changes are justified through racialized appeals and target communi- ties of color. ... We find that during the Dutch colonial era, planning was piecemeal; that ...
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analyze the neoliberal inner city as one that is thoroughly racialized. In other words, he does not consider the extent to which these urban changes are justified through racialized appeals and target communities of color. He does not, for example, consider how changes in the neoliberal city are linked to increased policing, surveillance, and the rise of a prison industrial complex. Be that as it may, there is much in this study for undergraduate and graduate students, academics, and practitioners. Clement Lai Lai is an assistant professor of city and regional planning and Asian American studies at Cornell University. His research interests include urban renewal, multiracial communities, and property. He is working on a book on redevelopment in San Francisco’s Fillmore district.
International Planning and Development
Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century Christopher Silver. Routledge, London and New York, 2008. 262 pages. $120.
ot only is Jakarta the largest metropolitan area in Southeast Asia, it is the also one of the most dynamic, though beset with most of the urban problems experienced in twentieth century Southeast Asia. Batavia, colonial capital of the Netherland Indies in the first half of the 20th century was a small urban area of approximately 150,000 residents. In the second half, Batavia became Jakarta, the 14 million megacity capital of independent Indonesia. Planning the Megacity reveals how planning contributed to reshape the small Dutch colonial city into the sprawling, modern, and democratic megacity capital. Silver’s main thesis is that planning has been a vital component of Jakarta’s metamorphosis. The time span covered, from 1900 to the present, makes the volume especially valuable. We find that during the Dutch colonial era, planning was piecemeal; that “plans were prepared but they were simply detailed mappings of existing uses and went out of date almost on a daily basis” (p. 82). In the Sukarno era (1945–1967), Jakarta’s plan was conceived by President Sukarno’s vision of a national capital to “foster national unity and identity for the Indonesian people” (p. 97). We also learn that during the three decades of Suharto’s “New Order,” (1967–1998) the plans for Jakarta were highly centralized by government in a top-down approach. Most interestingly, we discover how the political intrigue of Suharto’s regime dictated the planning process, and how the political revolution triggered by the economic crisis of the late 1990s resulted in a more participatory and inclusionary planning process.
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The book is a pleasure to read, engaging, well conceived, and logically organized. Chapter 1 discusses aspects of urban development in connection to the broader literature on the dynamic of urban growth in Southeast Asia. This chapter provides a better understanding of urban growth in Jakarta within the context of the Southeast Asia region as a whole. Chapter 2 presents the growth of Jakarta and its influence on the city’s planning during the Dutch colonial era, while chapter 3 examines the plan for building the capital of a newly independent country. The emergence of the concept of regional planning to anticipate the megacity phenomenon is also discussed. Chapter 4 discusses planning for housing, the most critical and challenging issue from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Kampung Improvement Program (KIP), the landmark of Indonesia’s urban revitalization program, is also examined carefully and in specific detail. Next, chapters 5 and 6 present the expansion and restructuring of Jakarta during Suharto’s “New Order.” Finally, chapter 7 examines the evolution and challenges of a new planning paradigm inspired by the decentralization and democratization movements in the late 1990s. All chapters are carefully researched and provide historically detailed descriptions of the transformed Jakarta. Silver embellishes his discussion with a wide range of references, even from Amsterdam and Singapore, and interviews with most of Jakarta’s planning directors and administrators since the late 1960s to the present. Despite its many virtues, the book does not offer any empirical insight into the discussion of the informal sector. In many cities in developing countries, including Jakarta, the informal sector accounts for a high proportion of total employment. Furthermore, the proportion of informal sector employment in Jakarta was even higher during the economic crisis when many manufacturing and service corporations shut down and pushed the newly unemployed into the informal sector. The book also fails to discuss the existence of motorcycles in the Jakarta’s transportation system. The number of motorcycles increased dramatically after 1998 in response to the lack of a public transport system that was accessible, affordable, and integrated for people living in metropolitan Jakarta. The rising number of motorcycles also complicates comprehensive transportation planning. Furthermore, the book examines the evolution of Jakarta’s suburbanization and rapid urban growth but pays little attention to the costs associated with that growth. It does not provide any insight into the impact of the severe floods in 2002 and February 2007. Excessive residential and commercial constructions in environmentally sensitive areas have been blamed for the extent of both floods. Another drawback is that the book is not carefully proofread for Indonesian words. There were a number of misspellings of Indonesian names of places, persons, and companies; for instance, the spelling of the current president’s last name should be Yudhoyono not Yudiono; also the railway company is not Permuka but Perumka. Regardless, this is obviously a carefully researched study that will contribute to the literature of international planning and planning history. Anyone with a scholarly interest in the history of planning in Jakarta should read this book; it can also serve as an excellent source of information in graduate and undergraduate courses that focus on international planning, particularly in the Southeast Asia region. It can also be a very useful reference for planners conducting projects in Jakarta. In sum, I fully agree with
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Silver that “[planning in Jakarta] is a history worth understanding and worth telling” (p. 6). Deden Rukmana Rukmana is an assistant professor of urban studies at Savannah State University. He has eight years experience as a planner in Indonesia in the 1990s and also blogs at http://indonesiaurbanstudies .blogspot.com
Planning and Urban History
Cities in the Third Wave: The Technological Transformation of Urban America (2nd ed.) Leonard I. Ruchelman. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2006. 178 pages. $79, $24.95 (paperback).
his slim volume tackles a very large topic: the past, present, and future effects of technologies in and on American cities. The first edition appeared in 2000, the heady days of the turn of the millennium, and this 2006 edition updates some demographic data with statistics from the 2000 U.S. Census, expands the treatment of globalization in a few places, and adds some material on growth management and communitarian concerns. On the whole, this second edition amounts to a fairly minor revision of the original. Cities in the Third Wave is structured as a series of brisk surveys. The opening chapter is a short catalog of theoretical perspectives on technology, urban form, and urban society, comprising such disparate figures as Howard, Sasson, Le Corbusier, Mitchell, Jacobs, and Florida. Ruchelman plays no favorites with this motley crew, and it is noteworthy that the two writers with the best claims to having significantly influenced 20th-century thinking about both urbanism and technology, Mumford and Castells, are included with everyone else. Chapter 2 offers a series of epochs in the history of American cities. Here, the influence of Toffler, signaled by the book’s title, begins to come to the fore in the march of urban progress from the pre-industrial era (the first wave) through various stages of the industrial city (the second wave), to the postindustrial present (the third wave). Next, summary descriptions of information technologies are provided, from telegraphy and early wireless communications to the internet and a few electronic applications that use it or other parts of the information superhighway, followed by a selection of changes in the nature of work and the spatial ordering of business and commerce. Chapter 4, “Types of Cities,” offers a taxonomy of urban types, mainly drawn from Logan and Molotch. To their categories of headquarters cities, innovation centers, old industrial centers, border cities, and retirement sites, Ruchelman adds two of his own,
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leisure-tourism playgrounds and edge cities. The concluding chapter comes to rest on the inevitable question of the sustainability of thirdwave patterns of urban development as they relate to environmental impacts, political and economic equity, and social cohesion. Simplification is unavoidable in a short book on a big subject, and as such Cities in the Third Wave has its good and bad sides. This edition is plainly written, providing an organizing basis for classroom discussion. The topics range widely to offer plenty of departure points, although the book itself does not fuel that discussion as well as it might. There is a large and growing body of scholarly work on the technological history of cities, not only regarding communications, which is most pertinent to the whole logic of Toffler’s third wave, but also the myriad other systems on which urban centers depend, from transportation networks to environmental management, and even on the nature of large technological systems in general, which Ruchelman mostly ignores. Granted, this is a book about the future not the past, thumbnail sketches of fading urban epochs notwithstanding. However, a little more consideration of historical contingency would have helped mitigate the real flaw in Cities in the Third Wave: its passive attitude toward the whole idea of technological change. It is true enough, if anodyne, to observe that “history teaches that even the most powerful cities must be able to adapt to change if they are to remain viable” (p. 147). Change, technological or otherwise, does not just happen; it originates in particular places, under particular circumstances, with particular people. Ruchelman does not dwell on such particulars and the result is a book that is not as provocative of thought or discussion as it could have been. It seems increasingly clear that the planning problem for postindustrial, third-wave cities, like the rest of postindustrial society, is not so much how to react to technological change as how to influence it, and it is a pressing one. Joseph Schultz Schultz is senior associate editor of Technology and Culture, the journal of the Society for the History of Technology.
Ethics and Professional Concerns
There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina Gregory D. Squires and Chester Hartman, editors. Routledge, New York, 2006. 328 pages. $100, $27.95 (paperback).
here is No Such Thing as a Natural Disater is a commissioned collection of essays that explore the inequities associated with race, class, gender, and how these socially constructed markers manifested themselves in the differential impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the northern Gulf Coast. The book focuses
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