Crosscurrents of urban theory

What counts as urban discourse at the end of the twentieth century? How is the city being conceptualized across the human sciences? These five thoughtful books begin to suggest the range of possibilities. Barry Cullingworth is a specialist in urban planning and its history. Michael Hough is a landscape architect and professor in one of North America’s leading interdisciplinary environmental studies programs (York University). Richard Lehan and Hana Wirth-Nesher are literary scholars (UCLA and Tel Aviv University, respectively). Imagining Cities is a collection of essays by a (mostly British) group of social scientists and cultural critics, spanning the fields of geography, sociology, and media studies.

I

In Planning in the USA Cullingworth undertakes to provide, through “an outline of policies relating to land use, urban planning and environmental protection,” a historically informed overview that will serve as “an introduction to the policy-making process in these fields” (p. xix). Six sections follow that survey: (1) modern urbanization’s overall trajectory vis-à-vis the development of the field of urban planning on the one hand, and municipal government structures on the other; (2) land-use regulation; (3) aesthetic and preservationist concerns; (4) growth management; (5) transportation, housing, and community development policy; and (6) environmental (air, water, waste) regulation and the politics thereof. The book is intended as an introduction to the field for scholars and practitioners, but it is accessible to any reader interested in the history of city planning in the United States since its formal emergence as a profession in 1909.

Hough’s Cities and Natural Process, an updated revision of his City Form and Natural Process (1984), aspires to raise the ecological consciousness of architects, planners, and readers generally by identifying dimensions of the natural environment within which urban infrastructure must function whether designers realize it or not, and by showing through a combination of systems analysis and specific case studies how urban design might be made more energy-efficient and environmentally responsive. A lucid overview of “urban ecology” is followed by more-technical but still quite readable chapters on water, plants, wildlife, city farming, and climate. Whereas in Cullingworth’s framework, local specificity is an inevitable complication attendant upon the multilevel complexity of federal-state-municipal organization, for Hough it is most emphatically a positive value. Although planning in the sense of rational forethought based on sound general guidelines is evidently as indispensable to Hough’s philosophy of landscape architecture as it is to Cullingworth’s philosophy of city management, it is axiomatic for Hough that ecological context should dictate the application of a particular set of design principles, rather than the other way around.

The City in Literature offers a panoramic historical/critical review of how the literary imaging of cities has developed in tandem with the history of urban forms themselves. Lehan takes us from antiquity to postmodernism, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as city and city fiction evolve from the walking city to the postindustrial city, from the geographically demarcated city as commercial center to the city as nodal point in a global network that extends far beyond even the much more elastic-extended boundaries of contemporary metropolitan areas. He provides scores of concisely observant critical readings of all significant European and American urban novelists and poets from the eighteenth century to the present, within a narrative of the breakdown of liberal ideals of personal autonomy and knowable community in the face of growth...