International Handbook of Urban Policy, Volume 1

In the book’s introduction, Brian Berry writes about the two competing paradigms that will inspire urban policies in the world for the next decades: the market-oriented versus the rationally planned social–spatial regulation. From this starting point, the following 17 papers offer arguments for and against this. For instance, in Part II (about urban morphology), the first chapter defends urban sprawl as concomitant to the process of agglomeration and specialization produced in metropolitan areas. Sprawl, these authors claim, is a natural, positive outcome; hence, it should not be artificially regulated by any centrally or locally commanded policy since the market is a better distributor of resources in space. Yet the rest of the chapters do not necessarily agree with this perspective, offering instead less radicalized approaches to urban form regulation through the following topics:

· location in economic space and urban restructuring;
· impacts of globalization on the redistribution of economic activities; and
· the effects of globalization in former communist countries now in process of economic liberalization and growth.

Part III deals with social and economic inequalities in urban areas. Being a politically loaded problem, the unequal spatial distribution of wealth is analyzed from several different angles. The first two chapters examine the nature, size and outcomes of the current international migration flows, their changes over the last decades and their implications on local community life at urban scale (the second chapter is more specifically centred in British and Japanese territories). The subsequent four chapters deal with:

· the problems of global migration, observed from a European urban perspective;
· “place” quality of urban space;
· urban terrorism (written from a US perspective, these authors demand more “technical” – and less “political” – responses to the increasing threat of terrorism in cities); and
· crime and urban living in current metropolises. Regarding the chapter on crime, its author argues that although the media usually magnifies urban malaise and violence (which have historically existed in urban agglomerations), it is also true that crime statistics show, especially in many low- and middle-income countries, that it is becoming not only more frequent but also more violent.

Part IV deals with issues of governance related to urban sustainability. The topics range from spatial and organizational integration of urban management, to infrastructure, to environmental management issues. The chapters debate:

· the “smart growth” movement in North America, a wave of new regionalism and metropolitan planning informed by global paradigms of sustainable development, which nevertheless, as these authors conclude, needs to be more flexible in responding to specific regional and local particularities;
· the need to integrate urban planning in regional environmental contexts;
· the way infrastructures not only shape cities but how cities shape infrastructures; and
· urban environmental policies in Europe and Africa, at regional and local levels.

Finally, in Part V, Alan Gilbert is asked to make a sort of prediction about the global process of urbanization to the year 2020. Trying to “avoid science fiction”, he claims first that overgeneralizations and grand theories of the past have done little to predict or explain the major process of urban change we experience today. He recommends more observational–inductive ways of knowledge. From this epistemological standpoint, Gilbert’s forecasts for the near future include the following:

· there shouldn’t be any great environmental urban disasters due to global warming in the forthcoming years;
· although, increasingly, poverty will be an urban phenomenon, over the years, cities have proven superior to rural areas for improving people’s living conditions; moreover, this “urban advantage” should be reinforced by the correct use of tec