Notes From the Review Editor

Black Lives Matter. The planning field has not been kind to the Black community. One has to take a serious look at the history of our discipline to understand the role planning has played in reinforcing racial segregation, destroying Black neighborhoods, lacking in providing access to public transportation, and basically falling short in every aspect of our discipline. Today’s urban racial movement for Black racial justice provides an opportunity to ameliorate the role our planning discipline has played in institutional racism. Planning is a tool for reshaping our physical and social environment: Planning can perpetuate and maintain racial inequality, or planning can be used as a tool for advancing racial justice. Morally, our discipline’s AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (APA, 2016) is clear about how we should use planning to promote justice. It states, “We shall seek social justice by working to expand choice and opportunity for all persons, recognizing a special responsibility to plan for the needs of the disadvantaged and to promote racial and economic integration. We shall urge the alteration of policies, institutions, and decisions that oppose such needs” (APA, 2016, Sec. A.1.f.). The following book reviews emphasize this vital responsibility to the public: four of the seven book reviews specifically speak to racial injustice issues.

Tim Chapin, JAPA’s previous review editor, starts the book review’s racial equity cluster with a concise review of Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, a work that speaks directly to racial inequality. By illustrating the role urban policy and planners played in promoting segregation via exclusive housing and the lack of economic opportunities for Black people in the United States, Chapin praises the book as a work that every planner needs to read and a book that should be required reading in our planning educational programs and in professional development for practitioners. Rothstein explains that racial segregation is not an unintended consequence of markets; instead, segregation of Black people is a consequence of purposeful and racist urban policy and core planning tools such as zoning, infrastructure, public housing, code enforcement, and homeownership programs, which were created to segregate Black people.

The book review section’s emphasis on racial inequality continues with the review of Courtney Elizabeth Knapp’s Paul Davidoff Award–winning book, Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Charles Connerly of the University of Iowa (and also a past recipient of the Davidoff Award) explains how Chattanooga serves as a case study to describe various wages of displacement experienced by people of color, a process Knapp calls “diasporing displacement.” The book will help planners understand the historical trends related to displacement, which in turn helps cities better understand the context of experiencing gentrification today. Connerly encourages planners who work on placemaking to read the book because it will remind them of the long history of how displacement has ruined communities of color. He eloquently explains how the book “reminds us of the long histories of peoples who have inhabited our places, even if since long removed, their ongoing efforts to fashion those places into spaces that serve their needs and enrich our cities and towns.” Planners should read all of the Davidoff Award–winning books, because they all shed new light on equity issues. This book is no exception.

The following review by the University of Iowa’s Jane Rongerude also speaks to this review section’s focus on equity and racial justice issues. Rongerude views Katrin Anacker, Andrew Carswell, Sarah Kirby, and Kenneth Tremblay’s Introduction to Housing, 2nd edition, as a successful book covering important technical challenges and policy issues within the U.S. market context. The topics covered have a vital breadth, including racial and ethnic diversity, health, sustainability, disasters, and others. In addition to the strong U.S. focus, the editors expanded to include various regions throughout the world, such as Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa. Rongerude also appreciates the book’s audience; the book will be of interest to planners, architects, nonprofit and for-profit developers, and real estate students and practitioners.

We continue our emphasis on racial inequality with Eric Seymour of Rutgers University. He reviews Rosie Tighe and Stephanie Ryberg-Webster’s book, Legacy Cities: Continuity and Change Amid Decline and Revival, which describes both the challenges and opportunities present in “legacy cities,” former powerhouse cities that developed around expanding industry. A vital section of the book, according to Seymour, is the section on racial inequality. This section includes essential equity planers such as Norm Krumholz, who has a chapter on the equity effects of redevelopment in Black neighborhoods. A particularly valuable chapter for today’s racial conflicts in our cities is on race and policing in Ohio by Dunn, Allen, and Whitt, which is directly relevant to the current Black Lives Matter movement. According to Seymour, the chapter ends with a call for reform at multiple levels, which is useful as planners try to figure out our relationship to policing communities of color.

The Review section then turns to other planning issues, including utopian communities, planning theory, and skateboarding! Sonia Hirt of the University of Georgia reviews Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle Gournay, and Robert Freestone’s edited volume, Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change, which explores the legacies of utopian small cities in the United States. According to Hirt, “The purpose of the book, as I understand it, is to learn about the common problems of iconic planned communities and search for best practices in safeguarding their legacy and identity but also adapting them to change.” Hirt explains that Sies, Gournay, and Freestone analyze small cities that are residential, with mixed income, and that are located in green settings at the edge of metropolitan cities, characteristics of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept. Hirt assesses that the book makes an original contribution to planning history.

Our penultimate review by Lisa Ann Schweitzer of the University of Southern California takes us to planning theory. Schweitzer reviews Beatrix Haselberger’s Encounters in Planning Thought: 16 Autobiographical Essays From Key Thinkers in Spatial Planning. The book intends to create an oral history based on 16 essays from influential planning theorists: distinguished academics such as Judith Innes, John Friedmann, and Peter Hall. The book seems to be a good fit for teaching planning theory courses where the instructor wants to humanize the theorist as a supplement to the theorists’ academic ideas. Schweitzer takes issue with the lack of self-reflection regarding the theorists’ privileges (racial, gender, etc.) and how that benefited their careers.

Our last review opened my eyes to a planning issue that I thought was peripheral in the field of planning. But Jeremy Németh of the University of Colorado Denver helps to bring Ian Borden’s Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History to the center of planning practices. Németh begins the review by asking, “Why should planners care about skateboarding?” Németh describes how Borden goes about answering this question with detailed descriptions of how planners can learn from skateboarders how to “interpret, reimagine, and ultimately shape our cities.” Németh takes issue with the lack of analysis on a critical point: the predominantly White male–dominated activity. Nevertheless, Németh concludes with a positive assessment of the book by admiring the work as comprehensive, approachable, and passionately written with excellent images that bring skateboarding to planners.

In closing the Review section, I would like to encourage planning academics and practitioners to bring racial equity to all aspects of their work. Racial equity is operationalized differently within our planning subdisciplines; equity is dependent on the institutional planning context. All of our disciplines had a role to play in sustaining the racial inequality within our cities: We can also play an essential role in advancing racial equity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerardo Francisco Sandoval

Gerardo Francisco Sandoval is an associate professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, & Management at the University of Oregon.