The Evangelistic Bureaucrat: A Study of a Planning Exercise in Newcastle upon Tyne

Patterns of urban living

Land Use: An Introduction to Proprietary Land Use Analysis

IN THE FIRST ROUND TABLE WHICH DEALS WITH ROAD FREIGHT TRANSPORT, THE AUTHOR DESCRIBES THE RELATION BETWEEN TRANSPORT AND THE REST OF THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM AND GIVES SOME ROAD TRANSPORT CHARACTERISTICS. TRANSPORT POLICIES ARE CONSIDERED FROM AN ECONOMIC POINT OF VIEW, AND THE ARGUMENTS PUT FORWARD IN FAVOUR OF A SPECIFIC INTERVENTION BY THE STATE IN ROAD TRANSPORT ARE EXAMINED. THE SECOND ROUND TABLE IS DEVOTED TO THE INTERNAL NAVIGATION FLEET. DATA ARE GIVEN FOR THE CALCULATION OF THE CAPACITY OF THE FLEET TOGETHER WITH THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF RIVER TRANSPORT. ATTENTION IS DRAWN TO THE FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DISEQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE CAPACITY AVAILABLE AND THE DEMAND OF RIVER TRANSPORT. THE NEED FOR CONTROLLING THE CAPACITY OF RIVER TRANSPORT IS STRESSED.

Economic criteria for determining the capacity a) of goods transport by road, b) of the fleet of inland waterways with a view to obtaining an optimum balance between supply and demand

The term 'new town' must surely be one of the most loosely used labels in the terminology of planning. What exactly does it mean, what is implied in terms of content and function, and what are the typical circumstances which have led to the widespread adoption of 'new towns' as planning measures? Professor Merlin's book sets out to answer these important questions in the context of nine very varied countries (UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, France, USA, Poland, and Hungary) and for this reason alone the book seems assured of a wide and interested audience. Beyond this general readership, however, more specialized interest is likely to focus around two particular themes—urban design and its details, and the tools, mechanisms, and agencies of the planning process itself as it operates at what Hall (1970) has called regional/national and regional/local levels. For both these interests the book provides welcome detail, which is arranged under broadly consistent themes (design policy, building mechanism, housing, administration, finances, employment, population, social life, and so on) in the case of town construction and content and which is presented as a brief summary of the official planning structure and regional planning 'history' so far as the planning process is concerned. Neither of these subjects is particularly easy to present. The first can too easily become a catalogue whilst the complexities of the latter are difficult enough to deal with in one's own language, let alone somebody else's, and it must be admitted that the book does not always escape the first of these pitfalls and is often rather overwhelmed by the second. On the designdetail side, comprehension is not helped by half-a-dozen town plans devoid of any key, or more fundamentally, the almost total absence of local maps naming the features described and illustrating their relationship to each other. If the reader's knowledge of suburban Stockholm or Upper Silesia is somewhat vague, or nonexistent, he will get little help from this book, and the many new place names will remain only dimly associated with real places and situations. The more widespread difficulties encountered with the description of the planning process seem to arise partly from an attempt to deal too briefly with very complex situations, and partly in the translation from the original French text, for there are many passages which make difficult reading and some whose true meaning is quite obscure. In this manner, intriguing and important ideas such as the existence around Paris at one stage of a 'carcan' (though not translated, this means 'iron collar', was it a sort of urban fence?) are touched upon but not elaborated, and in the section on Britain, where the reviewer can judge more freely, one is often left with a feeling of a somewhat misplaced emphasis in the description of the new town and expanded town situation. Even so this is a very difficult problem to tackle and the reader's sympathies are likely to be with Merlin in his pioneering attempt to present a rare comprehensive picture. After reading the book one scarcely knows whether to be appalled or reassured that in none of the countries described does this type of planning appear to be free from the confusion of plan, new plan, strategy, revised strategy, false starts, and fresh starts which are not unknown here—and Britain's record as described in the book emerges as well as any. Difficulties or not, there is much salutory reading here for 'regional planners'.

Reviews: New Towns, Land Use, Instructional Planning Systems—A Gaming Simulation Approach to Urban Problems, a Theoretical Approach to Rural Land-Use Patterns, Perspectives on Resource Management, Industrial Location: An Economic Geographical Analysis, a Systems View of Planning

C. D. Foster

Papers

Reviews: New Towns, Land Use, Instructional Planning Systems—A Gaming Simulation Approach to Urban Problems, a Theoretical Approach to Rural Land-Use Patterns, Perspectives on Resource Management, Industrial Location: An Economic Geographical Analysis, a Systems View of Planning