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The language of planning
Book reviews
A veteran's collection THE LANGUAGE OF PLANNING Essays on the Origins and Ends of American Planning Thought by Albert Z Guttenberg
University of Chicago Press, Urbana, IL, 1993, xviii + 266 pp, $39.95 hb, $16.95 pb Albert Guttenberg is one of the veteran theorists of US planning. A practitioner from 1948 to 1964, he has taught since then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now Emeritus Professor. This book is a collection of his essays over more than 30 years, nearly all reprinted from the journals. He has rearranged them thematically. The first group, from which stems the title of the collection, are about the linguistics of planning: as Guttenberg explains, they owe a lot to an early interest in the writings of the English linguistic analyst I A Richards. The second is a wide-ranging series of essays on the history of US planning thought. The third is a collection of essays, some from the 1960s and some from the 1980s, on urban structure and the role of planning in shaping it. All three groups reflect his interest as a theorist of planning. But they do so in very different ways. The first group is excessively theoretical and definitional for this reviewer's taste. But it does try to explore the relationship between planning in its narrowest sense, that is land use planning, and planning in a wider social context. The trouble is that Guttenberg, p e r h a p s in reaction against Marxist modes of thought, treats the whole theme in a very ahistorical way, divorced from broader social and intellectual currents. Surely, if land use planning is making a comeback in the 1980s and 1990s, it is because the social context is being shrunk; and that reflects a conservative temper that is highly suspicious of wider social purpose. That is odd, because in Part 2 Gut-
Land Use Policy 1995 Volume 12 Number I
tenberg shows that he is well aware of broader historic forces. Here he treats subjects such as the Regional Planning Association of America in the 1920s; the agrarian ideas of Elmwood Mead, a fascinating and neglected Californian figure of the same time; the Fairway Farms movement in Montana; the ideas of Lewis C Gray, who called for a national system of directed land settlement; and the writings of Pristine Mann Martin, who argued for family collectivism. Guttenberg powerfully suggests here that there was a very strong and now forgotten set of ideas circulating in the U S A between the wars and owing little'to any outside influence - ideas that need further attention from historians. In the final section G u t t e n b e r g theorizes about key elements in urban structure. For this reviewer's taste, these essays are again excessively theoretical and ungrounded in deeper social and economic realities. They do not adequately capture, for instance, the inherent tensions between the American worship of individual space and individual movement, and the pressures that have come from energy constraints and environmental im-
p a c t s . T h e e s s a y on the D u t c h woonerf, though workmanlike, fails to set the phenomenon against the background of the mid-1970s energy crisis, which affected the Netherlands very severely, or to treat the subsequent development of the idea in Germany and elsewhere. But this section contains another perceptive essay on early 20th century social thought. So The Language o f Planning suffers from the usual defects of any collection of essays, even when authored by the same person. It often gives the impression of two different writers, one almost obsessively concerned with questions of taxonomy, the other a perceptive social historian of urban America between 1900 and 1940. I think the latter Guttenberg is the one that has most to offer the contemporary scholar, and I suspect that the essays on that theme will be the ones that will be the most heavily thumbed. Planning historians, even well informed and sophisticated ones, will almost certainly find something new in them.
Peter Hall University College London
A detailed framework for environmental assessment THE ICID ENVIRONMENTAL CHECKLIST To Identify Environmental Effects of Irrigation, Drainage and Flood Control Projects compiled by Prof Dr-lng J F Mock and Dr P Bolton for the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage
HR Wallingford, Wallingford, UK, 1993, 24 + 120pp, £13.50 Computer version, ENCHECK, £50.00 The ICID Working Group on En-
vironmental Impacts has developed this checklist over several years, and preliminary versions have been tried out in several countries. Prof Mock and Dr Bolton have now produced a c o m p r e h e n s i v e version r e a d y for widespread use as a guide to the environmental concerns which should be considered in the planning and operation of irrigation, drainage and flood control projects. In recent years there has been a growing emphasis on the sustainability of development and an increasing awareness of the importance of environmental effects. This has been brought about partly by the realization that the fundamental resources of land
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A veteran's collection THE LANGUAGE OF PLANNING Essays on the Origins and Ends of American Planning Thought by Albert Z Guttenberg
University of Chicago Press, Urbana, IL, 1993, xviii + 266 pp, $39.95 hb, $16.95 pb Albert Guttenberg is one of the veteran theorists of US planning. A practitioner from 1948 to 1964, he has taught since then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now Emeritus Professor. This book is a collection of his essays over more than 30 years, nearly all reprinted from the journals. He has rearranged them thematically. The first group, from which stems the title of the collection, are about the linguistics of planning: as Guttenberg explains, they owe a lot to an early interest in the writings of the English linguistic analyst I A Richards. The second is a wide-ranging series of essays on the history of US planning thought. The third is a collection of essays, some from the 1960s and some from the 1980s, on urban structure and the role of planning in shaping it. All three groups reflect his interest as a theorist of planning. But they do so in very different ways. The first group is excessively theoretical and definitional for this reviewer's taste. But it does try to explore the relationship between planning in its narrowest sense, that is land use planning, and planning in a wider social context. The trouble is that Guttenberg, p e r h a p s in reaction against Marxist modes of thought, treats the whole theme in a very ahistorical way, divorced from broader social and intellectual currents. Surely, if land use planning is making a comeback in the 1980s and 1990s, it is because the social context is being shrunk; and that reflects a conservative temper that is highly suspicious of wider social purpose. That is odd, because in Part 2 Gut-
Land Use Policy 1995 Volume 12 Number I
tenberg shows that he is well aware of broader historic forces. Here he treats subjects such as the Regional Planning Association of America in the 1920s; the agrarian ideas of Elmwood Mead, a fascinating and neglected Californian figure of the same time; the Fairway Farms movement in Montana; the ideas of Lewis C Gray, who called for a national system of directed land settlement; and the writings of Pristine Mann Martin, who argued for family collectivism. Guttenberg powerfully suggests here that there was a very strong and now forgotten set of ideas circulating in the U S A between the wars and owing little'to any outside influence - ideas that need further attention from historians. In the final section G u t t e n b e r g theorizes about key elements in urban structure. For this reviewer's taste, these essays are again excessively theoretical and ungrounded in deeper social and economic realities. They do not adequately capture, for instance, the inherent tensions between the American worship of individual space and individual movement, and the pressures that have come from energy constraints and environmental im-
p a c t s . T h e e s s a y on the D u t c h woonerf, though workmanlike, fails to set the phenomenon against the background of the mid-1970s energy crisis, which affected the Netherlands very severely, or to treat the subsequent development of the idea in Germany and elsewhere. But this section contains another perceptive essay on early 20th century social thought. So The Language o f Planning suffers from the usual defects of any collection of essays, even when authored by the same person. It often gives the impression of two different writers, one almost obsessively concerned with questions of taxonomy, the other a perceptive social historian of urban America between 1900 and 1940. I think the latter Guttenberg is the one that has most to offer the contemporary scholar, and I suspect that the essays on that theme will be the ones that will be the most heavily thumbed. Planning historians, even well informed and sophisticated ones, will almost certainly find something new in them.
Peter Hall University College London
A detailed framework for environmental assessment THE ICID ENVIRONMENTAL CHECKLIST To Identify Environmental Effects of Irrigation, Drainage and Flood Control Projects compiled by Prof Dr-lng J F Mock and Dr P Bolton for the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage
HR Wallingford, Wallingford, UK, 1993, 24 + 120pp, £13.50 Computer version, ENCHECK, £50.00 The ICID Working Group on En-
vironmental Impacts has developed this checklist over several years, and preliminary versions have been tried out in several countries. Prof Mock and Dr Bolton have now produced a c o m p r e h e n s i v e version r e a d y for widespread use as a guide to the environmental concerns which should be considered in the planning and operation of irrigation, drainage and flood control projects. In recent years there has been a growing emphasis on the sustainability of development and an increasing awareness of the importance of environmental effects. This has been brought about partly by the realization that the fundamental resources of land
93