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Book Review: The Politics of Place: Contentious Urban Redevelopment in Pittsburgh

agree, adding that it takes financial capital, too. Blaming the planners and liberalism, though, is getting old. The following three essays take up the theme in different ways. Klaus Frey’s essay looks at local network building in Brazilian communities, finding that networks may be simultaneously exclusionary and valuable for survival. William Siembieda examines local communities faced with natural disasters and finds, again, a mixed role for networks, with exclusion a real problem for the most disadvantaged. Xavier de Souza Briggs considers networks in relation to social diversity in cities. He finds that we do not know enough about how to understand and manage diversity but that networks are oversold. Fainstein concludes with a trenchant critique of the usefulness of network analysis, a question to which I will return below. The final subsection of part III, Governance Capacity, Policy Networks, and Territorial Specificities, comprises four chapters plus a commentary by Patsy Healey. Again, I would suggest that her comments be read first. The overall topic of this section is how network thinking can assist in comprehending changing modes of governance, a phenomenon that the authors take as given. Chris Webster and Shin Lee provide an overview of the emergence of privatized collective consumption (in their term, “club based.”) Using the idea of transaction costs as a key explanatory variable, they critique what they call the network-governance paradigm from a conventional economics perspective. Their argument addresses only a portion of the changes in governance that are discussed in this group of chapters, but it is coherent and has no need of network theory at all, though it would seem that changes in network and information-transmission capacity would affect the way in which the model works in the world. Torre Sager and Inger-Anne Ravlum examine changes in governance within a market-hierarchy-network framework, arguing that each provides a different mechanism for coordination of action. They apply the framework to the case of the Norwegian National Transport Plan, focusing especially on issues of cooperation. They find that networks are difficult to form and manage, requiring careful preparation, a point confirmed by Healey in her commentary. The final two chapters, one by Ronald G. H. van Ark and Jurian Edelenbos and one by Enrico Gualini, take the issues further. The former focuses on the question of trust in designing new policy arrangements, and the latter attempts a broad overview of governance in urban and regional research. Healey’s commentary provides a thoughtful closure. What can we make of this set of essays and commentaries? First, despite the valiant efforts of the editors, this is a flawed way in which to address the issue that the book attempts to confront. There are real questions here for planning, and the book does stimulate thought, but I doubt that a reader would come away with a coherent understanding of what the core issues are. If a multiauthor volume were to be the form, I would prefer to have seen an invited set of papers with a clear mandate. This would be a great topic for a small, focused conference. Second, the editors were quite right to lay out a research agenda. While one might argue with their specifics, the book makes clear that there is a great deal to be done. Unfortunately, the problems of doing valid and reproducible empirical research on networks are huge, which accounts, perhaps, for why people fall back on case studies and elaborate systems of categorization. Finally, at the heart of all this is the question of whether the idea of the network/information society is indeed the key to understanding a new and truly profound social change or whether what we are seeing is simply another manifestation of capitalism’s remarkable capacity to change while remaining the same. One thing is evident from this book—the answer that one gives to this question will shape one’s sense of the meaning of the network society for planning.