I put this review section essay together while sitting in a beach house in Rehoboth Beach (DE). Like many northeastern coastal towns, Rehoboth Beach was for many decades a small community, with a main commercial strip with nearby residential neighborhoods and surrounded by remarkably productive farmland. Over the decades it became a retreat for people of means, leading to bigger and more expensive houses, tremendous traffic problems, and massive development in an unsightly suburban strip. The bucolic drive over from Washington (DC) or Baltimore (MD) along scenic two-lane roads has transformed into a blitzkrieg experience using massive federal and state highways, with bypasses around small towns along the way. Rehoboth Beach is thriving by many measures as businesses expand, new firms enter the market, and housing values increase; this summertime retreat has become a year-round community.
I describe this scene because the experience of this place is similar to that of many American communities. Economic growth and prosperity are observable and measurable. The sun, sand, and surf yield smiles, sunburn, shopping, seafood, craft brews, and a thriving real estate market. But the challenges of this prosperity are real, and many. Affordable housing is almost unknown anywhere close to town. Traffic gridlock is common, and not only on the weekends. Farmland is increasingly scarce, and these lands are under constant threat from the bulldozer. Tourists and outsiders bring many dollars to Rehoboth Beach, and these dollars are a godsend and curse to this community.
It is through this lens that I see so much on offer in the reviews in this issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association. In its own small way, Rehoboth Beach reflects the core issues and stories in each of the books reviewed in this issue. Up first is longtime planning professor Dennis E. Gale’s review of the award-winning and truly remarkable Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Mathew Desmond. Gale captures the many strengths and weaknesses of this book, one that details the firsthand experiences of households and families at the financial margins of the housing market. The personal stories are powerful, although Gale takes issue with some of the proposed solutions Desmond offers.
Professor Emeritus Michael B. Teitz’s review of Michael Storper, Thomas Kemeny, Naji Makarem, and Taner Osman’s The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles follows. This book, a tour de force in regional economic development, uses the divergence in the economies of Los Angeles and San Francisco (CA) to ruminate on the role of a range of factors on regional economic outcomes. The authors—and Teitz—conclude that regional economic development is a function of market forces, local factors (climate, labor force, accessibility), providence, and public sector action. The book offers no clear answers, but, as planners well understand, simple answers to complex phenomena are few and far between.
The next two books investigate the planning and development experience of the Great White North, beautiful and progressive Canada. The first of these books is explicitly about Canada: Ray Tomalty and Alan Mallach’s America’s Urban Future: Lessons from North of the Border is reviewed by Vancouver Island University professor Don Alexander. Alexander finds much to like in the book, suggesting that planners in the United States (and elsewhere) who are looking for policy ideas and inspiration for land, transport, and environmental planning should take a look. The second book in this section is Farmland Preservation: Land for Future Generations, reviewed by Evangeline Linkous. Edited by Wayne Caldwell, Stew Hilts, and Bronwynne Wilton, the book is not specifically focused on farmland protection in Canada but ends up as such with its Canadian-dominated examples. Linkous, an expert on land preservation herself, sees much to learn in these examples, although she is disappointed the book does not take a more expansive look at how to keep farmland from its last harvest of homes, strip malls, and so on.
The penultimate review is of a book focused on the topic of urban physics, which is related to the smart cities and Big Data movements. Urban physics rests on the idea that a combination of science, Big Data, and powerful computers can bring new insights into how cities function. Reviewer Geoff Boeing had high hopes for Marc Barthelemy’s The Structure and Dynamics of Cities: Urban Data Analysis and Theoretical Modeling. However, Boeing finds less new ground explored than expected and fewer meaningful insights into planning practice in this new book. Although forward thinking, Barthelemy’s book remains too rooted in science and not enough in the policy and politics that animate most cities.
Closing this issue’s section is Michael Maloy’s review of Eugene P. Moehring’s Reno, Las Vegas, and the Strip: A Tale of Three Cities. Like my own Rehoboth Beach, these places have economies rooted in tourism but also much more complex histories. Maloy, a planner in Salt Lake City (UT), describes Moehring’s rich urban histories that illustrate Las Vegas and Reno (NV) as much more than places to gamble, divorce, and drink. Tourism may be a prominent, even dominant, part of the story, but there is much more to Vegas, Reno, and Rehoboth than meets the eye.
As always, I welcome suggestions for books and e-books to be reviewed, offers to complete reviews, and other feedback on the section ([email protected]).