Journal of Planning Literature

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Book Review: Activists in city hall: The progressive response to the Reagan era in Boston and Chicago Tom Angotti Journal of Planning Literature 2011 26: 310 DOI: 10.1177/0885412211401723 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jpl.sagepub.com/content/26/3/310

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Book Reviews Journal of Planning Literature 26(3) 309-310 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav http://jpl.sagepub.com

Book Reviews

Ann Sloan Devlin. What Americans Build and Why: Psychological Perspectives New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 301 pp. $27.99. ISBN 978-0-521-73435-6 Reviewed by: Sidney Brower, School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, College Park, MD, USA DOI: 10.1177/0885412210395887

The book is about places where Americans live (suburbs, new urbanist developments, and McMansions), work (offices), shop (shopping centers), learn (schools), and heal (hospitals): how these facilities came to be what they are, how they evolved, and what they are likely to become; what people say about them; and what we learn from research into them. Each of these places occupies a separate chapter in the book with little cross over between chapters, and this gives the book a cobbledtogether feel. But it is rich in information, and this review gives only a flavor of its contents. Devlin is particularly interested in how places are designed—their form and appearance—and how people respond to them. (The book’s subtitle is ‘‘Psychological Perspectives.’’) She measures each place against her experiences in Mystic, Connecticut, where she lives, and Rome, Italy, where she spent a semester teaching. From these experiences, she derives criteria for good design: units should be small, compact, walkable, diverse, and legible; they should encourage interaction and generate a sense of community. Housing in the suburbs (read urban sprawl) fails miserably to meet these criteria. The pre-1970s new towns (Columbia, Maryland and Levittown, Pennsylvania are discussed) do not do much better, and Devlin is appalled by the idea of McMansions—amazed that people would want such huge houses and concerned that as a society we cannot afford them. New urbanism (exemplified by Seaside, Celebration, and Kentlands) is offered as our latest best hope for good housing design. In the chapter on health care, Devlin outlines the evolution of modern hospital buildings; how their design has responded

Clavel, Pierre. Activists in city hall: The progressive response to the Reagan era in Boston and Chicago. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2010.232 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by: Tom Angotti, Hunter College, City University of New York, USA DOI: 10.1177/0885412211401723

to new philosophies; and knowledge about treatment and healing, technological innovation, and federal programs. Health professionals tend to believe that private hospital rooms speed healing, but some patients prefer multiple-occupancy wards because they feel less isolated. There has been a change in the delivery of medical services, including a trend away from large general hospitals in favor of small ambulatory care facilities in shopping centers and commercial streets. Research suggests that people believe they will get better care in big facilities, but feel more comfortable in small ones. They look at the appearance of the building as an indication of the level of customer service, health care, and competence. In her discussion of schools, Devlin explains why they have got to be so big. She is in favor of small schools, arguing that they offer a wider range of experiences and are more welcoming and stimulating. But smallness is not enough; school designs must also foster interpersonal relationships and build a sense of community. Devlin describes innovative school designs that attempt to do just that. There is, however, no evidence that these designs improve student performance. Office designs tend to support solitary rather than group work; they discourage interaction, collaboration, and a sense of community. Open-space interior designs offer a solution, but some workers are distracted by the loss of visual and acoustical privacy, and research has not found that these designs lead to greater productivity. Shopping malls are big, bland, monotonous, and unattractive, and they offer more choices than we really need. New designs try to recapture the feeling of oldfashioned streets, open to the sky, and with a mix of uses. This is a chatty book, full of opinions, statements of intention, and personal experiences of the author, her family, friends, and colleagues. It leaves one with the overall impression that new design is born of the urge for innovation; that each new design represents educators’, developers’, or architects’ best thinking; and that each new solution brings with it a new problem. So far, research findings tend to be inconclusive and of the ‘‘on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand’’ variety.

With his latest book Pierre Clavel continues to uncover and document the practice of progressive politics in local government in the United States. His earlier work, including The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969–1984 (Rutgers University Press, 1986), highlighted the stories of progressive regimes in smaller cities and towns. With this volume, he looks at two


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examples from larger cities, Harold Washington’s Chicago and Ray Flynn’s Boston, both in the 1980s. Activists in City Hall complements and enriches an important narrative that Clavel has developed by uncovering the connections between community-based activism, local planning, and progressive politics. He shows how community-based movements influence the individuals in city hall and how city hall changes community movements by enacting reforms (or failing to do so). Pierre Clavel is a masterful story teller, using clear, direct, jargon-free narratives to engage readers at all levels. In a field too often encumbered by overindulgence in abstractions that lose touch with the real world, Clavel has set an admirable standard for writing about planning in local government in a way that uncovers underlying trends in all their complexity. He talks about professionals as real people, the personal and political conflicts they face, the ethical dilemmas, and both their achievements and shortcomings. Clavel also is a master at collaborative scholarship, engaging professionals and community activists in discussions that reflect back on events while acknowledging their participation. He shares the stage with them and their voices are prominent elements in his analysis. He does not try to understand complex political processes only from afar through library research but plunges in-depth into direct conversations with those who lived the daily contradictions within and outside the local administrations. This is truly refreshing scholarship and will make Clavel’s work exciting reading for students at undergraduate and graduate levels as well as professionals. Activists in City Hall supplements other initiatives by Clavel to document the important role of progressives in local government, including the Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning Project he started at Cornell University with Ken Reardon. Clavel continues to publish fascinating profiles of leading individuals in the quarterly Progressive Planning Magazine, where he also serves as an editor. This work is especially important for the education of the next generations of progressive planners, who must learn from the achievements and missteps of those who have gone before them if they are to overcome the deeply imbedded politics of exclusion and neoliberalism.

Clavel defines progressive politics as having roots in neighborhood movements, following redistributive goals, and committed to participatory governance. I believe the one missing element in this definition is the commitment to social inclusion and racial justice (see Angotti 2008). If urban progressivism today is to stake out a political terrain distinct from classical liberalism then something more than New Deal programs and neo-Keynesian economics is needed; community movements are not necessarily progressive simply because they are neighborhood-based and many are conservative and exclusionary. Also, citizen participation can serve a broad range of political agendas from left to right. The progressive reforms discussed in Clavel’s book, such as Boston’s linkage program for affordable housing, have been contested by some progressives as legitimizing progrowth agendas and gentrification. While Clavel acknowledges such debates, more in-depth analysis is needed or there will be more schisms than unity in future city halls run by progressives. To his credit, Clavel does give considerable attention to questions of race and racial equality and shows how they figured prominently in the mayoral campaigns and policy agendas in the two cities. A chapter devoted to ‘‘race, class, and the administrative struggle’’ carefully examines the complex intersection of these dynamics. Yet, inclusion and racial justice are curiously not part of Clavel’s definition of progressive politics. As Clavel demonstrates in his excellent analysis of the similarities and differences between Ray Flynn and Mel King, two progressive candidates for mayor in Boston, differences over the significance of racial inequality have been a major stumbling block to unity among working-class communities and on the left in the United States. Activists in City Hall is a powerful contributor to our understanding of both the achievements and challenges for progressives in local government. Reference Angotti, Tom. 2008. New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate. Cambridge: MIT Press.
