nondictatorial nations as “open ethnocracies” (p. 12). However, the qualifier “open” usually drops out (as in the title of his book). So, when the term ethnocracy by itself is applied to Israel, the reader may well associate that country with other ethnocracies including the dictatorial types cited above. Estonia, Sri Lanka, Latvia, Serbia, and Malaysia are mentioned as additional examples of “open ethnocracies.” Surely, there must be more “so called” democratic nations that lie close enough to the “tipping zone” for reclassification. However, Yiftachel cautions that “It is analytically difficult to sharply define this zone . . . .” (p. 21). A determination would have to be made as to whether the “political demos has been fundamentally undermined by the state’s ethnocratic laws, policies, and institutions” (p. 21). But how can one determine whether the political demos have been fundamentally undermined? Well, let us follow his analysis of Australia. Yiftachel asserts that Australia has made a transition from an ethnocracy to a democracy: “During the first 120 years of white settlement, 80 to 90 percent of native Australians perished” (p. 26) and “white settlers and mineral explorers drove Aboriginal holders off most fertile or mineral-rich lands. . . . ” (p. 27). In 1992, the Aborigines (there are still over a half million left—about two percent of the population), after a 10-year legal battle, were given the right to make claims to native land ownership based on collective and continuous occupation of the land: “Successful native title claims depended, however, on highly restrictive conditions, with the intention that little land would be returned to Aboriginal ownership . . . the structural marginalization of Aborigines has remained conspicuously evident” (p. 28). Yet, in Yiftachel’s estimation: “Australia has been transformed from an ethnocracy to a liberal-democracy” (p. 28). Now, I have to agree that Australia is a democracy despite its land-contested policy toward its ethnic Aborigines. My judgment is based on a model of a democratic nation-state where the majority ethnic group acts to promote its own interests, culture, language, and composition by immigration, but where it accords rights to its minorities to avoid “tyranny by the majority.” These minority rights may vary, and may change over time, but strict ethnic equality is hardly possible in a democracy unless the minority can (and wants to) assimilate. Democratic nations do act in accordance with the will of the majority ethnic group, often to the disadvantage of a minority, as in Australia. The United States, as a democratic nation, takes pride in its ethnic diversity, but ethnic biases continue to exist, and minorities are expected, eventually, to assimilate the values, culture, and language of the dominant American ethnic type to be fully accepted. C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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Israel’s Arab/Palestinian minority unquestionably lacks the same privileges accorded to Israeli Jews. Over time this gap has narrowed, and it needs to move further in that direction. However, if equal treatment of minorities is made an essential component of a democracy, then Israel will never qualify because the Arab/Palestinians are a nonassimilating minority—by their own choice. If support for the majority ethnic group in preference to others classifies a government as ethnocratic, then this term applies to virtually every large nation with resident minorities. After all, France prefers French ethnicity to Algerian; Germany prefers German ethnicity to Turkish; and Israel prefers Jewish ethnicity to Arab/Palestinian. There is nothing surprising or intrinsically undemocratic about these preferences. However, minorities have to be treated fairly and as equally as possible. But sometimes it is not possible to please all parties. In that case, how much support should be extended to a minority against the wishes and needs of the majority? This is one of the classic issues of governance in normal democratic nation-states. Yiftachel’s use of the label ethnocracy is categorical and subjective. A more objective approach to political classification is provided by the Freedom House organization, which evaluates nations on a scale measuring political and civil liberties. Israel is classified as Free, the highest category, and the only nation in the Middle East and North Africa so designated (www.freedomhouse.org). The Economist developed another quantitative measure—an index of democracy (a score based on answers to 60 questions) that classifies nations as: full democracies (28 nations), flawed democracies (54 nations), hybrid regimes (30 nations), and authoritarian regimes (55 nations). Israel was classified as a flawed democracy (www.economist.com/media/pdf/DEMOCRACY INDEX 2007 v3.pdf). Both sources document their methodology. While interpretation based on these quantitative indices requires care, the scores are as free of bias as one can expect in the social sciences. In summary, the book Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine is a polemic on equality for Israel’s Arab/Palestinian and nonwestern Jewish ethnic minorities. Regardless of how worthy this cause may be, it does not justify the use of subjectivity in a theory that depends on a contrived definition of democracy. Harold Brodsky Department of Geography University of Maryland, College Park
Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment, by Matthew E. Kahn. 2006. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. 160 + vii. ISBN 0-8157-4816-7, cloth, $44.95; ISBN 0-8157-4815-9, cloth, $18.95. Matthew Kahn opens Green Cities with a question of fundamental consequence to the field of regional science: “Does growth hurt or help the urban environment?” (p. 1) The matter is far-reaching and inevitable, Kahn explains, because, within the next two decades, most of the world’s population will live in cities and, already, nearly all of the world’s cities are, or are well on their way to becoming, free-market, capitalist economies. So how will the environments of these places be affected? On the one hand, urban growth clearly has deleterious effects—via contamination from industrial activities, for example—but, on the other hand, it just as clearly has produced an exceptionally high quality of life for residents of cities located all around the planet. This dichotomy, coupled with the fact that few places, if any, can be described C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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as being either absolutely “spoiled” or absolutely “pristine,” suggests that economic development is both good and bad for the urban environment. Working from this premise, Kahn develops a straightforward economic explanation for why this is the case and, in the process, delivers a workable framework for evaluating the environmental outcome of growth and thinking about how to enhance it. Overall, I found his book to be exceptionally good and recommend it broadly to researchers and policymakers in regional science and especially those interested in urbanization. A general summary and some of my more specific thoughts and reactions follow. After the introduction, in Chapter 2, Kahn describes the different ways in which ecologists, public health experts, and economists go about measuring environmental quality. These approaches—namely ecological footprints, benefit-cost analysis, and hedonic price analysis, respectively—all attempt to gauge the same thing and, together, they form the basis for a more holistic “green city index” (p. 27). The index is largely hypothetical because the kind of data needed to create it are not available, but it serves to clarify the reasoning behind much of the material covered in subsequent chapters. In Chapter 3, Kahn presents the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) as an explanation for why the “greenness” of the world’s cities differs so much. In short, the EKC hypothesis suggests that growth initially raises the scale of environmental degradation before lowering it. In the example he gives (on p. 31), the result is an inverted U-shaped relationship between pollution and gross national product; in terms of per capita income, the turning point of the EKC has variously been estimated at “$6,000–$8,000” (p. 34). The reason for the relationship is that as economies grow consumption grows too, but eventually, the demand for environmental quality shifts, causing firms to use greener technology and households to use greener products. This simple explanation goes a long way toward identifying the fundamental difference between cities with high and low environmental quality. It’s also worth pointing out that the chapter itself is very clear and does an excellent job of providing the reader with an intuitive understanding of the EKC hypothesis and its implications. Kahn then delves deeper into the underlying behavioral mechanisms. In Chapter 4, he examines the relationship between income growth and changes in household demand for greener technologies and products. The highlight here is an analysis (contained in two tables of data and a chart, plus the surrounding text on pp. 51–56) of how vehicle emissions vary with household income that provides good empirical support for the EKC hypothesis. This evidence suggests that, in the United States, the turning point, which is triggered by the use of newer, higher quality automobiles, occurs somewhere around $40,000. Moving beyond market forces, Kahn then turns, in Chapter 5, to the role that governance and regulation play in determining how green urban areas are. Here again, the evidence confirms that wealthier economies populated with better-educated households demand greener policies and that, in turn, these policies—including air and water quality controls, growth management, and others—result in higher environmental quality. Like the chapter just before, the implication via the EKC is that growth ultimately leads to greener outcomes and that government regulation can be used to mitigate the various market failures that impede them. Moreover, as economies progress along a postindustrial trajectory, demand for environmental quality, expressed via market forces plus governance and regulation, is likely to continue to increase. Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 bring the body of Green Cities to a close by examining how population growth and sprawl enter the mix. These two dimensions of the problem sit somewhat outside the purview of the EKC hypothesis, which is really about income C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
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growth, not growth in numbers of people or the space they occupy. Too often, economic analyses stop short of dealing with more qualitative issues that do not fit neatly into the underlying theory, so it is to the credit of Green Cities that Kahn brings population growth and sprawl into the discussion in this way. Population growth, the first of the two dimensions, speaks directly to the magnitude and urgency of the question that motivates the book because, as the world’s urban population grows, so too does people’s exposure to urban environmental problems. The second dimension, sprawl, is also a key aspect of the problem because different modes of land use lead to different resource consumption patterns. A particularly interesting component of Kahn’s discussion, for example, is an analysis of how much gasoline residents of different metropolitan areas require, after controlling for income and size; households living in New York City and San Francisco are estimated to use about 60 percent as much as households living in more sprawling places like San Antonio and Raleigh. All the material presented in these two chapters is in line with the EKC hypothesis and they add a lot to the book by illustrating how the hypothesis plays out on the ground. Chapter 8 is the conclusion, which mainly revisits the main themes of the book before ending with a brief statement on the situation in the United States. Green Cities is an important book, and I believe that, above and beyond its strong message and worthwhile content, its contribution to the field of regional science is at least twofold. First, it is a comprehensive survey of a large and rapidly expanding area of research—one that promises to break new barriers in policy analysis and management. The list of economics literature reviewed is long and Kahn also draws extensively on his own research and the knowledge that it has brought him. Second, Green Cities is written in a clear, plainspoken way that requires only minimal prior knowledge of the theory and methods involved. It is genuinely refreshing to see a scholar of Kahn’s stature make an area of research this complex and wide ranging so accessible and, for this reason, I believe that the book is certain to have a major impact. People coming at environmental problems from more normative disciplines/epistemologies, like mine, urban and regional planning, often find the economic perspective to be overly simplistic and/or reductionist, but that is definitely not the case here. In fact, what makes Green Cities such a pleasure to read is the way that it simultaneously simplifies the problem (via the EKC hypothesis) and highlights its reach and some of its intricacies. What is clear to me from reading the book is that the environmental impacts of urbanization represent some of the most challenging problems that researchers and policymakers are likely to face in the coming decades, and that facing them will require an interdisciplinary effort involving participants from the natural sciences, social sciences, and public policy fields—in other words, a group very much like the regional science community. I think that Green Cities takes an ambitious step in opening up the kind of dialogue that is needed to address the challenge, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in participating. John I. Carruthers Office of Policy Development and Research U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Urban Design and Planning University of Washington The opinions expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the U.S. government at large. C Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
