planet of cities, by shlomoangel. 2012. cambridge, ma: lincoln institute of land policy. 341 + xvi....

BOOK REVIEWS

CONTENTSThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, by Trevor J. Barnes,Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard. Review by Jeff Boggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Geographies of the Super-Rich, by Iain Hay. Review by Jay D. Gatrell . . . . . . . . . . . . 157Reforms and Economic Transformation in India, edited by Jagdish Bhagwatiand Arvind Panagariya. Review by Sasidaran Gopalan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Planet of Cities, by Shlomo Angel. Review by Karima Kourtit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbsto Smart Growth, by James C. O’Connell. Review by David Rain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Beyond GDP: Measuring Welfare and Assessing Sustainability, by Marc Fleur-baey and Didier Blanchet. Review by Salah El Serafy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, by Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck,and Eric Sheppard. 2012. West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. 646 + xvii. ISBN 978-1-4443-3680-1,$199.95.

Edited by three luminaries of contemporary economic geography, 48 scholars contribute 39thematic chapters to this newly released compendium. This is bracketed by the editors’ introductoryand summarizing remarks. Collectively, this work surveys the current state of English language eco-nomic geography. While its intended audience is graduate students and advanced undergraduates,more seasoned economic geographers will also find it valuable for keeping abreast of the field.

I recommend comparing and contrasting it with an earlier version of this volume, Sheppardand Barnes’ (2000) The Companion to Economic Geography. While the two volumes are similar inintent, a comparison reveals generational shifts in contributors and scope. About one-third of thecontributors are female. Similar to the 2000 edition, though, the vast majority of authors are basedin North American or U.K. institutions. The comparison also suggests that economic geographycontinues to become less quantitative, less analytical, and less orthodox. As before, case study-basedresearch abounds. The scale of the body has become more prominent as the site of analysis. Morethan I recall in the 2000 edition, the editors and authors match topical summation with reflectionon the state and purpose of economic geography.

The editors organize the Companion into three broad sections. Section 1’s eight chapters ex-amine noncapitalist economies (Gibson-Graham), trends in North Atlantic economic geography(Walker), political economy (Mann), the corporation (O’Neill), money and finance (Hall), nature(Bakker), East Asia (Yeung), and Latin America (Werner). The shadow of David Harvey touchesthem all, though beyond that their mutual influences become more eclectic.

Section 2 holds the bulk of the chapters. It is organized into three subsections: accumulation andvalue, with nine chapters; regulation and governance, with seven; and embodiment and identity,with eight. Essletzbichler’s chapter on evolutionary economic geographies is a particularly lucidoverview. Zook’s treatment of the virtual economy touches on not just the material infrastructurethat enables it, but the social and cultural limits of its distance-collapsing potential. Leslie andRantisi’s succinct overview of the creative class debates is particularly well-suited as a reading inan advanced undergraduate course on the creative economy and cultural industries.

Among the other chapters comprising section 2, two stood out. First, Beverly Mullings(pp. 407–419) provides a clear example of how to unpack concepts and appreciate their roles increating a discourse. She does so by outlining the evolving treatment of race and ethnicity in eco-nomic geography since the 1940s. This might be of particular interest to regional scientists given

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that she begins her discussion by rooting it in early postwar Anglo-American economic geography,and uses this as an opportunity to introduce the concept of race and discourses about race in clearlanguage. A key endeavor in many of the newer strands of economic geography is a concern with“unpacking” concepts. This involves examining how these concepts came to be, the kinds of disci-plinary and societal conversations employing these concepts, who benefited from (and conversely,who was hindered by) these concepts, and what new concepts came to replace the old ones. Mullingsprovides a clear example of how to unpack concepts while also reviewing their evolution over timeusing compelling examples.

Second, Ian Cook and Tara Woodyer examine the lives of things and, in the process, unpackcommodity fetishism, long a staple in more Marxian strands of economic geography. Their chapterreads more as a performance, with a whimsy reminiscent of Olsson’s (1980) Birds in Egg/Eggs inBird. After I followed the authors’ instructions on how to read their chapter, what I initially took formadness revealed itself as a clever pedagogical tool. They juxtapose descriptions and images of itemsin an imaginary auction catalogue with critical reflection. As the reader wends from description toanalysis, we first encounter Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism by reading the description of theauction item, a dog-eared copy of Marx’s Capital. This catalogue entry is followed by musings on whyand when the previous owner would have marked particular passages that define the concept. Thisis followed by more commodities in the auction, and more unpacking of concepts. This back and forthbetween auction description and unpacking creates the effect of peeling an onion: looking at the ideasbehind the ideas as well as the genealogy of the ideas. It also acknowledges emotion—affect—whichother Companion contributers take seriously as a key factor shaping the world around us. While onthe one hand this juxtaposition left me feeling as if I would never cease falling down the rabbit hole,the exercise compelled me to consider the utility of this approach for teaching abstract concepts.

The seven authors contributing chapters to the final section ask us to move beyond the amor-phous borders of economic geography to incorporate insights and techniques from other disci-plines. Sunley (pp. 588–590), though, recognizes that this incorporation only goes so far, notingthe impasse—despite repeated calls for dialogue—between a Krugmanesque new economic geogra-phy and the contemporary pluralist economic geography. That cognitive neuroscience, behavioraleconomics, or analytical network sociology are not represented in any of the chapters also says muchabout the policing of these borders.

Given the large number of chapters, coupled with their theoretical pluralism, the editors fore-stall chaos by identifying commonalities and coherences. The most common means for enforcingcoherence is by calling for an “engaged pluralism.” This means economic geographers should iden-tify their common ground, listen to each other respectfully, and reflect on how we know the economy.For instance, Yeung (p. 125), reviewing how economic geographers have theorized East Asian cap-italism over the last three decades, contends we should “theorize back” and use observations fromthat context to reveal the blind spots of concepts developed originally to understand the NorthAtlantic economies. Similarly, Werner (pp. 136–141), reviewing economic geographers’ analysis ofLatin America over the same time frame, instead favors constructing new explanations divorcedfrom the influence of English language economic geographers. Both Yeung and Werner argue thatfocusing on only the North Atlantic economies is too restrictive. Not only does this blind us tothe ways that economies evolve in other locales, it also chains our expectations of what is possi-ble. However, where Yeung seems to suggest that (eventually) there might be a universal frame-work in which to organize all this knowledge, Werner would argue that such a universal frame-work is just a means of intellectual domination that limits the imagined possibilities in peripheralregions.

And, this is the crux of my concern with engaged pluralism (see Simandan, 2011 for a dif-ferent critique of engaged pluralism). In practical terms, the diversity of conceptual frameworksand methodologies makes it difficult to practice (competently) engaged pluralism. Why? Evaluationrequires the evaluator understand the rules, the norms, and the expectations that govern the genrein which the scholarship was created. Only then can one determine if the evaluated work “makessense”—that is, if an author’s findings are supported by the proffered evidence, if they have fol-lowed the explanatory conventions of that genre, or if their contribution is significant rather thantrivial. However, few economic geographers possess the knowledge to evaluate competently worksfrom all these genres. In practical terms, I suspect this means that economic geographers operating

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in genre A and B just talk past each other, nodding politely as if they understand what theirpartner means, and ultimately making little meaningful progress due to their stunted divisions oflabor.

Jeff BoggsDepartment of GeographyBrock University

REFERENCESOlsson, Gunnar. 1980. Birds in Egg/Eggs in Bird. London: Pion.Sheppard, Eric and Trevor Barnes. 2000. A Companion to Economic Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Simandan, Dragos. 2011. “Is Engaged Pluralism Really the Best Way Forward? Commentary on Barnes and

Sheppard (2009),” Progress in Human Geography, 35(4): 568–572.

Geographies of the Super-Rich, by Iain Hay. 2013. Cheltenham, U.K. and Northampton,Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. 213 + xiv. ISBN 978–0–85793–568–7, $108.

With cover art reminiscent of a romance novel, Geographies of the Super-Rich would be easyto dismiss as just another edited collection on an esoteric topic. Yet, the collection is one of themost coherent I’ve come across since graduate school—although I must admit my personal poli-tics likely diverge from those of the authors. Politics aside, the twelve chapters chart the globalgeography of the super-rich and provide an effective sociocultural framework for understandingand analyzing the practical economics of wealth at work, home, and play. In doing so, the authorsarticulate a new geography of abundance (p. 7) and globalization that heretofore has remained hid-den behind the gates of country clubs, secure doors of skyboxes, and the confines of elite auctionhouses.

The book’s chapters coalesce around four basic themes: Concepts (chapters 1–2); FinancialCapital (chapters 3–5); Home Spaces (chapter 6–8); and Leisure (chapters 9–12). Each of thesethemes is united not only by wealth, but also by the broader process of globalization that hasarguably accelerated and exacerbated the social distance between classes. Similarly, the contri-butions underscore how the super-rich make money, exercise political power, and create culturalcapital.

In the introductory chapters, Hay (chapter 1) and Short (chapter 2) make a case for why under-standing the geography of the super-rich is not only an appropriate academic pursuit, but necessaryto unlock the dynamics of globalization on the ground. As Short notes, investigating elites is an es-pecially difficult task as access is limited and the world of the super-rich is a complex combination ofglobal political and economic power cloaked in and driven by neoliberal discourses on marketizationand deregulation. To that end, the first two chapters begin the process of explaining the sociopoli-tics of the “Second Gilded Age.” Additionally, Hay and Short note that little research exists on thetopic, in contrast to the extensive academic literature on poverty and inequality. Furthermore, theemergence of compelling new social movements (e.g., Occupy Wall Street) underscores the need tolocate and situate the “.1 percent” in their everyday spaces (see chapter 2).

The second section is arguably the most familiar as a great deal has been written on finan-cial capital. Two of the three chapters focus on prominent onshoring centers, specifically London(Beaverstock et al.) and Singapore (Pow), and the third examines developers in Ireland. In chap-ter 3, Beaverstock et al. provide the reader with a unique perspective on wealth management forso-called “ultra high net worth individuals” (UHNWIs; p. 25). In doing so, the authors examinewealth management to understand how UHNWIs behave. Based on survey research, Beaverstocket al. illustrate that wealth management firms have broadened the scale and scope of their effortsfrom simply preserving wealth to generating it. Pow’s chapter investigates how Singapore’s “liveand bank here” development strategy emphasizes livability and markets itself as a “lifestyle” city



(p. 66). In chapter 5, Murphy and McGuirk explore the property boom that accompanied the rapidgrowth and expansion of the Irish economy (a.k.a. the Celtic Tiger) at the turn of the century upthrough the banking crisis of 2008.

Chapters 6 through 9 focus on home spaces and the capacity of the super-elite to control notonly the local markets but also the spatial politics of their environments. Whether it’s global cities(Paris, chapter 6), 19th-Century London (Wilkins, chapter 7), or rural landscapes (Woods, chapter8; Roberts and Schein, chapter 9), the wealthy transform the landscape and spatial practices ofthe communities and regions in which they reside. Moreover, as Paris notes, the hypermobility ofthe elite permits the group to parachute into communities, secure resources, and privatize onceshared assets. Indeed, globalization and hypermobility have also driven the transformation of ruralKentucky, Britain, and Australia. As both chapters 8 and 9 illustrate, the elite are not only ruralentrepreneurs, but wealthy sheiks, movie stars, and industrialists. While chapter 7 presents ahistorical account of the super-rich in a different time and at a different scale, the themes of powerand control over resources and space that drive UHNWIs haven’t changed much in the past 150years. These chapters represent a cultural turn in the collection and focus on making meaning ofwealth in place—and time.

Building on Roberts and Schein, McManus (chapter 10) explores the world of thoroughbredhorse racing and breeding, with an emphasis on how the super-rich have distorted the economicsof the industry in their quest to engage in an authentic competitive activity (i.e., horse racing; p.168). Like horseracing, the global bourgeois have transformed the art world (chapter 11). In theprocess, the elite transform wealth through art into a form of cultural capital that gives meaningto everyday life. Fasche charts the decline of public institutions in the marketplace and the rise ofmegacollectors from emerging economic regions, who have transformed the visual art market bydriving museums out with unsustainably rising purchase prices. In chapter 11, two case studiesare presented in an attempt to differentiate between traditional and emerging collectors. Whilethe cases are interesting, the comparative analysis is not compelling. Indeed, Fasche presents afalse dichotomy between an established collector (Broad) and a new generation archetype (Pinchuk)to suggest emerging collectors have effectively privatized collections and limited access—whereasmore traditional collectors are patrons of the arts who deploy their resources to advance publicinstitutions and/or nonprofit foundations (i.e., museums).

Finally, the book closes with a critical analysis of race and class in St. Barts, a place that residesat the intersection of luxury vacationing, global capital, and a desire to obtain an authentic (butgeneric) exoticism. To that end, Cousin and Chauvin present an interesting (but familiar) account ofotherness on vacation in the form of imported labor, building supplies, and sanitized histories thatdownplay Afro-Caribbean narratives.

In sum, the collection is solid and well thought out. Indeed, Hay has marshaled a collectionthat succinctly demonstrates the ways in which the culture, economics, and politics of the super-richdrive globalization. Having said that, I earnestly believe it is worth noting that the tone of thecollection (perhaps unintentionally, although I suspect not) portrays the “super-rich” as villains.Indeed, many chapters imply UHNWIs are contemporary robber barons, a point explicitly made byMurphy and McGuirk who assert Irish developers were “the key authors of the crisis” (p. 90) who“left a dubious legacy” (p. 91). Similarly, Fasche’s willingness to impute motive to an emerging artcollector is problematic. Yet, the most curious comment is from McManus, who suggests horseracingis a reasonable competitive substitute for the elite who “perhaps cannot compete with their ownbodies” (p. 168). While the politics may cause some readers concern, the collection demonstratesthat the super-rich are the place makers and engines of the global economy.

Jay D. GatrellOffice of Academic Affairsand School of Environmental StudiesBellarmine University


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Reforms and Economic Transformation in India, edited by Jagdish Bhagwati and ArvindPanagariya. 2012. Series: Studies in Indian Economic Policies. New York: Oxford UniversityPress. 292 + xiv. ISBN 978–0–19–991520–0, $49.95.

The Indian economy stands at a crossroads. Its impressive growth record, which has beenaveraging about 9 percent since the early 2000s, was first briefly interrupted by the global financialcrisis when growth slipped to about 6 percent in 2008. The economy then regained ground, bouncingback to post a growth rate of over 9 percent in 2011. But since then, the country appears to havelost its growth momentum, with the growth rate sliding down to about 5 percent in 2012–2013. Thishas been further compounded by soaring inflation rates as well as acute currency weakness in thelast couple of years. An offshoot of this triple whammy of low growth, high inflation, and currencyweakness has also been a slowdown in the momentum toward making substantial progress inreducing the massive scales of poverty and inequality prevalent in the country. As India gears upfor its largest democratic exercise—the parliamentary elections—in May, 2014, the current policydiscourse has been centered around how to get the country back on its feet from its near-stagnantgrowth phase as well as how to improve the “quality of growth,” paying adequate attention to itsdistributional consequences.

India has come a long way since its Balance of Payments crisis in 1991, when it walked downthe path of economic reforms. In many ways this was a watershed moment in post-independenceIndia’s history. But it is becoming increasingly evident that much more needs to be done on thesupply side for it to sustain its growth momentum and remain competitive in the global market.There is a broad recognition that capacity problems exist in the country, but most of the existingacademic research on the subject remains disparate and largely descriptive. A systematic empiricalexamination of these and related themes has been missing. In this context, Reforms and EconomicTransformation in India, an edited volume by eminent economists Jagdish Bhagwati and ArvindPanagariya, makes a unique contribution to the literature by offering some new, refreshing, andvaluable insights focusing on supply-side themes at a disaggregated firm level.

This book is the second volume in a series on “Studies in Indian Economic Policies” that aims tounderstand the dynamics of the wide-ranging and heterogeneous implications of the market reformsembraced by the country since 1991. Bhagwati and Panagariya have put together a compilationof 10 academic and policy papers that are both rigorous and accessible to researchers and policypractitioners interested in the Indian economic story. This volume primarily deals with assessing theimplications of those reform policies on the structural transformation across sectors and enterprisesof the country. In a nutshell, the book demonstrates that the failure of Indian policymakers toincorporate certain “key ingredients” into these economic reforms has prevented the country fromreaping the full potential of those reforms in achieving structural transformation within and acrosssectors and enterprises.

There are three broad themes that the book addresses. A set of chapters in the first part of thebook examines why the structural transformation in India in terms of migration of workers fromagriculture to industry to services has been relatively slow compared to other economies in East Asiawith similar economic and political structures. It has been well documented that India’s growth hasbeen quite unlike that of East Asia in that it is the services sector (rather than manufacturing) thathas contributed to growth. But little has been said as to why that has been the case. The first partof the book deals with that fundamental question by making use of highly disaggregated firm-leveldata from enterprise surveys covering both manufacturing and services firms.

Hasan and Jandoc (chapter 2) for example emphasize that the answer to the puzzle lies inrigid labor laws that have prevented large firms from hiring more workers. They use firm-level datain India’s manufacturing sector to examine the possible effects of labor regulations on firm sizeand distribution. Their empirical results suggest that, across states, those with more flexible laborregulations tend to have a greater share of employment in larger firms and those with rigid lawstend to have a concentration of employment in smaller firms. Furthermore, as the authors note, thepattern of workers in highly labor-intensive sectors like apparel is concentrated in small firms whilemedium and large ones are virtually absent. This is in stark contrast to China, where medium- andlarge-scale firms accounted for a significant chunk of employment.



The point about rigid labor regulations in states is also echoed in chapters 3 and 4. WhileSundaram, Ahsan, and Mitra’s contribution (chapter 3) deals with the link between trade liberaliza-tion and its impact on organized and unorganized sectors in manufacturing, Dehejia and Panagariya(chapter 4) address transformation within the services sector. Interestingly, both these chapters findempirical support largely in favor of the argument that stringent labor laws limit India’s completetransformation to a modern economy. Sundaram, Ahsan, and Mitra find that the effects of tradeliberalization produce weaker output effects in the organized manufacturing sector when stateshave inflexible labor laws. Dehejia and Panagariya (chapter 4) find that such outdated laws haverestricted the growth of output of services firms in certain states. The final chapter in this section(chapter 5) by Kohli and Bhagwati considers the policy debate surrounding the concerns to liberalizeorganized retail services in India. Just as the modernization of Indian industry has been held back bystringent labor laws discouraging the entry of big firms in labor-intensive manufacturing, a similar“fear” has kept foreign multibrand retailers out of India. A pertinent point they emphasize here isthat one of the crucial benefits of allowing such large multinational retailers into the country wouldbe the enhancement of productivity in agriculture due to efficiencies in supply-chain managementthey would bring to the country.

The second overall theme, which seems unique to this volume and a notable contribution tothe literature, too, is an examination of the transformation that the economic reforms have broughtabout within and across firms. Gupta (chapter 6), for instance, presents a strong empirical casefor privatization of the inefficient state enterprises that remain dominant in India. Her analysis ofpartial and full privatization episodes by the Indian government reveals that, on the whole, con-trary to popular sentiments about the feared perverse social welfare consequences, such policiesare associated with significant improvements in profitability and efficiency of state-owned firms.Interestingly, her study also reveals that privatized firms increased employment compared to non-privatized firms and the improvement in profitability of state-owned firms was clear. Furthermore,Gupta observes that her empirical results show how state-owned firms that do not privatize appearto be reducing the average workforce size compared to privatized firms. In all, this chapter producesa solid case for one of the most politically contentious issues in India’s reform toolkit.

Complementing the privatization theme is Alfaro and Chari’s study (chapter 8), which investi-gates how the end of licensing requirements for investments and imports has affected competitionamong manufacturing firms. Employing highly disaggregated firm-level data from the Center forMonitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), they find that the average firm size declined significantly inthose industries that underwent deregulation. They also find that entry of firms takes place fromthe “left tail” of the firm size distribution, implying that new firms are small. As Bhagwati andPanagariya note in their analytical synopsis (p. 9), the problem in India has not been that of smallnew firms entering the market after deregulation. Rather, the issue is that the more dynamic andsuccessful firms among the smaller ones have not grown into larger ones. They conjecture that thishas been primarily because of labor market rigidities that discourage new entrants from growinglarge. Using the same database from CMIE, Goldberg, Khandelwal, and Pavcnik (chapter 7) ex-amine how the liberalization of imports on intermediate inputs spurred the growth of new productvarieties. They show how new product varieties accounted for a significant share of manufactur-ing output growth in the postreform era. As the authors further note, the results pointing to theintroduction of new products have led to dynamic gains as they fed into the domestic economy.

The final theme of the book appears to be a work in progress, with much more potential tobe fully developed in future volumes. This theme pertains to the effects of reforms on social trans-formation among “socially disadvantaged groups.” Hnatkovska and Lahiri (chapter 9), for instance,present the case that economic reforms have significantly contributed to the striking education andwage convergence across castes, particularly benefitting the socially disadvantaged groups. Theyalso make the argument that reservation quotas played a key role in declining wage, education, aswell as consumption gaps across caste groups—though they indicate the possibility that only theinitial high levels of quotas were more influential in driving the convergence. Complementing thiswork, the final chapter in the book, chapter 10 by Dehejia and Panagariya, makes the point thatsocially disadvantaged groups witnessed the development of an entrepreneurial class, which theauthors attribute to the opportunities created by reforms.


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While both these chapters present evidence that shows the progress made by socially disadvan-taged groups, it is not very clear that the causal relationship they imply is robustly established. Thecorrelations presented do not control for other explicit social legislative actions that were aimed atuplifting the socially disadvantaged groups. Nor do they imply causation. Clearly, the interactionsbetween the various social reforms and the economic reforms have not been tested empirically in asophisticated way and more work is needed before firm conclusions can be made.

Overall, the chapters provide an accessible and yet rigorous summary of a complex set ofpolicy issues undertaken in India since 1991. The overarching policy emphasis in this volume hasprimarily been on the supply side, with prescriptions focusing on reforming outdated labor lawsin the country and facilitating land ownership/acquisition to not only attract foreign investmentbut also provide an enabling environment for a more broad-based and sustainable future growth.However, the policy prescriptions that emerge from the chapters, despite sometimes being informedby statistical rigor, do not sufficiently factor in the differential implications of de jure and de factopolicy changes. In a federal structure like India, though decision making can be at the central level,most of the implementation occurs at the state level. To that end, this book moves in the rightdirection by focusing on assessments of economic reforms at this level of geography. But it falls shortof discussing how reforming labor laws on paper would translate into strict enforcement. Whilethe point on labor laws acting as impediments to growth is well taken, reforming them does notnecessarily imply enforcement. Furthermore, going by the evidence produced in this volume, thereis also a significant population of workers in the informal sector who remain outside the ambit offormal labor laws. It will be useful if these issues are addressed in a more nuanced fashion in futurework in this area.

Sasidaran GopalanSchool of Public PolicyGeorge Mason University

Planet of Cities, by Shlomo Angel. 2012. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 341 +xvi. ISBN 978-1-55844-245-0, paper, $40.

In the “century of cities,” our planet is gradually moving toward a “New Urban World”: moreand more people will move toward urban areas, so that these cities become the “new home of hu-mankind” (Kourtit et al., forthcoming). The “New Urban World” is a complex and critical evolutionaryorganism of spatial development. Cities are evolving systems driven by a multiplicity of actors andstakeholders; they have many faces and are not uniform or identical. The management and gover-nance of such modern, complex, and ever-growing urban agglomerations calls for an effective andfocused explanation and comparison of the driving forces of city dynamics, including the impactsof urban attractiveness and the implementation of appropriate urban governance measures fromthe global perspective of long-range “grand challenges” (Zeng and Zhao, 2005). There is a generalawareness that traditional urban planning tools (e.g., simulation models, stakeholder analysis, andconsultation methods) are no longer able to cope with the multiplicity of challenges faced by citiesin an open world.

Shlomo Angel’s recently published book, Planet of Cities, brings these highly important topicstogether in one coherent framework. The study is supported by representative, reliable, and robustempirical evidence on cities around the world, using case studies and attractive colorful illustrationsand nice visualizations of both expansions of the urban footprint and declines in urban density seenin the developing world. It is a well-written book on the importance of past, present, and futureoptimal urban development of 4,000 large cities (those with a population of more than 100,000worldwide). It aims to advance knowledge on urban performance conditions of cities by carrying outa statistical analysis through monitoring and measuring urban dynamics patterns (i.e., populationgrowth and density and urban spatial expansion), their ecological resilience (i.e., flexibility and



adaptation to change in the future), and variations among the cities’ performance worldwide. Bydoing so, Angel provides new insights by analyzing and explaining the global urban world. Thisstudy is instrumental for an understanding of the underlying forces of urban trends in the UnitedStates and Western Europe. Angel also incorporates the importance of different levels of diversityby using new systematic global-scale data covering several centuries, using a benchmark approachbased on the rank-size rule or Zipf’s law.

It is a great challenge to monitor a complex urban management system and to trace whether thedifferent actors involved are still on course. From this viewpoint, the endogenous forces for enhancingthe urban growth potential (viz. the “Containment Paradigm”) and for reducing environmentalthreats and protecting open areas from rapid urban growth (viz. the “Making Room Paradigm”)may shape cities that are vibrant, inclusive, and affordable in a broader global perspective. Thissmart approach becomes a critical complementary vehicle for proactive strategic urban policy andplanning that is better grounded in empirical realities in a global urban environment.

A trip with Shlomo Angel around the world introduces us to cities of different sizes in differentparts of our world and with varying urban expansion performance over time in a search for a smartweb of knowledge and skills in a fast-changing urban world. The data and results help identifyimportant patterns and trends, starting with an illustration of the continuing rise in the share ofthe world population that lives in urban areas. The demographic change in the world populationwill likely be around 1 percent in the next few decades and there will be an increasing geographicimbalance in the spatial dispersion of the world population, with rapid increases in Latin America,Africa, and Asia, but more modest increases and even a stationary population in other parts of theworld (in particular, Europe). Some countries like Japan or France may even show a populationdecline. Growth rates may fluctuate, but our planet will most likely have to accommodate at least 9billion people by the year 2050. Observations show that, worldwide, more and more people move tourban areas, such that, since the year 2008, for the first time in human history more than 50 percentof the world population is living in urban areas. These urbanization rates also show different levels ofdiversity, with a rapid rise in megacities (with more than 10 million inhabitants) and in metropolises(in general, urban agglomerations with more than 1 million inhabitants). Similar developments canbe observed in polynuclear (or polycentric) metropolitan developments, which have a satellite systemof suburban areas, edge cities, and new towns around a central core area.

Planet of Cities clearly demonstrates that urbanization is an irreversible megatrend, withunprecedented research and policy challenges. Issues of place and space will become increasinglyinterwoven, not only in the developed world, but also—and even more so—in developing and emerg-ing economies. The implementation of effective strategies and actions in an urban setting will ensurethat these cities are not only aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, but are also fit and ableto adapt and prosper in a competitive global setting.

The well-crafted and clear-cut design of this book provides a convincing case for a novel view ona set of quantitative assessment instruments to map out the drivers of the performance of cities. Theinformation needed to perform such a comparative benchmark analysis for several cities originatesfrom a long period of collecting new data on cities around the world. Against this backdrop, Angel’sbook encourages the global collaboration of people for the design and management of cities from largescale to district level. Without doubt, its context and content will offer an added value for universitycourses on urban planning. An open-minded trip through Planet of Cities offers new insights on anda complementary approach to a rapidly emerging urban world.

Karima KourtitDepartment of Spatial EconomicsVU University Amsterdam

REFERENCESKourtit, Karima, Peter Nijkamp, and Mark Partridge. Forthcoming. “Challenges of the New Urban World,”

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy.Zeng, Daniel D. and J. Leon Zhao. 2005. “Effective Role Resolution in Workflow Management,” INFORMS Journal

on Computing, 17(3), 374–380.


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The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to SmartGrowth, by James C. O’Connell. 2013. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. 326 + xiii.ISBN 978-0-26201-875-3, $34.95.

Those looking for an up-to-date urban case study on a North American metropolitan area shouldlook no further than James C. O’Connell’s handsome and lavishly illustrated MIT Press book on thegenesis and development of Greater Boston—not the historic core of Faneuil Hall, the FreedomTrail, and Old Ironsides, but the hundreds of municipalities in the Census-defined metropolitanstatistical area. How these often far-flung hamlets and rural estates became ensnared in BostonCity’s expanding mesh, and how historical trends can be analyzed and applied to other cities, formthe skeleton of this historically detailed study.

A planner for the National Park Service, O’Connell pays close attention to environmental andplanning concerns, and his research skills are excellent. For those comfortable seeing the built land-scape as a negotiated outcome of driving forces, the stories contained here highlight characteristicNew England pragmatism. In his preface, O’Connell credits Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia)with a seven-stage typology for American suburban development, which he contrasts with his em-ployer, the National Park Service’s five stages of growth. O’Connell himself uses nine historicaleras, from Traditional Village Centers and Proto-Suburbs (1800–1860) to the Smart Growth Era(1990–2012). Drawing this out allows him to handle the case of Massachusetts mill towns, which ina way are exceptional to metropolitan growth, and also to discuss Boston’s vaunted turnaround inthe 1970s and 1980s, which returned the Hub to its earlier glory and strengthened even more thecity’s relationships with its surrounding region.

O’Connell begins his historical march with a look at Boston’s metropolitan structure prior to1800, when there were no suburbs. Town centers that today are recognized as New England iconsdid not appear until after the American Revolution, and some of today’s urban neighborhoods suchas Brighton, North Cambridge, and Charlestown began as nodes in a primitive agricultural supplychain, with Brighton for instance functioning as the city’s stockyard. Charlestown’s Milk Row metthe city’s dairy needs. “Ribbon villages” along country roads met the growing needs of the city. Thefirst decade of the 19th century saw the growth of turnpikes and canals, both of which made urbanmarkets ever more powerful.

O’Connell’s chapter on Country Retreats recounts the development of the earliest suburbs,Jamaica Plain, Milton, and Brookline, then later “Essex Colony,” which evolved into today’s ChestnutHill neighborhood. North Shore resort towns such as Beverly and Manchester-by-the-Sea developedas a recreational habitat for the extremely well-to-do and their servants in the days before theprogressive income tax. The North Shore itself did not become home to bedroom suburbs until theadvent of the automobile in the 1920s. The following chapter on Railroad Suburbs recounts the rapidspread of train trackage after 1839, when the Boston and Worcester line went as far as West Newton.Investors built rail lines to Providence, Worcester, Lowell, Salem, Fitchburg, and Fall River—all ofwhich are still in use—using a novel public-private partnership, with rail companies given charteredauthority by the state to buy land. Railroad lines quickly began offering “commuted” discounts fordaily travelers (hence the term “commuter”), and land around railroad stations was subdivided intoresidential parcels of one-half to three acre lots. There were no zoning or other land-use regulations,nor any municipal planning to guide this.

Suburbanization’s pace hastened after 1845 with the arrival of a flood of refugees fleeingthe Irish Potato Famine and creating teeming slums near the city’s harbor. Middle-class Yankeesavoided the crowding and later the political domination of the Irish in politics, a process that lastedmany decades. Cambridge underwent a profound transition in the mid 1800s as farmland andthe stockyards at Porter Square (reputedly the origin of the Porterhouse steak) were convertedto subdivisions and urban functions. Restrictive covenants and other efforts to uproot traditionalindustries like tanneries transformed towns like Winchester.

O’Connell’s chapter on Streetcar Suburbs documents a trend beginning after the Civil War,when burgeoning immigrant groups began to spread outward from the urban core. When elec-tric trolleys replaced horse-drawn cars between 1889 and 1920, the service area for accessing thecity expanded dramatically. The period between 1850 and 1920 marked the biggest growth spurt



Boston ever had. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted relocated from New York City toBrookline in 1883 and oversaw the construction of Beacon Street’s wide boulevard, among otherprojects. By 1920, streetcar usage peaked at almost 840 million passenger trips, averaging 217rides per inhabitant. The quality of life in the streetcar suburbs with their famed “triple-deckers”and tight street grids was seen as more habitable away from the smoke and noise of the inner-citytenements.

The Metropolitan Parkway Suburbs, discussed in the following chapter, were conceived as en-circling green spaces connected by parkways, a metropolitan counterpart to the urban EmeraldNecklace. These parkways, designed for carriages, walkers, and bicyclists, eventually became over-run by automobiles. A distinctly metropolitan planning process evolved, which was emulated byother cities. As car registrations soared, the need to escape the city made “country clubs” popular,first for exclusionary WASPs and later other, more middle-class European groups.

In his chapter on Postwar Automobile Suburbs, O’Connell recounts the familiar story of return-ing veterans, federally financed mortgages, and highway construction that dramatically expandedthe amount of developable land in Greater Boston, particularly around Route 128 (Boston’s beltway).Eventually, housing, work, and shopping all moved out of the urban core, prompting a period of de-cline for Boston that lasted into the 1980s. Shopper’s World opened in 1951 in Framingham, givingrise to the strip along Route 9, which produced a number of national franchises, including HowardJohnson’s, Friendly’s, and Ken’s Steakhouse (the last one is still a family-owned company that is thenumber three salad dressing producer in the United States). As Wall Street invested in the retaillandscape and roadways became commercial strips (“Television roads” according to Edward Relph),towns turned to “fiscal zoning” to finance schools and other programs with proceeds from taxationof businesses along retail ribbons.

O’Connell’s chapter on Interstates, Exurbs, and Sprawl documents the rise of Edge Cities,such as Foxborough along Interstate 495, or Boston’s outer beltway, a region that is marked byMcMansions and “category-killing” big box stores in a crescent of development reaching from CapeCod to southern New Hampshire. Following that time period is the Smart Growth Era. In thischapter, O’Connell details the multiple responses to “sprawl” (a term which was attributed tojournalist William Whyte in 1958) at both the state and municipal levels. Here, he credits theformer governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis with effective actions in supporting“Smart Growth” a full decade before the term was widely used. Dukakis allocated state funds forrevitalizing aging urban cores in cities like Lowell, providing parking, street improvements, andadaptive reuse of former mill buildings. But planning challenges remain in the form of conflictingstate and local zoning laws, which lay out minefields of exceptions and cover them with layers ofbureaucracy.

A Postscript on the Coming Era details the Digital Revolution and its effect on the growthof the Boston metropolitan area, with deserved credit going also to the medical technology in-dustry seeded by Mass General Hospital and a host of biotech startups around MIT. A soberingsection on coping with climate change and expensive oil describes such adaptations as buildingmassive barriers to keep storm surges from flooding Boston’s 30 miles of highway and subwaytunnels.

As with much else in this book, the author’s meticulous research and narrative abilitiesshowcase Greater Boston as a laboratory of successful planning interventions. Particularly use-ful are the short sections that end each chapter of the book with suggested locations to visit,an idea suggested by Sam Bass Warner. The Hub’s Metropolis is a well-crafted and engag-ingly written and illustrated case study that could serve as a superb model for similar ef-forts around the country and the world. Kudos to Mr. O’Connell for creating this commendablework.

David RainDepartment of GeographyGeorge Washington University


BOOK REVIEWS 165

Beyond GDP: Measuring Welfare and Assessing Sustainability, by Marc Fleurbaey andDidier Blanchet. 2013. New York: Oxford University Press. 306 + xvi. ISBN 978-0-19976-719-9,$49.95.

This is a treatise on Welfare Economics—a difficult subject with a long and rugged history—but it is really much more than a discourse on happiness. Welfare Economics does not only dealwith individual and social well-being, it also guides the evaluation of public policies and informscost-benefit analysis of projects and programs. The authors, dissatisfied with the overuse of GrossDomestic Product (GDP), widen the scope of their inquiry in pursuit of more information to determinewhether or not a society is following a sensible socioeconomic development course. Additionally, theysearch for other metrics capable of yielding meaningful country comparisons. GDP, being a singlenumber, is found too seductive to users, and the authors argue for complementing it with informationalready available from within the family of national accounts. In their ambitious quest, they openup a fascinating vista of analytical economics, embellishing it with insights from closely relateddisciplines.

For this grand endeavor, Fleurbaey and Blanchet structure their book over six main chaptersentitled successively: “A Wealth of Indicators”; “Measuring Sustainability”; “A Price for Everything?”;“Equivalent Income, or How to Value What Has No Price”; “Is Happiness All that Matters?”; and,finally, “Empowering Capabilities.” These are followed by an un-numbered chapter of “Conclusions,”which would benefit the reader if it were perused first. Preceding these chapters is an “Introduction”quaintly called “The Four Musketeers” (or adjusted GDPs), which include the UNDP’s famed HumanDevelopment Index. This index, while sensibly adding considerations of health and education toincome, is still faulted by the authors for failing to give weights to its components.

Briefly, in chapter 1, Fleurbaey and Blanchet propose that consumption, though central, isinsufficient to indicate well-being without adding investment (for capturing “sustainability”). Con-sumption plus investment then becomes the subject of chapter 2, so we are back to GDP. In chapter3, the authors review arguments for and against using monetary aggregates as social welfare indica-tors, and demonstrate that market prices manifestly fail to reflect preferences. Equivalent Income,a key instrument in the investigation, is elaborated in chapter 4 in terms of “willingness to pay,” andexamined against the views of Rawls (1971) and others with echoes of an underlying Social Contract.This discussion takes the economist reader to the familiar Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare Func-tion. “Contingent valuation,” as revealed by responses to questions about individual preferences, isdiscussed in chapter 5 and confirmed as an unreliable guide to satisfaction. Here, it is suggested thatcontradictory answers may be due to difficulties that researchers face when making ethically validcomparisons of individuals who may have diverse opinions of “the dimensions of life” (p. 203). Last, inchapter 6, Fleurbaey and Blanchet praise Sen’s (1985) capacity-enhancement method, which avoidsthe “narrowness of individual wellbeing,” and is judged to be more objective than direct happinessapproaches. Its potential, however, the authors maintain, will rest on assigning adequate weightsto its ingredients.

The authors doggedly employ their favorite “Equivalent Income” concept, which I believe is avariant of the “Compensation Variation” introduced for demand analysis by Hicks (1952) to offsetthe impact of a price change on real income. The analysis builds upwards from individual choicestoward group preferences expressed by Samuelson-Bergson Social Welfare Functions as amplifiedby later thinkers. Yet, the primacy given to personal choices underestimates the impact of society onthe formation of individual preferences. The economic analysis is generally carried out in terms ofordinal rather than cardinal utility, albeit with an occasional nod to cardinality. As an aside, it maybe surmised that the replacement of cardinal utility by Pareto-inspired ordinal preferences, thoughhailed as great scientific progress for demand theory, has turned out in retrospect to be less effectivefor welfare analysis, which seems to have been better served by the cardinal utility of Marshall,Jevons, Walras, and Bohm-Bawerk. To its credit, the book has an unmistaken whiff of cardinality.

While the Kaldor-Hicks-Scitovsky controversy of the 1930s and 1940s is mentioned, othereconomists are absent, including Ian Little (1950, 1952), who approached Welfare Economics fromphilosophy and offered piercing criticisms of Arrow’s earlier writings. Much more conspicuous is theabsence of Pigou (1932), widely regarded as the founder of Welfare Economics. Pigou conflated GDP



(his Social Dividend) with welfare, claiming that it should constitute the entire body of “EconomicScience.” He favored the maximization of the Social Dividend by using, instead of market prices,Marshall’s Consumer’s Surplus, which sits atop the price paid.

Those familiar with the literature will recognize Beyond GDP as a phrase lifted from theenvironmental literature, which appears to have greatly influenced the authors’ investigation ofwell-being. To environmentalists, GDP overlooks ecological losses, which undermine happiness, andthe authors take these misgivings seriously, faithfully following the environmental trail. Preoccupa-tion with this line of thinking, however, distracts them from considering the substantial literaturethat focuses not on welfare but on correcting the estimation of output. Currently, GDP contains manycapital elements that distort the estimation of Value Added and damage any welfare assessment tobe inferred from income. Specifically, the User Costs of natural resource exploitation are neglected,as revenue is conflated with income so that the GDP of resource-dependent economies is often over-estimated. Particularly affected are some of the poorest nations, whose GDP fails to show whetherthey are genuinely progressing or merely living unsustainably on the sale of their deterioratingnatural capital. Missing this issue seriously weakens the discussion of sustainability, especiallywhen the authors turn from abstraction to application and proffer international comparisons basedtrustingly on uncorrected GDPs.

On the positive side, there are many gems strewn throughout the book, including a superbdiscourse on index numbers, a refutation of egalitarianism as a criterion for social happiness, anda perceptive discussion of the drawbacks of discounting future social welfare which, though foundinappropriate, is still recommended “for practical reasons”—to avoid “nonconvergence of infiniteintegers” (p. 41). Wise obiter dicta abound, for example, that happiness is not the ultimate value nomatter how happiness is defined; feelings are but a poor guide to value; and life satisfaction shouldnot be a source of intrinsic value but rather “the valueless summary of all other things of value”(p. 172). The happiness of others is considered by enquiring what an individual is prepared to forgoso others might benefit.

The authors’ contention that GDP ignores sustainability, however, may be challenged. GDP,being an annual metric, cannot guarantee sustainability: for society, for institutions, for the envi-ronment, or for anything else—it must not be taken as a divining rod for prospecting the future.Sustaining welfare receives concentrated attention, while sustaining the more important output,which enables consumption, and hence well-being, is only very cursorily considered. And, that isexactly where much of the Green Accounting work has been focused.

Summing up, it may be true that, “We have indexes of production: we do not have—it is clearwe cannot have—an index of welfare.” (Hicks, 1975). However, Fleurbaey and Blanchet take us along way toward this elusive welfare index. Whereas the book successfully shows GDP’s weaknessas a welfare guide, it must be stressed that the GDP estimators themselves have never claimedthat role. All told, this work will undoubtedly interest philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists,but above all economists, who are here shown the powers of deductive reasoning, the merits ofscholarly diffidence, and the dictum that economics “is a method rather than a doctrine” (Keynes,1922).

Salah El SerafyIndependent ScholarFormerly at The World BankWashington, D.C.

REFERENCESHicks, John Richard. 1952. Value and Capital, second edition (first edition 1939). Oxford: Clarendon Press

(pp. 40–41).———. 1975. “The Scope and Status of Welfare Economics,” Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 27(3), 307–326.Keynes, John Maynard. Editorial Introduction to the Cambridge Economic Handbook Series (1922–1935).

Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.


BOOK REVIEWS 167

Little, Ian M. D. 1950. A Critique of Welfare Economics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (second edition 1957)pp. 422–432.

———. 1952. “Social Choice and Individual Values,” Journal of Political Economy, 60(5).Pigou, Alfred Cecil. 1932. The Economics of Welfare (fourth edition), London: Macmillan.Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Sen, Amartya K. 1985. Commodities and Capabilities, Amsterdam: North-Holland.


planet of cities, by shlomoangel. 2012. cambridge, ma: lincoln institute of land policy. 341 + xvi....

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