Tom Angotti

Problems and Prospects for Healthy Mixed-use Communities in New York City

In the US there is a growing understanding in business and government of the high private and social costs of modern land-use planning based on the separation of uses. Conventional planning has given rise to suburban sprawl and dependence on the private automobile, which raise energy and labour costs and lower productivity (Bank of America et al., 1995). Sprawled development and single-use community planning contribute to air pollution, loss of natural areas, environmental degradation, and global warming. Auto dependency creates serious public safety hazards, contributes to the large proportion of obese and overweight Americans, and plays a role in stress, depression and the high levels of lung disease and asthma in urban areas (see Kunstler, 1993; Beatley & Manning, 1997; Kay, 1997). Part of the remedy for this new public-health crisis is the creation of mixed-use communities. Today’s public-health crisis is in part the result of measures taken to deal with the public-health crisis of more than a century ago. Epidemics and disease were generated in part by the failure to separate uses in large cities. This led to modern land-use planning and zoning based on the separation of residential, commercial and industrial uses. The separation of uses has been a guiding principle in suburban zoning regulations that encourage low-density sprawled development at the periphery of large cities. Two-thirds of the urban population in the US live in sprawled suburbs where single uses predominate, while the rest live in more densely developed central cities where there are substantial remnants of the older mixed-use districts that preceded zoning. John Reps, in his classic Requiem for Zoning, referred to the planning dogma that has ruled in the US:

Ciudad Guayana From Growth Pole to Metropolis, Central Planning to Participation

Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela is one of the leading examples in the world of a city planned in accordance with the principles of comprehensive rational planning. It was started in the 1960s as a “growth pole” in an isolated part of Venezuela, built around a large steel plant and hydroelectric projects. In the 1990s, the model of planning shifted from centralized to decentralized as a result of the election victories of a radical political party and neoliberal restructuring that weakened central government. The story of this dramatic change contains lessons for planning in the context of the recent wave of expansion in the global economy.

The Political Economy of Oil, Autos, and the Urban Environment in Venezuela

When Venezuelas economy, dependent on oil exports by the state-owned transnational corporation, produces a large surplus which the government uses to invest in urban infrastructure, especially highways. Highway investments and low gasoline prices reinforce auto dependency and contribute to urban congestion, air pollution, and public health problems. Oil and auto dependency benefit the middle and upper strata of the population, which have the highest levels of car ownership. The majority of the urban population do not own vehicles and suffer the worst consequences of environmental contamination.

Urbanization in Latin America

Four theoretical approaches to the analysis of urbanization in Latin America are reviewed namely classical urban sociology dependency structuralism and Marxism. The author suggests that Marxism has the greatest potential as a framework for understanding urban and regional questions. The basic theoretical categories for the analysis of these issues are outlined and problems with the existing literature are detailed. (ANNOTATION)

Fifty Years of Rectification

In the middle of Latin Americas lost decade of the 1980s, Cuba seemed to be doing relatively well. Economic indicators were up, the institutions set up a decade earlier after the first congress of the Cuban Communist party in 1975 were working, and the future of the socialist camp seemed assured (Angotti, 1988). Party members headed to the third congress and listened intently to the report from Fidel that enumerated the accomplishments, problems, and chal lenges for the future. But something happened on the way to the congress: the Cuban Revolution, again. Criticisms cascaded: bureaucracy, waste, machismo, dis crimination against blacks, individualism, corruption, overreliance on mater ial incentives. The mechanisms for central planning that borrowed liberally from the Soviet and East European experiences were under assault, and the central focus was not the institutions themselves but what Fidel later called

Green gentrification: Urban sustainability and the struggle for environmental justice, by Kenneth A. Gould and Tammy L. Lewis

Clark, D. (2003). Urban world/global city (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Grossman, J. R., Keating, A. D., & Reiff, J. L. (Eds.) (2004). The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (1993). Two treatises of government: An essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government. Cambridge, UK: Everyman Press. (Original work published 1669) Perry, D. C., & Villamizar-Duarte, N. (2016). The social contract: A political and economic overview. InM.A. Pagano (Ed.), Remaking the urban social contract: Health, energy, and the environment (pp. 3–32). Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Skidelesky, R. (2015). The essential Keynes. New York, NY: Penguin.

The lofts of Soho: gentrification, art and industry in New York, 1950–1980

labourers. Building dwellings, literal and figurative, was the order of the day. Roberts next turns to the years of the so-called ‘market revolution’ (1815–1840) which were characterized by the rapid commercial and demographic expansion of New York City, as well as a commensurate flourishing of evangelical institutions and reform movements. In addition to the establishment of major evangelical congregations and relief agencies in newly developing parts of the city, this period also witnessed the development of a New York-based evangelical print culture, with new organizations, such as the New-York Tract Society, promulgating bibles and other texts for a Christian audience well outside the boundaries of the city. Evangelical Gotham concludes with the two decades extending from the Panic of 1837 until 1860, when questions over slavery would fragment evangelical Christianity in the US along lines of race and region. In New York, evangelical congregations were also consumed with issues of gender and the ‘perfection’ of Christian women, even as the churches wrestled with more prosaic questions about relocating ‘uptown’, closer to the new Central Park and the leading edge of the city’s development. Roberts his work ends on a note of ambiguity, as now-mature evangelical churches in the city cast their eyes toward a very different urban future, symbolized by the construction of the massive new Roman Catholic cathedral, St. Patrick’s. Evangelical Gotham is not without its flaws. It is not at all obvious how evangelical Christians ‘made’ New York City prior to1860, although Roberts convincingly demonstrates how these churches and other institutions adapted to and shaped the growing metropolis. Moreover, Roberts’ chronological schema is somewhat arbitrary, and his thematic range occasionally sacrifices depth for breadth. Nevertheless, this is a welcome and important book that makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the relationship of religion to US urban history. Although it joins a growing and distinguished list, one hopes that there will be more to come.

Reviews : Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Mexico City Keith Pezzoli Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1998. 437 pages.

ability issues. It could be used as a text for either or both purposes-as a detailed case study and/or background reading for courses in urbanization in Latin America, urban sustainability, and land use and environmental planning. The greatest merit of this substantial volume, however, is the author’s passion and spirit of commitment to his subject and the subjects of his study. Over a period of 10 years, Pezzoli studied Los Belvederes, a group of lowincome settlements, or colonias, that sprouted in the Ajusco ecological reserve, located in the Mexico City metropolitan

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Barry Carr and Steve Ellner (eds.) The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). 256 pp.

Book Review : Reform in the Latin American Revolution: New Directions in the Latin American Left, Marxism, and Radical Thought

16.95. Jorge G. Castafieda Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York: Vintage, 1993). 498 pp.