BOOK REVIEWS

Arthur O’Sullivan, Urban Economics, 6th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2007).

As someone who first encountered the subject of urban economics while a graduate student in the1980s, I benefited from James Heilbrun’s excellent textbook, Urban Economics and Public Policy,which had three editions between 1974 and 1987. Since then I have taught urban economics tograduate students in urban planning and policy and have tried several textbooks, none of whichhas measured up to Heilbrun’s high standard for clarity, thoughtfulness, and relevance to urbanpolicy.

However, Arthur O’Sullivan’s popular textbook is clearly the best of the options, and the6th edition is a substantial improvement over earlier versions. As the author notes, the book isdesigned for advanced undergraduate courses in urban economics and graduate courses in urbanaffairs or planning. There is a clear focus on the use of microeconomic concepts to evaluatepolicy and on topics of interest to planners and policy makers. The policy issues covered includelocal economic development, land use, neighborhood and community development, automobiletransportation and mass transit, crime, housing, and local public finance. Issues of urban povertyare addressed at various points throughout the book. The book assumes that readers are familiarwith basic microeconomics, and a review of microeconomic concepts is provided in an appendix.The new edition is shorter than previous versions and, therefore, easier to cover within the spaceof a single semester, especially when used together with supplementary readings. The writing isgenerally clearer and better geared than in the past to students who are not economists. The studyquestions at the end of each chapter require students to actually understand and then apply thematerial, rather than simply repeat ideas. Generally, the questions seem less opaque than was thecase at times in previous editions.

O’Sullivan presents five “axioms” of urban economics—basic concepts such as “externalitiescause inefficiency”—that are referred to throughout the book and which help to tie the booktogether. As these axioms suggest, the focus of the book is very definitely on efficiency, with noexplicit attention given to the possibly competing objective of equity. To be fair, the author doesaddress some questions of fairness. For example, a chapter on neighborhood choice concludes thatracial segregation is bad for blacks; however, related equity issues also need to be addressed laterin the book in the context of the discussion of the Tiebout model of local government. And whenshould racial “preferences”—which are a matter of consumer tastes expressed in more or lessefficient property markets—be more appropriately labeled racial “prejudice”—which is purelyand simply a matter of inequity? Although economists do not have any special tools for resolvingconflicts between the competing objectives of efficiency and equity, the issue should at least berecognized whenever it arises.

Another shortcoming of the book is a tendency at times to dwell too much on rather abstractconcepts that seem, in the end, to have little relevance to urban realities. Given that many studentshave difficulties with economics, the use of unrealistic examples makes the subject even moreoff-putting and makes teaching even more challenging. An example is the extended discussion of

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 29, Number 5, pages 543–550.Copyright C© 2007 Urban Affairs AssociationAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved.ISSN: 0735-2166.

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the median-voter hypothesis in Chapter 15, which seems unlikely to be relevant to many actualbudgetary situations. A second example is the discussion of the incidence of the property tax inChapter 16, much of which is based on extremely unrealistic assumptions. For similar reasons,the discussion of general equilibrium effects of a change in transportation technology on urbanland rent and urban land use in the appendix to Chapter 7 is not convincing. More generally, thebook could have been more careful in places about stating underlying assumptions and also aboutmaking it clear that some of the numbers presented are just illustrations and not facts.

The book has been substantially updated to take into account recent literature in urban eco-nomics. Topics that are not addressed include: (1) the substantial growth in homeowners’ associ-ations as a means for controlling land use; (2) the economics of housing tenure choice; and (3) theeconomics of urban house prices and the possibility of disequilibria and downwards adjustmentsin some markets. The omission of the last topic seems particularly odd, given its virtually dailyappearance in the news media.

One problem that plagued earlier editions of this book was an abundance of sometimes confus-ing typographical errors. This edition reflects somewhat better proofreading, but still contains toomany errors for this reader’s taste. Indeed, the author is offering a $5 bounty for errors reported tohim and has published a list of these on his web site. I could have made a tidy sum had I reportedthe additional errors discovered while reading the book in preparation for this review. Are authorsand editors skimping on proofreading in order to make publishing more “efficient”?

In spite of the limitations mentioned, I recommend this book for use in advanced undergraduateor graduate programs in urban affairs and planning. It provides a good and up-to-date overviewof the application of microeconomic concepts to important urban issues. The 6th edition is asubstantial improvement over earlier editions in many respects, although it still does not live upto the high standard set by Heilbrun.

Steven C. BourassaUniversity of Louisville

Steven.bourassa@louisville.edu

Steven P. Erie, Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and theEnvironment in Southern California (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Beyond Chinatown is the second book in a trilogy of studies on how public entrepreneurship,innovative institutional forms of governance and successful management of cooperation andcontroversy have combined to shape “Southern California’s improbable yet explosive 20th centurygrowth” (p. 14). “Improbable” because, as Globalizing L.A. (2004)—the first book in the trilogy—explains it, the region and especially L.A. were practically devoid of any natural locationaladvantages. Despite the limitations, the regional authorities were able to build and maintain “asuperior trade infrastructure” (p. 78), based on the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach inSan Pedro Bay, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), and the Alameda corridor, a 20-milerailroad express line that connects the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the transcontinentalrail network. “Improbable” also because of the meager water resources, which, as the secondbook—Beyond Chinatown—reveals, would have been hardly sufficient to sustain large-scaledevelopment in the semi-desert environment, if it were not for the region’s largest water provider:the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD).

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Based on extensive archival research, Beyond Chinatown defies the conventional wisdom em-bodied in the 1974 Roman Polanski movie Chinatown and brings to light little known facts aboutthe public decisions that led to improved water supply to the L.A. area in the early 20th century.Erie argues that despite major controversies involving “differing conceptions of public good andprofessional responsibility” (p. 38) which surrounded the construction of the first 233-mile L.A.aqueduct (the aqueduct that brought water to the San Fernando Valley from the distant OwensValley farmland), ultimately it was the public interest, “not private wealth or corporate power,”that prevailed. In his chronicle, Steven Erie, a political science professor and Director of the UrbanStudies and Planning Program at the University of California, San Diego, pays special tribute toWilliam Mulholland, an Irish immigrant and founding father of the L.A. Department of Waterand Power. “A visionary man of action,” according to Erie, Mulholland devoted himself to theconstruction of the aqueduct “as his personal and professional gift to building a greater Los An-geles” (p. 36). The real impetus for the water transfer deals, Erie says, came from the L.A. voterswho supported with a qualified majority 12 out of 16 water bond issues between 1904 and 1931.Thus, the first two chapters of the book seek to convince the reader that the Metropolitan WaterDistrict has never been, as portrayed by many even today, “a Chinatown-style shadow power,”but to the contrary, it has served the public caringly and perceptively.

Chapter 3, which completes the first part of the book, explores the debatable connection betweenwater supply and the region’s “sprawling development.” Questioning the argument put forwardby many, including William Fulton in his book The Reluctant Metropolis (1997), namely, thatthe MWD worked “in favor of the local growth machine” (p. 56), Erie contends that there is anintricate relationship between water policy and suburban growth. He finds that the correlationbetween water subsidies and booming population became increasingly weaker in the 1971–2000period compared to what it had been in the decades preceding it (p. 78). Erie suggests that althoughwater provision has played and continues to play an important role in the region’s urban expansion,other factors such as provision of local services to the newly incorporated metropolitan areas,municipal taxation policies, flexibility of zoning and land use regulations, colossal long-rangecapital investment, and quality of life, have also contributed to the region’s rapid populationgrowth.

The second part of the book examines the dilemmas of strengthened regional interdependenceversus increased local water independence, self-sufficiency and reliability. The focal point ofChapter 4 is the effort of the San Diego County Water Authority to secure dependable watersupplies bypassing the Metropolitan Water District. On the one hand, Erie sees the San DiegoCounty Water Authority transfer deals as a threat to the “regional cooperation” fostered by theMetropolitan Water District over the years; on the other, he admits that the antagonistic tendencieswithin “MET” stem from the growing awareness about the insecurity of water supplies from theColorado River and Northern California. The author observes that the internal “war” over SouthernCalifornia’s “water status quo” has created the need for a more in-depth exploration of local waterresources, including building desalination plants, seeking reclamation and improving conservationefforts.

Chapter 5 further examines how intrastate and interstate struggles over the control of waterresources have affected MWD’s ability to balance water needs and water demands. A series ofcourt battles have made it increasingly difficult for MWD to secure sufficient and reliable watersupplies, e.g., the 1963 Arizona vs. California lawsuit which determined the interstate allotmentof Colorado River water, the 1983 California Supreme Court decision limiting the drawings fromthe Mono Lake Basin, the 1986 California Court of Appeals’ decision reducing transfers fromthe State Water Project, and finally, the 1997 court victory of the Owens Valley citizens whorequested compensation for mitigation of environmental consequences brought about by waterwithdrawals. Controversies over the cost of water transactions have brought to light previously

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ignored issues such as the yield from conservation efforts and the cost of environmental impacts,which, as Erie notes, were largely overlooked before 1990 (p. 112).

Chapter 6, which completes the second part of Beyond Chinatown, looks at the prospectsfor water supply privatization in Southern California and the extent to which MWD, with itshighly institutionalized structure, is able to handle market pressures. In Erie’s words, the fate ofSouthern California’s water resources will largely depend on “how well Metropolitan continues tonavigate between the Scylla of authoritative, potentially authoritarian politics and the Charybdisof efficient, potentially soulless economics” (p. 204). The dilemma, as Erie points out, is part ofa more general debate between the proponents of the free water market and those who oppose itarguing that water as “a public good” is entitled to “use rights not ownership” (p. 203).

In Part III, Erie looks at “the daunting tasks” facing the Metropolitan Water District in thedecades to come, that is, how to sustain continued population growth, cope with the impactof the global warming on the semi-arid Southern California environment, secure resources forenvironmental protection and restoration, guarantee the quality of the water supplies, and protectthe resource from bioterrorism.

Although the book follows the convoluted path of water politics, its logic is easy to comprehendas each chapter sets the background for the next. Some sections of the book, however, might beconsidered too specialized and technical by readers who are not familiar with the field. Part II,for example, contains many acronyms which may make it difficult for some readers to follow thethread of events.

Overall, Beyond Chinatown is a powerful account of water politics. I believe that the experienceof the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, as presented by Steven Erie, will berelevant to scholars and academics dealing with water resource planning in countries across theglobe.

Diana Mitsova-BonevaUniversity of Cincinnatimitsovdp@email.uc.edu

Nancy Foner (Ed.), Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11 (New York, The RussellSage Foundation, 2005).

Wounded City is a valuable yet frustrating collection of independent studies of various aspectsof life in the New York metropolitan region, loosely strung together around the question: “Whatdifference did 9/11 make?” In a very commendable effort to assess the impact of the World TradeCenter attack on the future of New York City, the Russell Sage Foundation assembled a groupof respected scholars to examine aspects of that impact; ending as three volumes, separately oneconomic, social, and political impacts; Wounded City is the social volume.

Each of the 11 studies is a carefully executed piece of original research, providing substantialinformation, dense description, some analysis, and limited but often suggestive flashes of broaderinsights that cry out for further exploration. The big picture, however, is only there by implicationand by reference. The pieces are presented as if their authors had done them without referenceto the others, no cross-references, no significant comparisons, no generalizable conclusions. Forsome the specifics of 9/11, as a terrorist attack, from a particular source, aimed at a particulartarget, is relevant; others treat 9/11 as a generic disaster. The Introduction by Nancy Foner gives

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historical background and summarizes the pieces; only the Conclusion, by Kai Erikson, venturesa big picture.

The outline of one such picture is there, however, and it is richly supported. It is simple: adisaster affects different groups very differently. The impact is not on some unitary entity, “NewYork City,” but on a multiplicity of entities within that city with different backgrounds, differentrelations to the whole, and different consequences. The Conclusion goes a step further: a disasterhurts most the weakest and most vulnerable. The individual contributions bear out both points indetail, often eloquently, certainly sensitively and with nuance, even if few findings are surprising.Many of the contributions further deal with the difficult question of separating out the influenceof pre-existing trends (ups and downs of the economy, the restructuring of work process, racism)from the influence of 9/11. This is best understood when 9/11 is seen in the broader context andas an aggravating factor rather than a sole cause.

The book is divided into three not quite parallel sections: the impact of 9/11 on residential andethnic communities, on occupational groups, and on organizations. It opens with an introductorysummary by Irwin Garfinkel and colleagues on the latest wave of the ongoing New York SocialIndicators Survey, done six months after 9/11. Key findings include the fact that 14 percent ofadults had economic problems, while 15% had new health problems. The general conclusion isthat 9/11 heightened anxiety among about half of New York City’s population, and that vulnerablegroups—the least educated, the disabled, Muslims, Hispanics, immigrants—suffered most.

Philip Kasinitz and colleagues describe the differences in response between residents in BatteryPark City and those in Tribeca, two communities adjacent to the World Trade Center. The dis-cussion is against the background of differing sociological conceptions of community, with theconcept of culture playing a large if unexamined role. Kasinitz finds that Battery Park City, physi-cally isolated, felt its community threatened by responses to 9/11 that would reduce its separationfrom the city; in Tribeca the community was already more integrated into its surroundings.

A similar disparity in response is found in Melanie Hildebrandt’s examination of the responsesof different sections of the Rockaways to the trauma of 9/11 and to the subsequent crash of anAmerican Airlines fight in that section of the city. Jennifer Bryan vividly describes the hostilityencountered by Arab Muslims in Jersey City after 9/11, a story repeated, again with rich detail,in Monisha da Gupta’s account of the difficulties faced in New York City by Muslim taxi driversafter 9/11, where 85 percent of the workforce is estimated to be Muslim.

Chinese garment workers are considered as an occupational group in Margaret Chin’s contribu-tion, which is not as optimistic about full recovery as many of the other chapters are. Its interestingconclusion is that the enclave nature of the Chinese garment economy, at first a source of strengthfor its residents, was an unreliable basis for recovery, which called for expanded integration intothe rest of the economy.

The chapter on the airline industry by William Kornblum and Steven Lang provides a welcomelook at the unhappy position of airline workers, rather than their corporate employers, and findsthem unfairly neglected in public responses to 9/11. Julia Rothenberg and William Kornblum’slook at the world of visual artists finds the expected negative impacts from the loss of affordableworkplaces and from shifts in demand. Clearly, poor artists experienced much greater difficultythan established ones.

Several chapters use 9/11 more as an opening for their authors to address broader questions.For example, Karen Seeley’s chapter on psychotherapists’ involvement after 9/11 focuses on therelationship between personal involvement and professional work in psychotherapy. Danial Be-unza and David Stark’s chapter on the reorganization of the trading activities of a financial firmafter 9/11, part of an ongoing study of management organization, is more interested in the dif-ference between hierarchical and heterarchical organization than anything specific to 9/11. Theirdiscussion of the self-identity and existential anxieties of the traders is peculiarly unanalytical.

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Finally, Francesca Polletta and Lesley Wood’s article on public participation in planning forlower Manhattan after 9/11 is the only one that centers on the policy formation process in theaftermath of 9/11, and overlaps substantially with the concerns of the third volume in the Sageseries on the politics of recovery. Their interest is in the complex process issues involved inenabling a wide public to participate in deliberations around city planning issues. The carefuldescription of what did and did not happen is illuminating as to the complexities involved, butleaves unsettling questions unresolved as to the real impact of the process on ultimate decisions.

As Herb Gans says in a blurb for the book, “the empirical articles will be an indispensableresource for urban researchers and lovers of New York. . .” The research provokes as many ques-tions as it answers: Was this disaster of a unique type? Didn’t governmental responses explainmany of the findings? Was the net impact centripetal, or did it accentuate divisions in the city?Could the sources of vulnerability be distinguished, and directly addressed? What indeed are thepolicy implications of the research? The added value of Wounded City may lie in its impetus toshape an agenda for further work, perhaps even for a follow-up policy-oriented research agendasupported by Russell Sage.

Peter MarcuseColumbia University

Pm35@columbia.edu

Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (Eds.), The Resilient City: How ModernCities Recover from Disaster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Adam Smith is credited with the aphorism, “there is much ruin in a nation.” Vale and Campanellahave collected and woven a series of narratives that add a corollary to Smith’s theorem: there is awhole lot of ruin in cities too. In a very readable volume just short of 400 pages, their contributingauthors cover Chicago, San Francisco, Oklahoma City, New York, Washington, Berlin, Warsaw,Guernica (Spain), Jerusalem, Tokyo, Tangshan (China), Mexico City, Beirut, Los Angeles, andthe Internet (as a vulnerable digital metropolis).

The chapters make demands on a reader’s appreciation of history, theology, philosophy, en-gineering, and economics, so the book’s most likely audience will come from among advancedundergraduates, graduate students, and dry-eyed academics. For those who liked Victor Hanson’sCarnage and Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), Vale and Campanella have assembled apage-turner that maintains a suitably uniform editorial style that still allows the individuality ofcities to emerge.

For example, Hashim Sarkis’s elegy to Beirut (bulldozing the rubble of yet more combat asthis review is being written) recalls that the pre-civil war city of the mid 1960s was not just theParis of the Levant, but, indeed, its Left Bank. Julian Beinart’s recounting of Jerusalem, fromCanaanite roots to Israeli rule, helps to explain just why Beirut is being bombed again. Lessthan 300 km from Jerusalem, Beirut hosts a similar cast of socio-religious characters; see JessicaStern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).Sarkis’s chapter, read against the backdrop of Beinart’s essay, ingeniously and eloquently conveysJerusalem’s importance in the global geography of worship and its sociology of hate.

There are lighter moments in what could have been a dreary catalogue of fires, floods, earth-quakes and warfare, but Max Page’s survey of urban science fiction about New York, a city Americaused to love to hate (until 9/11), confronts this nation’s fascination with Batman, Godzilla, and

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The Gangs of New York. In contrast, Los Angeles, home to the counter-utopian Blade Runner,gets gentle treatment from William Fulton, who celebrates the Latinization of the city in itspost-Rodney King era.

Socialist urban resilience gets mixed reviews. Brian Ladd gives a good account of East Berlin’smonumental Communist Champs Elysee, Stalinallee. We can understand why some Americanutopian planners would like East Berlin’s signature avenue, because it featured high density, nosingle-family dwellings, and lots of “public space.” Jasper Goldman’s chapter title almost givesaway the entire story: “Warsaw: Reconstruction as Propaganda.” This chapter is the book’s miniAnimal Farm. In Warsaw’s version of resilience, Communist Party planners saw some historyas more equal than other history, and Communist-deemed politically incorrect edifices were, ineffect, non-resilient, especially buildings that were too Catholic or too Baroque.

Beatrice Chen’s narrative of the rebuilding of the Chinese factory city of Tangshan, leveled byan earthquake in 1976, does two things very well. First, it gives us a hint of what North Koreamust be like in 2006. (See GlobalSecurity.org, North Korea is Dark, December 23, 2002, URLhttp://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm [Accessed August 17, 2006])Second, it explains how the Maoist period managed to achieve high-density, walkable, pedestrian-friendly urban sprawl. Chen paints the morphology of pre-quake Tangshan as dwellings “akin to aminiature, self-contained city” in which “[w]orkers enjoyed the convenience of a short walk to theirworkbench or desk” (p. 238). After the quake planners gave short shrift to citizen participation,“relevant parties were mobilized on command; and no disobedience was tolerated from below”(p. 240). In the end, Tangshan is a city planners will like better than tourists or entrepreneurs. AsChen puts it, the decade of reconstruction helps “reinforce the inextricable link between planningculture and Chinese politics and reveal[s] the significance of urban reconstruction as an arena forthe display of political authority in the communist regime” (pp. 250–251).

Mexico City, like Tangshan, was the victim of an earthquake. But in the Federal District, the 1985quake and its aftershocks also took down the regime, often called “the perfect dictatorship,” withthe city. Diane Davis gives a carefully nuanced explanation of how the long-ruling InstitutionalRevolutionary Party (PRI) was broken in a vise. One jaw was Mexico’s international creditors,the other jaw was Mexico’s homeless and unemployed. The vise eventually brought an end to thePRI’s monopoly of power. It also furthered the career of gringo-baiting Andres Manuel LopezObrador, whose narrow loss to Felipe Calderon in the 2006 presidential election left Mexicopoised on the verge of civil unrest.

This sampling of urban destruction, sometimes heroic responses, triumphs of hope, and failureof politics leads the editors to ask if the “accounts presented in this book reveal common themesthat can help us understand the processes of physical, political, social, economic, and culturalrenewal and rebirth” (p. 335). Vale and Campanella cleverly and remorselessly put Jerusalemalongside Chicago, and admit “the contents of this book demand that we question its very title”(p. 335).

Vale and Campanella’s response is not a theory in the conventional sense of an engine for testablehypothesis generation. Instead they offer twelve “axioms” for consideration: (1) narratives ofresilience are a political necessity, (2) disasters reveal the resilience of governments, (3) narrativesof resilience are always contested, (4) local resilience is linked to national renewal, (5) resilienceis underwritten by outsiders, (6) urban rebuilding symbolizes human resilience, (7) remembrancedrives resilience, (8) resilience benefits from the inertia of prior investment, (9) resilience exploitsthe power of place, (10) resilience casts opportunism as opportunity, (11) resilience, like disaster,is site-specific, and (12) resilience entails more than rebuilding.

In a space-limited review there is no way to do justice to what amounts to an outline for anotherbook. But it is fair to point out that the strength of these axioms, taken as an ensemble, is theauthors’ and editors’ recognition of the role of politics and public opinion in urban resilience.

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Is there an apparent weakness in these axioms? Pressed to find one, we would argue that theyunderstate the role of geography, hydrology, and geology in urban resilience. Some cities are justin the wrong place. So, drawing from Douglas Brinkley’s recently published book, The GreatDeluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, we would add Axiom13: Rebuilding entails more than resilience, which cannot overcome (to paraphrase Mike Davis)an ecology of death.

John WildgenUniversity of New Orleans

JWildgen@uno.edu

Fritz WagnerUniversity of Washington

fwagner@u.washington.edu