Book Reviews

Abstract

Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions: Towards More Equitable Development, Karen Chapple, NY, Routledge, 2015, 307 pp., US$155.00, ISBN 978-1-13-878966There have been a large number of books published on sustainability planning since the 1990s. For teachers or scholars of sustainability planning, one challenge is not a lack of choices but too many choices. This book by Karen Chapple, a Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, can be recommended. It distinguishes itself from competing choices by connecting 'planning dogmas' to 'changes that are occurring in our population, preferences, technology, and economy' (p. 14), and by presenting instructive real-world cases. It thus initiates intriguing discussions regarding how planning dogmas and practices have adapted to, and should adapt to the above changesChapters 1 and 2 serve as the introduction. They paint the big picture of contemporary cities/regions, their planning and the contexts where planning is embedded. The author argues that 'lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy' cities/regions are now commonly accepted across countries. But planning such cities/regions is a serious challenge. Planning as a profession has established paradigms regarding how to conceptualise and manage a series of relationships, 'between people and plans, economy and place, and the poor and their life changes', which have a lot to do with sustainability (p. 3). However, recent years have seen significant trends in population, preferences, technology and economy and this necessitates changes in planning paradigms so as to best deal with emerging opportunities and challenges. For instance, the US will become a country where the minority is the majority, where there are more millennials than baby boomers and where the youth is experiencing higher unemployment rates. This would engender challenges for planning and beyond where the region is a better unit of analysis and for interventions. Based on this, the author examines the evolution of regional sustainability planning in the US and surveys representative regional sustainability efforts outside the US. The introduction concludes with descriptions of sustainability planning in California and the San Francisco Bay Area, which the author treats as a leader.The main body (Chapters 3 to 13) has three parts: development, economic development and equity, which correspond to the triple bottom lines of sustainability. Each part re-conceptualises the aforementioned paradigms, supplemented by selected realworld cases. Part 1 describes the necessity and challenges faced by infill development and other planning and policy tools. It regards the former as one of the least challenging planning and policy tools. Each tool, however, says the author, can be instrumental and destructive to realising sustainability/ development goals. In San Francisco, for instance, the author shows that reactive infill development and mixed-income development have exacerbated gentrification rather than lessened it.Part 2 argues that developing high-quality jobs that match the skills of local disadvantaged workers should be at least equally important as those traditional approaches such as stimulating exports, promoting agglomerations and cultivating entrepreneurship. It uses various cases in California to back up this argument. Again, the author cautions readers that tools which work in Place A may not work in Place B. …