Customer Reviews

Shaping Suburbia: How Political Institutions Organize Urban Development (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)

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Paul Lewis has produced a profoundly important work on the role that state legislation, tax laws and public institutions play in producing the variety of TYPES of suburban development patterns seen across the American landscape. The case studies of the Denver and the Portland areas are illuminating and convincing. The study is based on the use of statistical data (which is organized efficiently and presented well for the lay reader), documentary and archival materials and interviews with public officials and private developers in both areas. In addition to its methodological resourcefulness, the book is also very well-written. It is accessible to those impatient with academic jargon and internecine debates among contending schools of politics and economics.

Having lived in the Colorado Front Range for 16 years, I can say with certainty that Lewis' Chapters 4 and 5 remain the ONLY comprehensive treatment of the growth patterns and policies in the Denver metro area. It should be required reading for legislators and civic leaders who grapple with growth and planning issues in Colorado. What's more, the solutions to the problems Denver has endured are apparent to the attentive reader, although their is no 'cookbook' recipe for change.

A timely and impressive piece of scholarship.

Governance institutions matter they really do, but few studies have illustrated the impact of these mechanisms within the realm of land planning. Lewis argues that certain structures will generate certain outcomes, and that we should not be surprised when these outcomes occur. More specifically, Lewis finds that centralized structures will contribute to less sprawl and that more disorganized structures will contribute to higher rates of growth. The lesson for students of governance institutions is that one should attempt to design these structures with the end result in mind. This book is based primarily on case studies, which are great. Be advised that Lewis does not offer a list of variables that one could use in empirical testing. That will be the test of the reader if this will serve as the basis for further research on these bodies. Anyway, this work is a very useful scholarly product and very accessible.

In SHAPING SUBURBIA, Paul Lewis craftily presents the thinking behind the well-known hypothesis that political fragmentation is associated with suburban sprawl. He futhers the thinking by providing a new numerical index of metropolitan political fragmentation and subsequently by testing its usefulness in empirical analysis. He investigates further the effects of political fragmentation by providing to case studies of the effects of state and local political organizational structure and action on local economic development. For the main part, the case studies are interesting and well-written, although more than a cursory knowledge of the specific geopolitical landscapes will help the reader through some of presentation of the more tangled struggles in the two metropolitan areas (Denver and Portland [Oregon]). I found Lewis's Political Fragmentation Index (PFI) particularly intriguing. It measures both the division of local government expenditures within a metropolitan area as well as the total level of local government expenditures per capita across the metropolitan area. Using it he shows that metro areas with high fragmentation (according to his index) tend to lose more than their "fair share" of office jobs, have more of a mismatch between where jobs are and where households reside, and have more "edge cities." He is unable to show that it affects the metropolitan density gradient, however. The statistical approaches that he uses are overly simplistic and the number of metropolitan attributes that he controls for across metropolitan areas is minimal. I am certain that he would agree that he should have controlled for the decision-making efficiency of the internal political structure of the primary central city, as well as the degree to which the metro area in general maintained a laissez-faire political ethos. Nonetheless, he has developed an index that could prove useful in other studies of metropolitan public finance. I am sure that Lewis's PFI will be used, modified, and retested many times during the next decade. Lewis never really touches on how fragmentation can be avoided. He also does not straight out say that it should be avoided. This is surprising in light of the many times he points to failures (public and private) that result from political fragmentation of metropolitan areas. As a result SHAPING SUBURBIA merely illuminates a well-known problem without providing a solution.