10.
1177/0739456X04272763
Reviews REVIEW
䉴 Reviews
Environmental Land Use Planning and Management, by John
Randolph. Washington, DC: Island Press. 2004. 664 pages.
$55.00 (cloth).
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X04272763
Reviewed by Bill Fleming
Associate Professor
Community and Regional Planning Program
School of Architecture and Planning
University of New Mexico
This is the book that environmental and water planners
have been waiting for since the 1969 publication of McHarg’s
Design With Nature, followed in 1978 by Dunne and Leopold’s
Water in Environmental Planning. Randolph has produced a
comprehensive text for the modern environmental planner,
basing his approach on sound science to evaluate human-envi-
ronment interactions and realities of the political boundaries
of planning. A great debt is owed to Aldo Leopold and Ian
McHarg, and the author acknowledges them for their achieve-
ments in environmental ethics and land suitability analysis.
By juxtaposing ecosystem and watershed management,
Randolph integrates biological and physical approaches to
environmental planning. In this book, he demonstrates a
holistic treatment of science and politics by taking a long-term
perspective, he focuses on ecological integrity, and he uses
monitoring and adaptive management for implementation
strategies. The watershed approach recognizes that protecting
a water body requires conservation of its drainage basin. The
Environmental Protection Agency now advocates a watershed
protection approach, which is coupled with collaborative plan-
ning that involves an estimated 3,500 watershed stewardship
groups. Examples from Virginia, where laws allow watershed
improvement districts to tax its members for restoration
projects, illustrate useful institutional models.
The book is organized into two parts: Environmental Land
Use Planning and Environmental Land Use Principles and
Planning Analysis. In general, the division could be described
as theory and methods, although several technical applica-
tions are included in the first section. Part 1 discusses concepts
of environmental planning, collaborative approaches to pub-
lic participation, tools for open space and ecological protec-
tion, and community and regional approaches to smart
growth, green design, government land use regulation, natu-
ral hazard mitigation, and watershed management. Part 2
applies these concepts through geographic information sys-
tems, soil erosion and slope analysis, assessment of stormwater
452
flow and quality, groundwater protection, vegetation and wet-
land evaluation, land capability, carrying capacity, and
environmental impact assessment. The first part could be used
in a course on the foundations of environmental planning,
and the second would be an excellent text for a methods
course, as well as a compendium of applications for the
practitioner.
It is heartening to find so many useful methods for monitor-
ing ecosystem and watershed health in one book and with suffi-
cient detail to make them applicable in the field. For example,
methods for quickly and inexpensively evaluating riparian
health are included, as well as useful applications of the univer-
sal soil-loss equation as a measure of erosion potential. The
concept of a water balance and its applicability to monitoring
nonpoint pollution sources is elegantly explained, with an
application to lake eutrophication. There are clear examples
illustrating relationships between urbanization and impervi-
ous surfaces, with runoff curve numbers showing how flood
peaks and nonpoint sources of contamination are magnified
in urban settings. Randolph cites many examples of watershed
restoration techniques from the Center for Watershed Protec-
tion and Tom Schueler’s work with the Metropolitan
Washington Council of Governments.
Randolph’s approach to integrating science and politics is
exemplified by his treatment of vegetation buffers that are ad-
jacent to stream channels. One chapter poses the query, “What
is the value of property impacted by a 50-foot buffer . . . in a
rural residential zone?” (p. 302). An example explains how this
requires map overlays of streams, parcel values, zoning dis-
tricts, ownership boundaries, and buffer widths. Another
chapter explains the rationale for establishing buffer-zone
widths and provides documentation from technical articles. A
third chapter includes buffer zones in a protocol for assessing
the riparian condition of streams. A method that the Isaak
Walton League developed to evaluate stream health by the sen-
sitivity to pollution of various categories of aquatic insects is a
useful appendix.
Collaborative environmental management is a major
theme and public participation in decision making is ex-
plained clearly, with examples from forestry and water quality–
monitoring projects. Randolph compares and evaluates
strengths and weaknesses of an array of stakeholder participa-
Journal of Planning Education and Research 24:452-465
© 2005 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
Reviews 䉳
tion techniques, from focus groups to electronic networks. He
suggests the growing role of land trusts, conservation ease-
ments, and transfer of development rights as tools for manag-
ing sprawl and instituting smart growth programs. He explains
principles of sustainable design in the Charter for New Urban-
ism (Ahwahnee Principles), and provides examples of urban
revitalization, conservation design for subdivisions, brown-
field redevelopment, and green building programs. Although
the zoning section is not detailed, Randolph describes map
overlay techniques as “perhaps the most useful innovation in
zoning for environmental protection” (p. 154).
Although the last chapter on integration methods for land
analysis briefly mentions economics (along with environment
and community) as a necessary part of a rapid assessment,
there is little discussion of the role of economic analysis. Exam-
ples of cost-benefit analysis in watershed management projects
could be used to show how erosion control and land use plan-
ning to reduce reservoir sedimentation is often cost effective.
An emphasis on examples from the eastern United States does
not limit the usefulness of this book elsewhere in the nation,
but the inclusion of a discussion of rangeland monitoring and
restoration would have been helpful. Randolph presents tech-
niques for stream and riparian management adequately, but
he does not mention innovative methods for restoring mean-
ders and stream sinuosity, as originally developed by Luna
Leopold (Dunn and Leopold, 1978).
Environmental planners have needed a synthesis of techni-
cal applications and collaborative approaches that involves
stakeholder participation at all stages of the planning process.
A particular strength of this text is its emphasis on ecosystem
and watershed management as a unifying geographical theme.
Making small watersheds a convenient and hydrologically
sound unit for analysis is gaining increasing acceptance with
the formation of hundreds of locally based watershed asso-
ciations. Although Randolph only briefly discusses this, moni-
toring watershed health is now accomplished by more than
400,000 local, nonprofessional stakeholders in more than 700
programs.
Starting with the valid premise that “human generations of
the past four decades have recognized that their relationship
with nature is not sustainable,” (p. xxxiii). Randolph applies
McHarg’s ideas and relates them to specific problems, with an
emphasis on land and water. Human ecology and the contribu-
tions of landscape planner Frederick Steiner are underlying
themes. Not only is the book useful for undergraduate and
graduate courses, but it can also serve practitioners who are
working to implement the principles of working with nature to
strengthen the critical link between planning and an ethical
regard for the land.
453
䉴 References
Dunne, T. and L. Leopold. 1978. Water in environmental planning.
San Francisco: Freeman.
McHarg, I. 1969. Design with nature. Garden City, NY: American
Museum of Natural History.
The Birth of City Planning in the United States 1840–1917, by
Jon A. Peterson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. 2003. 431 pages, 117 illus. $59.95 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X05276133
Reviewed by Eugenie L. Birch
Professor and Chair
Department of City and Regional Planning
University of Pennsylvania
Co-Director
Penn Institute for Urban Research
Planning historians here and abroad have been waiting for
Jon A. Peterson’s book for almost three decades, and it was
worth the wait! Peterson, a professor in the Department of His-
tory at Queens College, City University of New York, has pro-
duced a masterpiece, impeccable in its research and brilliant
in its interpretation that explains the rise of the city planning
profession in the United States while placing it in its context of
nineteenth-century American urbanism.
The Birth of City Planning in the United States 1840–1917 is an
important book, certainly one of the most significant works in
city planning produced in a generation. It ranks with Lewis
Hopkins’ Urban Development: The Logic of Making Plans (2001a)
and Alexander Garvin’s The American City: What Works and What
Doesn’t (2002), in providing new insights into planning, in this
case the field’s history. It is, at once, an authoritative reference
for planning history and a basic resource for planning theory.
Guiding Peterson in his distillation of the key features of
modern city planning is his concurrence with Frederick Law
Olmsted Jr.’s observation that planning was (and is) like a
“river . . . composed of a number of streams of varied origin
and character still running side by side without quite losing
their identity” (p. 12). And in fourteen information-packed
and well-written chapters, Peterson reaches back into history
to trace each one. (He employs a fifteenth chapter as an epi-
logue, outlining the course of planning to the present time.)
He relates the contributions of the sanitary reform, landscape
urbanism, civic art, and city beautiful movements. He outlines
the professional careers of the field’s progenitors: Frederick
Law Olmsted, Daniel Burnham, Charles Mulford Robinson,
Benjamin Marsh, and others. He delineates the great precur-