Book Reviews :::

We read a lot of books about cities, regions, economic development, demographics and leadership at Civic Strategies.  Here are some we're excited about.

Recent Books

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall, University of Texas Press, 2000. Marshall doesn't care much for suburbs and slips occasionally into diatribes, but keep reading because he lays out why metro areas turned out as they did. It's the cars, stupid. The automobile was the first transportation technology that dispersed rather than concentrated people. Marshall would rather things be different, but he doesn't offer an antidote other than Portland's use of growth limits. Actually, the book's secondary theme is more interesting than the main one: that the economic roles of cities and suburbs have switched. Cities used to be the place where money was made and suburbs were the refuge. Now, says Marshall, suburbs are where the serious economic activities take place, from manufacturing to mass retail, and cities are becoming places for charming townhomes, quaint shops, cultural institutions and life at human scale. In short, more like Paris. "The suburban world of highways, shopping centers and office parks is now the place of blind market forces and impersonality," Marshall writes, "exactly what the city represented in the past. The city has become the refuge; the suburbs have become the open, storm-tossed sea."

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy by Robert D. Putnam, Princeton University Press, 1993.  This book got so much attention  (it was reviewed on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review) that it is easy to overlook why it was so important.  Simply this: Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, made a link between how a region behaves in its civic life and its economic life.  The stronger the civic ties, the stronger the economy.  This hasn't always been so, Putnam goes on, but something about the modern economy requires many people being in touch with each other as equals — and that is also what a healthy civic environment requires.  The book's research is about the regions of Italy, but don't let that put you off.  This book applies as much to Ohio, Mississippi and Arizona as to Lombardia, Umbria and Sicily. 

The Competitive Advantages of Nations by Michael E. Porter, Free Press, 1990.  Putnam's book makes an important discovery (see above): good civics makes good economics.  And Porter's book explains why.  We are evolving into a global "cluster economy," in which some highly advanced industries are "clustering" in certain places.  It takes Porter nearly 800 pages to explain why — and what it means for regions and nations — but it's a long trip that's worth your time, if you're curious about what will be shaping your community's economy in the future.  Porter is a Harvard business professor and perhaps the world's foremost authority on competitive strategies.

Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by Annalee Saxenian, Harvard University Press, 1994.  While Putnam and Porter (above) are roaming around the world, Saxenian, a University of California (Berkeley) professor, shows how the Putnam-Porter themes work in two American regions, Silicon Valley in California and suburban Boston's Route 128.  What she finds in these two high-tech regions are very different civic and business cultures — and the more freewheeling one (Silicon Valley) explains, she says, Silicon Valley's dominance since the early 1980s.  If you're interested in economic development or technology, you'll find this book well worth reading.

Cities in Civilization by Peter Hall, Pantheon Books, 1998.  Hall, a professor of planning in London, offers a remarkable tour of cities in history, focusing on places that were, however briefly, the centers of innovation. Sometimes, these were centers of artistic achievement (London in Shakespeare's time, Paris when Picasso was at his prime) or economic achievement (Detroit and Henry Ford, Tokyo in the post-war period) and mass culture (Hollywood in the Golden Era of movies, Memphis and Elvis Presley).  He sees common elements in all: a need for innovation, a place that appreciates achievement, and a group of outsiders who see the opportunity. 

The Twenty-First Century City: Resurrecting Urban America by Stephen Goldsmith, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. Goldsmith is a former mayor of Indianapolis and domestic advisor to George W. Bush. In Indianapolis, he pioneered a new way of delivering services through structured competitions. Goldsmith argues that privatization by itself is not the answer to decreasing costs and increasing quality, because private monopolies are only slightly more efficient that public ones. The answer is to divide up the city's services so several firms are competing against one another — or against public employees — for larger shares of the business. "Competition, not privatization, made the difference," he writes. "Competition drives private firms — and, as we soon discovered, public agencies — to constantly seek ways to reduce costs and improve services." If you're looking for dramatic ways of improving public services, Goldsmith's should be part of your research.

World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Simon & Schuster, 1995.  Putnam, Porter and Saxenian are academics and write like ones. Kanter's an academic too but doesn't write like one. A Harvard business professor, she covers the same areas as the other three, but more glibly and not as deeply. There's not much that's original in this book, but if you don't have time (or the will power) to read the others, use this as your Cliff Notes of how globalism, civic networks, competitive work skills and economic development are shaping our metropolitan areas.

The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power and the Pursuit of Office by Alan Ehrenhalt, Times Books, 1991.  A highly readable tour of local politics by the editor of Governing magazine.  Ever wonder what motivates people to run for local office?  Ehrenhalt has the answer.  

Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World by Daniel Yankelovich, Syracuse University Press, 1991.  Yankelovich is a brilliant public opinion pollster and analyst.  Unfortunately, he writes like a pollster.  But if you can make it through the leaden prose, you'll find a lot of wisdom about how people make sense of public issues — and eventually make up their minds.  If you're trying to change public opinion in your community, you should read this book.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown and Co., 2000.  This small book offers a new vision of how big-scale social change occurs: in the same way as flu epidemics, by a small number of people coming into contact with many others. There are rules to these trends, Gladwell says. They depend on the context of events and the "stickiness" of the idea (that is, how memorable the ideas are).  And they depend on three kinds of people spreading the word, people the author calls "mavens," "connectors," and "salesmen."

Common Knowledge: News and the Construction of Political Meaning by W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just and Ann N. Crigler, University of Chicago Press, 1992.  This is another academic book that's not very entertaining.  But it offers some fascinating insights into how people read or watch the news media and how they make sense of what they see.  The three professors share Yankelovich's view (above) that people do not passively accept whatever the media offer – rather they filter it through a series of "frames."  If you frequently come into contact with the media, this may be helpful in showing you how your issue comes across to the average reader and viewer.

Making Local News by Phyllis Kaniss, University of Chicago Press, 1991.  Rather than focusing on the average viewer or reader, Kaniss, a University of Pennsylania professor, focuses on reporters, editors and producers.  She helps unravel the mystery of how newspapers and TV stations pick the news they do. If you're trying to get your issue in front of the media, this book would be particularly helpful.

Classics

There are some older books that belong on every inquisitive community leader's bookshelf. Here are a few:

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.  Still the greatest book about power and politics ever written.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. If you want to understand America and the peculiar society Americans have built, this is where to begin.  This is a two-volume work, published in 1835 and 1840.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.  In the 1960s Jacobs changed the way we see our cities with this book and helped turn "urban renewal" from a cure into a curse.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life by Jane Jacobs.  A later and lesser book by Jacobs — and many have attacked her economic analysis as naive — but Jacobs takes you on a wonderful trip through time and space to the world's cities.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro.  This is a modern-day version of The Prince in the form of a biography.  In it Caro tells how a brilliant bureaucrat amassed so much power that he single-handedly reshaped New York City.

The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society by Peter F. Drucker. Arguably the best of Drucker's many books.  This one is notable for two concepts: his explanation of discontinuity (when things stop working as they once did) and his pioneering insight into how knowledge works in a modern economy.  As you go along, you'll constantly stop and double-check the copyright date.  Incredibly up to date, this book was written 30 years ago.

City: Rediscovering the Center by William H. Whyte.  Whyte was the author of the groundbreaking book, The Organization Man, in the 1950s.  After that, he turned to studying how street life actually works in cities.  It took 30 years for him to produce the work, but it was worth the wait.  This book, published in the late 1980s, is still changing the way urban areas are designed.

Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd.  The Lynds, a pair of New York sociologists, picked a Midwestern city off the map (Muncie, Indiana) and studied it as if they were anthropologists on a primitive island.  The result is a fascinating book, published in 1929.

Others worthy of note

Here are a handful of books that some leaders will find worthwhile.

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson.  This explains where the suburbs came from.  (Hint: England.)

The Sociology of Cities by William A. Schwab.  A sociology textbook (and an expensive one), this is maybe the best one-volume explanation of how cities develop.

City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society by E. Barbara Phillips.  Another expensive textbook, but worth reading.

The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City by Sam Bass Warner, Jr.  Yet another academic work on the development of cities. Warner was the dean of American urbanists when this book was written in 1972.

City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy by Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom.  This is a textbook about the history of local politics.

The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West by Carl Abbott.  If you live in a western U.S. city, this will be particularly interesting.

Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority by Peter Skerry.  An examination of how Hispanic politics works in Texas and California – and what it might say about the future of Latinos in America.