Urban Planning in Rich and Poor Countries by Hugh Stretton (review)

Books 259 between buildings and landscape areas were carved out of the desert lava, and Barragan gave much attention to the use of water in the housing complex. (2) 'The Towers of Satellite City' (1957), a title given to the 'gateway' concrete sculpture designed by Barragan that serves as a boundary symbol between an outer suburb and Mexico City. It is sited in the central portion of a divided highway. (3) Stables and associated buildings, including a house for Mr. and Mrs. Folke Egerstrom at San Cristobal (1967-68). This is the most complex venture discussed in the book, extending to 14 pages, and Ambasz uses it to conclude the main section of the book, after which he adds a few short notes about Barragan himself and an illustrative bibliography of his work. I recommend this book to readers who are interested in landscape architecture and the architecture of Mexico. Urban Planning in Rich and Poor Countries. Hugh Stretton. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1978. 220 pp. Paper, £2.25. Reviewed by N. N. Patricios* This is a remarkable book for compacting a range of approaches to city life and planning over a wide geographical area in a very readable style. The approaches are, as Stretton is careful to point out, only sketches and samples of the full extent of theoretical approaches and practices of urban planning in rich and poor countries. The book consists of two parts. The first is entitled Theories and is concerned with ideologies that planners may encounter. The author begins with a discussion on social understanding and identifies the now almost mandatory consensus and conflict perspectives of cities. He decides, however, to describe a range of urban ideologies either by simple social models or by metaphors that seem to underlie them. They are neatly titled Cities as Communities, Cities as Market Places, Cities as Battlegrounds and Cities as Machinery. It is a pity that even in a sketch survey of ideologies a place was not found for 'cities as ideals'. This could have included Paolo Soleri's ideas of Arcology, those of the Japanese Metabolists and others. Then, of course, there are the particular idealisms of Israelis with implications for their urban policy, and the unique apartheid ideology of South Africans and their deliberate construction of twin cities. The issue of inclusion or exclusion arises in part perhaps because Stretton has not explicitly expressed his use of socialist and of conflict perspectives in drawing the boundaries for his selections. Part two of the book is called Practices. The content of the chapters on Poor Capitalist Cities and Rich Capitalist Cities is probably fairly well known to most planners. In judging the planning policies of Bangkok and then the U.S.A., France, and Britain, Stretton again implicitly employs a conflict perspective . He correctly is concerned about distributions of income, inequality and class aspects of housing. But he only touches on other major urban issues of the 1970s--those of environmental impact and conservation and energy. Perhaps a tighter attempt to link theoretical ideas with practices may have overcome this problem and justified inclusion or exclusion of material. Chapters 10 and 12 are most interesting and revealing on the Poor and the Rich Communist Cities. The ones discussed are Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Havana in Cuba; also discussed are the Chinese policies of urban dispersal, decentralization, and provincial and local self-sufficiency. Thirty years after Mao's revolution, the results certainly appear impressive. On the other hand, the urban policies of Hungary and of the U.S.S.R. have proved quite mistaken, in Stretton's view. He argues for different principles for socialist cities, in fact, for further equalization of choices and the extension of them to any householder. Many readers will surely agree with his contention that what is needed in urban design and environment is 'not less attention to design but better design'. After the recent antiphysical approach I welcome the fact that recognition is again being given to the many things good design can provide to a 'Dept. of Architecture and Planning, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, U.S.A. city. These include built-in equalities into the layout of...