community sustainability and land use

Community Sustainability and Land UseGreen Urbanism: Learning from European Cities by Timothy Beatley; The Impact of PublicPolicy on Environmental Quality and Health: The Case of Land Use Management and Planningby Amer El-Ahraf; Mohammad Qayoumi; Ron Dowd; Toward Sustainable Communities:Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy by Daniel A. Mazmanian; Michael E.Kraft; Building Rules: How Local Rules Shape Community Environments and Economie ...Review by: Lisa S. NelsonPublic Administration Review, Vol. 61, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2001), pp. 741-746Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3110008 .

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Book Reviews I Lany Luton, Editor

Community Sustainabilily and Land Use

Lisa S. Nelson, California State Polytechnic Universily, Pomona Timothy Beatley, Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (Wash-

ington, DC: Island Press, 2000). 491 pp., $30 paper. Amer El-Ahraf, Mohammad Qayoumi, and Ron Dowd, The Impact of Pub-

lic Policy on Environmental Quality and Health: The Case of Land Use Man- agement and Planning (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1999). 181 pp., $59.95 hard.

Daniel A. Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Toward Sustainable Com- munities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 323 pp., $25 paper.

Kee Warner and Harvey Molotch, Building Rules: How Local Rules Shape Community Environments and Economies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). 204 pp., $59 hard; $25 paper.

Community sustainability and land use are at the forefront of changes in our ideas about the environment. Cit- ies and metropolitan regions and their resource needs and waste loads (also known as "ecological footprints") are becoming the focus of efforts to improve our ability to live sustainably on the planet. Sustainability is the idea that our current economic and consumption patterns should not lead to future generations facing reduced opportunities because of impaired or de- pleted resources. Opportunities for im- provements in consumer behavior in general, and land use choices in par- ticular, are the keys to improving air and water quality, waste management, habitat and biodiversity protection, and a wide range of other quality of life issues. In recognition that land use choices are predominantly under local authority, federal and state environmental agencies have been directing an increasing proportion of their resources to local and regional efforts

that coordinate and advance sustainability and more environmentally-con- scious land use decisions. This pattern coincides with emerging public demands for growth management at the local and regional levels.

Several elements of this shift deserve the attention of public administration. First, local level efforts to improve sustainability and land use can help consolidate and reduce the aggre- gate regulatory burden for businesses and communities by integrating sepa- rate concerns about air and water quality and resource conservation. This effort is known as multimedia integration. Second, decision-making processes increasingly incorporate public concerns about sprawl. Third, environmental justice has become a more vis- ible issue. The distribution of both amenities and undesired facilities across income and racial and ethnic groups cannot be ignored. Fourth, the concept of sustainability draws some of its force from the global reach of

environmental issues and the interconnectedness of the global economy. Local governments must understand where they fit in that global picture.

The four books reviewed in this essay are linked in their recognition of the importance of community sustainability and land use. The authors come from a variety of disciplines and professions, and the books have complementary purposes: to provide and chart a theoretical framework, to collaborate across disciplines, to test the results of policy measures, and to persuade by providing examples of more sustainable practices.

Towards Sustainable Communities places a set of policy case studies in a three-stage framework of the evolution of environmental policy and practice. Preceding the cases is an essay con- tributed by Lamont Hempel on the conceptual and analytical challenges of the sustainability concept. The first stage of the book's framework covers

Lisa S. Nelson is the MPA coordinator and an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research interests include environmental and natural resources management, and related issues of interorganizational collaboration and citizen participation. Recent articles have appeared in Administrative Theory and Praxis andThe International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior. Email: [email protected].

Book Reviews 741



the rise of environmental regulation during the 1960s and 1970s and that era's initial versions of the major environmental statutes. No cases are pro- vided for this stage. The second stage, the 1980s and early 1990s, is described as a period of flexibility and regulatory reform, with a shift from "com- mand and control" to markets and collaboration among sectors and levels of government. Cases presented here include air quality management in the Los Angeles basin, water quality protection in Wisconsin's Fox-Wolf river basin, and local open space preservation in California. The third stage, from the mid-1990s to the present, is concerned with community and regional sustainability. This stage is illustrated by the cases of Pittsburgh, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, and the Great Lakes Basin. Although the case selection is not particularly balanced either cat- egorically or geographically, the edi- tors' identification of broad currents within the environmental movement and the national direction of environmental policy is successful and convincing. They make the complexity of the present variety of policies and policy tools understandable as the ac- cumulation of the ideas of three very different eras. They conclude with an essay drawing together the implications of the collection.

The Impact of Public Policy on En- vironmental Quality and Health: The Case of Land Use Management and Planning is an ambitious effort to ex- tend the traditional concerns of public health to include the importance of environmental and land use policies, and further, to call for policy improve- ments. The organization of the book is weak and uneven. Discussions of United States environmental problems and policies appear redundantly in several chapters without reference to each other. The authors begin with an account of several current environmental problems that come from a number of places around the globe. They

742 Public Administration Review * November/December 2001, Vol. 61, No. 6

then present a description of each of the major U.S. environmental policies and the role land use plays in each. They also describe a variety of land uses and the typical associated environmental impacts. They present an elementary discussion of planning and zoning, and then finish the book with a chapter called "Toward a Sustainable Land Use Model," which calls for land use planning to be more environmentally sensitive. However, the authors provide no specific recommendations for changes in federal or local policy or practice. The conclusions are overly simplistic and the level of discussion ranges from descriptive generaliza- tions to unnecessary specificity (such as a section on the varieties of census data). Throughout, the authors neglect to cite sources.

Building Rules: How Local Rules Shape Community Environments and Economies is well-grounded in a com- parison of market and regulatory models and growth machine theory. The authors provide a convincing critique of the conventional wisdom regarding both economic development and growth control strategies. This is a nicely organized, illustrated, and meth- odologically well-documented study of the impact of measures taken in three urban areas in southern Califor- nia (Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and Riverside). Since growth control ad- vocates in many United States communities are fighting to establish measures similar to the ones used here, it is useful to examine the extent to which these "building rules" have been effective. The authors find that the net results of these growth control measures have been positive, albeit with some inadequacies and unintended consequences. This book is the small- est in scope of the group, but it is also the most successful in demonstrating its point.

Green Urbanism is a compendium of green (environmentally-friendly) projects in western and northern Eu- ropean cities, illustrated with photos

and diagrams. Beatley makes a strong case for the transferability of such projects to American contexts in his introduction and conclusion. The book is divided into four sections. "Land Use and Community" addresses the practice of planning com- pact cities and creative alternatives for housing and living. "Transportation and Mobility" presents successful examples of public transportation, car-free areas, and bicycle-friendly policies and practices. "Green, Or- ganic Cities" addresses urban ecology-a city's landscapes, farms, parks, and even wildlife habitat. This section also discusses closed-loop waste-to-resource systems, renewable energy, and ecologically-mindful building design. The final section, "Governance and Economy," is particularly rich for public administrators, including opportunities and tasks for city management and examples of sustainable/restorative commerce (environmentally friendly economic development). The book may, however, be a little longer than necessary, as the same multifaceted project is described in more than one of the book's sections.

These four volumes take different approaches to what has happened, what will happen, and what should happen. Mazmanian and Kraft see the concern with community sustainability as a new stage in the development of United States environmental policy. El-Ahraf, Qayoumi, and Dowd see the integration of environmental and land use con- siderations as essential for improve- ments in public health. Warner and Molotch see community land-use decisions as an ongoing arena of community self-determination, and Beatley sees the reform of urban land use practices of all kinds to be a necessary step toward global sustainability.

Several practical and political di- mensions of this topic that are dis- cussed in these books deserve the fo- cused attention of public administration. They are: multimedia integration,



public participation, environmental justice, and globalization. Those di- mensions will be addressed in more detail in the following sections of this essay. Finally, the conclusion addresses the lessons practitioners can apply in their work.

Multimedia Integration Environmental policy analysts and

administrators have learned many lessons in the decades since the first Earth Day. A series of issues caught the attention of the public and Congress: air, water, endangered species, the energy crisis, and poor management of haz- ardous waste. Regulatory frameworks were constructed for each problem, with states, local governments, and private industry expected to participate and comply. At first there was little concern for how these policies fit together, and regulatory programs often resulted in moving pollution around rather than reducing it. In addition, these programs created unanticipated, cumulative burdens for the regulated communities. At the same time that the popularization of ecology was pro- nouncing that everything was intercon- nected, many communities and businesses were learning that government seemed to act without consideration for the cumulative technical and economic impacts.

According to the case studies in Part III of Mazmanian and Kraft, the transition from a single-issue program approach to a multimedia, multisector, and multistakeholder approach is still more of a goal than a reality. Tugwell, McElwaine, and Fetting report on Pittsburgh's Environmental City Net- work. This place-based approach in- corporates the city's distinctive geographic and historic characteristics in a move toward local comprehensive natural resource and ecosystem use. There is difficulty in getting city leaders to perceive environmental quality as an important amenity that is useful in attracting new businesses.

Also in Mazmanian and Kraft, Barry Rabe's discussion of the Great Lakes Basin provides a sobering account of the Lakes' vulnerability to the effects of cross-media pollution: air deposition, groundwater discharge, landfill leaching, pesticide and topsoil runoff, and releases from contami- nated sediments. Rabe argues that multiple (rather than top-down or bot- tom-up) strategies have stabilized the quality of the ecosystem, but that it is a work in progress. He reviews the range of contributions from the bina- tional International Joint Commission on down to single state-level programs. He finds both achievement and shirk- ing of responsibility in different quar- ters. He also identifies a fair number of measurement issues and external threats from long distance air pollution and invasive species such as the zebra mussel.

In the final case of that section, Horan, Dittmar, and Jordan analyze the Intermodal Surface Transportation and Efficiency Act (ISTEA), a federal initiative aimed at integrating transportation planning and projects with broader land use and environmental concerns-for example, mobility, environmental quality, social equity, and the preservation or enhancement of areas of cultural and aesthetic value. They find that implementation often flounders in local community politics.

The authors of The Impact of Pub- lic Policy on Environmental Quality and Health seek to promote a holistic perspective through increased attention to public health and environmental protection in the local comprehensive land use planning process. In their view, the chief problems are cross- boundary problems and government fragmentation. Their recommendations for integration and coordination would seem to have already been addressed by federal and state requirements for cross-agency environmental impact review and coordination requirements, but the authors criticize these institutional arrangements as

well. Unfortunately, they offer no sug- gestions that differ from the stated purposes of the measures they fault.

Warner and Molotch approach the question of comprehensive integration of issues and programs by arguing that the desire for sustainability must be grounded locally. Local construction and settlement configurations are major determinants of resource consumption. Integration of environmental and economic development concerns can include pragmatic efforts to price development projects at their real value, to account for spillover effects as well as possible, and to require development to pay its own way. These tech- niques could improve rather than dis- tort market information.

Beatley addresses the integration of multimedia pollution control by pre- senting the idea of closed-loop pro- cessing, where the waste of one process is captured as an input or nutrient for another. At the urban or neighbor- hood scale, the first step is to study the relationships of inputs and outputs. Examples include the conversion of sludge to fertilizer and biogas, cogen- eration of heat and electricity, and sub- stituting industry wastes for raw ma- terials. This is one area where Beatley finds that there are examples to be found in the United States, with the EPA conducting pilot projects in Bal- timore, Chattanooga, Burlington, and the cities of Arcata and Davis in Cali- fornia. Overall, multimedia integration is a work in progress, as the local and regional levels of governance are in the midst of determining how to appropri- ately adapt federal and state goals to their various geographic and socioeco- nomic realities.

Interaction with the Public The interaction of regulatory and

resource agencies and local governments with stakeholders and the general public has become a sophisticated component of professional environmental management. Regular partici-

Book Reviews 743



pants have developed a set of professional skills for conducting meetings, influencing public opinion, and advo- cating their demands. The leverage that environmental groups have at- tained in federal land planning and decisions, and the local/community power of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) have greatly altered the expec- tations of agency decision makers. Public involvement is now seen as an important way to incorporate social and economic concerns into environmental management. It is also a means of locating allies to support administrative initiatives.

Mazmanian and Kraft point out the importance of psychological, economic, and cultural issues in Part III. Most current models of environmental and land use decision making call for intense civic engagement. The chapter on ISTEA provides an example of a policy that included provisions for public involvement at the state and mu- nicipal planning organization level. Planners and administrators are re- quired to demonstrate that their processes are inclusive and responsive. Horan et al. report that many planning- agency staff complain that narrow interests still dominate the process. This is consistent with Hempel's argument that the determination of goals for community sustainability involves conflict. The jargon of transportation planning may also be a barrier to broader public involvement.

Warner and Molotch characterize citizen action in the cities they studied as well-planned efforts to reorga- nize their communities. They point to the role of community elites in initiat- ing growth controls prior to the environmental movement, and to the importance of skilled planning staff in recommending and implementing policies. They see public involvement in planning as crucial to community self-determination. They observe that activists for sustainability believe it is important to start at the local level and then move on to larger scales.


Beatley also recognizes the importance of public awareness and involvement through his inclusion of examples of European cities conducting education and engagement cam- paigns for citizens, and more nar- rowly, consumers. One senses that the main goal of these efforts is to "green" the cities, but that leaders (and Beatley) recognize the necessity of public buy-in.

Gathering information from citizens, taking citizen contributions seriously, and trying to change public behaviors are all facets of the chang- ing pattern of citizen involvement in efforts related to community sustainability. However, concerns about the representativeness of the participating public suggest that attention also should be paid to the issue of environmental justice.

Environmental Justice and Economic Equity

In the 1 980s and early 1990s oppo- nents characterized environmentalists as elites seeking to protect amenities that only they could afford to enjoy. The environmental justice movement has put a crack in that stereotype, as working class and minority communities have mobilized to call attention to the tendency for their neighbor- hoods to bear the burden of unwanted land uses and higher concentrations of pollution. Warner and Molotch point out that discussions of sustainability, comprehensiveness, and holism can no longer easily ignore questions of environmental justice, or class status. As Logan and Molotch have explained, local land-use decisions clearly create winners and losers (1987). In the Char- ter for European Cities and Towns, an outgrowth of Agenda 21, social equity concerns are included within the overall sustainability framework. Health care, employment, and housing ineq- uities as well as poverty itself are seen as leading to unsustainable behaviors (Beatley, 465-6).

The radicalism of the environmental justice movement stems from the fact that it places environmental concerns squarely within broader demands for social and economic justice. Indeed, environmental justice is not the only criticism of the economic status quo found in these volumes. El- Ahraf et al. blame shortcomings of environmental quality and pollution control not only on the fragmentation of the United States's political system, but also on the dominance of economic motivations and the promotion of in- dividualism over social needs. Hempel also believes that some sort of regional governance, either through elite public-private partnerships or through a majority coalition style of confronta- tional justice, is necessary to overcome the obstacles to sustainability (Maz- manian and Kraft, 59-62).

Warner and Molotch do not share these other authors' despair over the current level of fragmentation. They cogently argue that the perceived dis- tinction between environmental and economic concerns is bridged at the community level through attention to the quality of life. The citizen efforts they have studied bring in a wide range of social and environmental goals, with positive net effects. However, they strongly call for the incorporation of equity concerns into community- located decision processes.

The more radical points about the linkage between environmental justice and social and economic justice should not be lost on public administrators and other community leaders. The cus- tomary jobs versus environment rubric might be recast as whose jobs and whose environment. The distributive element of sustainability is a global ethical question as well.

Globalization The increased awareness of the glo-

balization of markets and corporate finance is accompanied by an increasing awareness of global sustainability



and environmental issues such as global warming, the link between chlo- rofluorocarbons and the protective ozone layer, pollution of ocean resources, and the implications of trade agreements for national environmental protection laws. Communities are often advised to consider their economic well-being in the context of global forces (see Kettl 2000).

Warner and Molotch relate their discussion of urban theory and local regulation to the impacts of globalism (18-20). As localities con- tend with broader transformations that significantly impact their economic health, they seek to find a niche. Globalization may heighten the importance of locality, with new powers claimed and invented. Local policies have to be considered within the global context. Local is where we experience the environment.

Mazmanian and Kraft, and Beatley set the context for the local-global connection by calling attention to the role of the United Nations in promot- ing sustainability. The U.N. Confer- ence on Environment and Develop- ment in 1992, also called the Earth Summit, resulted in the Agenda 21 program of action. Agenda 21 includes many community-oriented strategies. This created a surge of interest in sustainability, particularly in western Europe.

Beatley discusses the Global Action Plan, an initiative in the Netherlands, and the role of cities in global sustainability, particularly in reference to cli- mate change and resource use. The Global Action Plan is in part run by a nonprofit agency that brokers and fa- cilitates creative community enter- prises and eco-teams, which are groups of households that work together to reduce consumption and the subsequent ecological footprint, such as the production of carbon dioxide.

The concern for the ecological footprint of a household, neighbor- hood, or city appears to have taken hold in many western European cit-

ies as an important ethic. Examining the inputs and outputs of any of these units and working to increase self- sufficiency and reduce waste have caught on as ways to take no more than one's fair share (in terms of global sustainability). How is it that we in North America have become so tol- erant to the fact of 6 percent of the world population consuming 30 percent of the world's resources? Ameri- can cities consume land and resources and emit waste at a rate that is increasing faster than population growth. This trend creates serious impacts on regional habitat, farmlands, forests, and high economic and infrastructure costs. Beatley's basic premise is, if we can improve urban practices, we can significantly reduce demands and pressures on the planet's resources and ecosystems. Agenda 21 calls for local governments to prepare sustainability action plans, and the Green Cities of Europe have responded quite seriously.

Conclusion What is the role of public adminis-

tration in moving toward more sustainable communities and regions? What do these books offer the practitioner?

In different ways, each book asserts that the choices made in metropolitan governance are important to community and regional sustainability. Land- use policies at every level are important. Reclaiming brownfields in Pittsburgh and establishing growth controls in California, local comprehensive planning processes, and efforts to close the resources-to-waste loop in cities are all different means to more sustainable communities. Hempel argues that reform of the metropolitan governance system is necessary for citizens to recognize and act on the reality of regional interdependencies (Mazmanian and Kraft, 67-8). The "community of communities" of a more democratic regionalism would be an important departure from con-

ventional practices and principles such as local control, market-driven behavior, and expert design.

Clearly there is a technical side to many of these questions. Administra- tors trained as planners, engineers, and scientists have much to contribute, as demonstrated in the southern Califor- nia cities studies by Warner and Molotch. But "proper administration," as called for by El-Ahraf and col- leagues, would not be sufficient. Ad- ministrators face many political questions, many with distributive impacts. They must balance, rather than equate, commercial and public interests. As regulators, they need to avoid corrup- tion and the giving away of public goods (Warner and Molotch, 140-5). In Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, the costs of commercial growth were calculated and assigned to developers. In contrast, Riverside communities tended to assume that market-driven growth was desirable, rather than to examine whether this was the case. Urban sprawl has become an obvious target of criticism for the sustainability movement. Concerns about sprawl encompass and intertwine aesthetic concerns, agriculture, energy, traffic, and pollution problems. There is a widespread sense that land use (his- torically a local issue) will determine much about the quality of our re- sponses to nearly all other environmental concerns.

Beatley's discussion of what city governments can do to promote green measures and sustainability is solidly linked to an ethic of demonstrating commitment. He reports European administrators saying that if cities want private businesses and citizens to change practices, then cities must clean themselves up first. In Chapter 11, a variety of employee practices, investment and purchasing measures, and changes in service delivery are presented. Often the development of sustainability indicators and "ecological budgeting" precede other actions that promote sustainability. Environ-

Book Reviews 745



mental impacts of public buildings and vehicles are measured and then reduced.

Environmental policy in the United States continues to develop in new di- rections at all levels of government, particularly in implementation struc- tures and networks. National leader- ship for sustainability may be on hold, but state and local governments are experimenting with a number of different measures and incentives to reduce urban sprawl and restore natural areas, largely in response to public demand. Even though there is dis- agreement over how to operationalize the concept of sustainability, it is clear that Agenda 21 has motivated some communities to take serious measures to reduce their ecological footprints.


References Kettl, Donald. 2000. The Transfor-

mation of Governance: Globalization, Devolution, and the Role of Govern- ment. Public Administration Review 60(6): 488-97.

Logan, John R., and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.



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