The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning, edited by NancyBrooks, KieranDonaghy, and Gerrit‐JanKnaap. 2012. New York: Oxford University Press. 1006 + xx. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐538062‐0, $175.
这本39篇论文的文集反映了城市经济学与规划之间的对话，适合教授城市经济学、规划和公共政策的学者，以及希望拓宽理论视角的研究生。
Handbook? It's a Kodiakbearclawbook—about 800 pages of text (excluding references and indexes) in 39 essays. The editors have succeeded in their goal to reflect a “problem-driven but theoretically informed approach” (p. 3) to connections between urban economics and planning and to promote dialogue between them. Their comment on the context is sobering: many institutions taken for granted by economists and planners are not serving us well, and “the efficiency of markets…in most domains of urban life is itself becoming increasingly questionable” (p. 4). There are 57 contributors, generally prominent scholars. They have extensive experience working with practicing planners, though about 80 percent work primarily in universities. About 80 percent are from the United States and Canada. There are familiar teams like Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson, Joseph Persky and Wim Wiewel, Timothy Bartik and Randall Eberts, John McDonald and Daniel McMillen, and Ingrid Ellen and Katherine O'Regan. It's not a cookbook or technical manual. The authors who are economists don't aim to help planners solve nuts-and-bolts problems, rather to help them—and their educators—understand ways of thinking about issues. The majority of the economists are concrete, empirical, and rely on fairly basic microeconomic theory. The extensive reviews of literature are a strong point, and they reinforce connections to reality by being honest when empirical work doesn't offer confident conclusions. Even readers already familiar with the topics will value those reviews. The author and subject indexes—26 and 46 pages, respectively—are excellent. The book is actually not best suited to practicing planners, rather to economists and planning academics who teach urban economics, planning, and public policy. Teachers will find new ways to handle various topics, as well as guides to literature. As for planning students, the story is mixed. Many essays are useful for their theory, history, data, and logical arguments that will stimulate discussion. Five, however, are heavy on urban microeconomics and calculus, and in some others authors use simple models but explain them poorly, or cram essays full of terse summaries, or employ (not well explained) economics terminology. Those essays are tiring to read, which gives a teacher pause. Better editing would have reduced ambiguity and the sense of mad dashes through empirical studies (and caught typos like “Burton” for “Bruton” and “Kaya” for “Kaza” (a fellow contributor!), and two identical four-line footnotes eight pages apart). All in all, the book is diverse in style of exposition as well as in topics. A recurring theme is how urban economists and planners are different. Several contributors offer generalizations. Planners are more likely to understand second-best policies, value equity, care more about actual compensation of losers than potential Pareto compensation (Brooks, pp. 16–17; Persky and Wiewel, p. 151). They are more likely to see weaknesses, not strengths in markets, favor regulation over pricing solutions, be idealists rather than pragmatists, and challenge consumers’ tastes (Richard Arnott, pp. 51, 77; Persky and Wiewel, p. 151). The comments I most appreciated are by Richard Schramm, an economist who has taught planning and worked with planners on local development. About economists, he says: “their approach does not necessarily build community, at least not for all those currently living in that area….That specific individuals and enterprises stay or leave…is not a major concern. Even efforts to reduce poverty and enhance the tax base do not include the question of who leaves or stays as a result” (pp. 660–661). He also says economists think in terms of top-down processes by which expanding sectors generate jobs “that, hopefully, will trickle down to those most needing jobs” (p. 664), while planners know and care more about the uneven distribution of jobs and build in targeting. You may find such generalizations useful, but it's notable that economists writing in parts 3, 4, and 6, and in one of the essays on sprawl, pay great attention to equity. Persky and Wiewel make the excellent point: “the sides taken by individuals are probably better predicted by their political affiliations than by their disciplines” (p. 151). Another theme: a city or region's planners have limited power or influence. Authors in the book often describe national contexts, national policies, and natural constraints—including competition for capital and people from other cities. Examples are William Goldsmith on drug policy, Manuel Pastor on immigration, Genevieve Giuliano on transit, Tracy Gordon on fiscal disparities, and of course the several authors on housing. Philip McCann adds global forces as he discusses the relationship between city scale and productivity or wealth. A third theme is the importance of interest groups, who work through politics and in other ways. Interest groups make unparadoxical a seeming paradox: urban ills are often the result—intended or not—of government action, yet there is vigorous public opposition to new government actions that might be remedies. Examples are in essays by Giuliano, again, Paul Jargowsky and Leah Platt Boustan (in separate essays) on segregation, Casey Dawkins on exclusionary policies, William Goldsmith on drug policy, Bartik and Eberts on incentives for business, and Eric Hanushek and Kuzey Yilmaz on schools. I found the great majority of essays useful, but have space to comment on only a few I found especially valuable. Nancy Brooks has advice on teaching urban economics to planners: don't attack straw men, recognize mutual interests; recognize and use behavioral economics (changing preferences, endowment effect, loss aversion); place is important; market failure does not imply government action or government failure imply privatization. Richard Arnott's summary of the general equilibrium monocentric city model, warts and all, is thoughtful and stimulating, though most so for economists and for planners who are very up on urban theory. He says very little about equity beyond “equity and efficiency [are] inextricably intertwined” (p. 77), yet also says “The monocentric model has proved to be remarkably rich…. Since it is a general equilibrium model, it permits rigorous welfare analysis” (p. 67). Whether you agree depends on your definition of rigorous (uniform, consistent, applied strictly according to some rule? or complete, accurate?). Alex Anas relies greatly on polycentric development in analyzing and evaluating sprawl, arguing that it brings jobs closer to residences and is essential in understanding that some sprawl is efficient. His essay is a fine combination of theory, empirical data, and summaries of many models and previous research. (The tight exposition requires very close reading.) Anas concentrates entirely on efficiency, and analyzes only one market failure, unpriced road congestion (p. 125). One notable conclusion: planners laud transit-oriented development (TOD) and New Urbanism as tools to reduce sprawl, but those tools “may be wrongly promoted…. Planners may do better to view them as mechanisms that will promote efficient polycentric land uses” (p. 147). Gordon and Richardson explain how polycentric development has curbed increases in commuting time, and they recognize equity issues by saying the problem with sprawl is not that people have moved to suburbs, but that some “have been left behind” (p. 110, quoting Glaeser and Kahn, 2003). They conclude: “Remarkably, even in a second-best world, spatial patterns emerge that facilitate efficiency and growth. Unfortunately…many prescriptions for how cities can be better managed are accompanied by assertions (with very little evidence) that compact spatial arrangements are superior” (p. 118). Their essay combines accessible theory, economic history, and lots of data, and it's suitable for an urban economics or planning course at any level. Philip McCann's essay on city scale and wealth and Brendan O'Flaherty's on homelessness are suitable for the same reasons, namely the triad of theory, history, and data. In sharp contrast to Anas, Persky (economist), and Wiewel (sociologist and planning academic) dwell almost wholly on the equity aspects of sprawl, elaborating the problems of those left behind. Students would benefit from reading their piece along with Gordon and Richardson's. Stephen Ross provides a very detailed survey of empirical studies of social interactions and their effects, with special attention to difficulties in identifying causal relationships. A representative question is: Schools vary greatly in their pupils’ learning. How much is due to direct peer interactions, how much to other differences like family resources? (pp. 219–220). Eric Hanushek and Kuzey Yilmaz emphasize the high correlation between school location and race, poverty, and school quality. In the U.S.'s decentralized financing system, families choose where to live depending on their own resources, preferences, and school quality (the biggest factor in “school choice” is the choice of residential location (p. 596)). In turn, school quality feeds back to affect the family's future resources. Persky and Wiewel are blunt about it in their essay: “Hoarding educational resources behind local school boundaries is surely one of the most depressing aspects of metropolitan decentralization and sprawl” (p. 162). Genevieve Giuliano gives a fine survey of urban transit. The distribution of costs and benefits helps explain why voters support transit subsidies but oppose correct pricing of congestion. One result is: “The voter, not the transit user, is transit's primary customer” (p. 575). The poor depend most on transit but aren't satisfied with it. Bartik and Eberts appraise business incentives from the viewpoint of greater earnings for residents. Good targeting is essential; here economists are thinking like Schramm's planners, and targeting helps explain why customized services like worker training and manufacturing extension may trump tax breaks. Bartik and Eberts suggest that even if job creation is a zero sum game for the nation, subsidies are socially good if they redistribute jobs from low-unemployment to high-unemployment areas. Jae Hong Kim and Geoffrey Hewings's excellent treatment of forecasting and simulation models is valuable because such models are used widely but are not typically covered in planners’ basic education. The essays on international settings would be good in teaching, and there are nuggets in them. Martim Smolka and Ciro Biderman take pains to show how misleading is the common monocultural image of “slums.” They observe that poor people often live far from business centers, because paying more for transportation (including time) frees up resources for better housing (I would add, perhaps also for investment in small businesses?). Thus, transport costs substitute for monetary credit, which is hard to get (pp. 824–825). That kind of observation will broaden a typical American student's theoretical perspective. Margaret Grieco describes transportation planning in many African cities as plagued by a legacy—attitudinal as well as material—of infrastructure built to serve extraction and export of raw materials; what cities need now is to improve links with hinterlands, facilitate nonmotorized transportation and the small-scale carriage of water, and improve accessibility for petty traders (many of them women). What's missing or slighted in this book? I mention six topics. First, benefit-cost analysis (BCA). There's no systematic survey, though Lorelei Juntunen, Knaap, and Terry Moore explain well how fiscal impact analysis differs from BCA. I believe practicing planners need tools to understand specialists’ BCA and to inform the public about its problematic combination of breadth and narrowness. Second, more attention to nonprofit organizations, drawing on ideas available in economic and political theory. Third, feminist perspectives. Only fourteen authors are women and there is no systematic treatment of the topic. Fourth, “communicative planning,” an important idea for planning academics. Nikhil Kaza and Knaap give us two pages on it, much too little. One interesting question here is how can planners make urban economic theory intelligible to the public, so as to increase the public's voice in planning? Communicative planning implies planners should enable the public. The underlying philosophy of Habermas is not friendly to conventional economics, but planning academics teach a less extreme version. Fifth, multiple equilibria, in economic theory and in the real city. Multiple equilibria are prominent in models in modern economic geography and social interaction analysis, so it's a natural topic. What's more, the authors of many nontheoretical essays in the book describe bad situations in cities and neighborhoods in ways that made me think of “traps” of some kind, which suggests multiple equilibria. Finally, a systematic treatment of interest groups—how they form, what they do, how well they succeed. The reasons are obvious from my earlier remark. An essay combining social science theory (from Mancur Olson and others) with empirical examples would help planners and economists. Consider Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's argument (made after the book appeared): “Even when it is possible, removing a market failure need not improve the allocation of resources because of its effect on future political equilibria” (2013, p. 174). That can happen if policy changes the distribution of rents and other benefits in a way to affect the power of certain groups, which has implications for both efficiency and equity in the future. Particularly if policy strengthens the power of already dominant groups, “it should not just focus on removing failures and correcting distortions….[It] calls for a different framework, explicitly based in political economy” (p. 190). As Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) note, it's not simply second-best thinking. Second-best is about how the coexistence of several market failures complicates the analysis of any one failure separately; AR's point is that reforms today may affect political equilibria tomorrow. Their illustrations are at the national level, but the argument is relevant to urban policy, especially if, as is likely, urban policy affects the formation and maintenance of civil society. I urge readers to look at the book carefully and get a sense of how it can educate them on various topics. It may be a worthwhile buy.