Susan S. Fainstein. The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000. Second edition. Studies in Government and Public Policy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. xv + 310 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7006-1133-1; $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1132-4.
Reviewed by David L. A. Gordon (School of Urban and Regional Planning, Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario)
Published on H-Urban (June, 2002)
During the period when the first edition of Susan Fainstein's acclaimed book was published in 1994, it was perhaps too easy to criticize public-private partnerships for urban redevelopment.[1] Most projects had collapsed during the early 1990s recession, some leaving high profile bankruptcies like Canary Wharf in London or stalled projects like New York's Times Square. It would have been easy to conclude that the policy was as bankrupt as the developers, based on the evidence at hand: missed deadlines, broken promises, vacant lots, empty buildings, insolvent developers. QED. However, Fainstein, a professor of urban studies at Rutgers University, probably surprised some of her radical colleagues by steering away from a general condemnation of public-private partnerships and arguing that they might be appropriate in some circumstances. Given the direction of post-structuralist evaluation of development in the early 1990s, Fainstein's study of New York and London broke new ground in the radical critique of urbanism in capitalist societies.[2] Her more nuanced conclusions held up fairly well after Times Square, Canary Wharf, and other projects rebounded in the boom real estate market of the late 1990s.
Research Method
Three pairs of parallel case studies are the core of the book's research: -- Manhattan's Times Square and London's Kings Cross, as central business district redevelopments -- Brooklyn's Metro Tech and Tower Hamlet's Spitalfields as peripheral centers -- Manhattan's Battery Park City and the London Docklands for "creating a new address."
The case studies are presented in some detail, based upon over 100 off-the-record interviews with developers, planners, politicians, and citizen leaders. Secondary sources such as newspaper articles, planning reports, and academic journal articles supplement the interviews. The comparative case study approach was successfully used in the past in Altshuler's The City Planning Process (1965), Savitch's Post-Industrial Cities (1986), and Frieden & Sagalyn's Downtown Inc. (1989).[3] However, Fainstein relies rather heavily on New York Times and Economist articles for the financial aspects of real estate development. Critical elements of the deals, such as risk-sharing arrangements, are often buried in the details. Financial strategy is best reviewed from primary sources like legal agreements, a bond prospectus, or agency records, as demonstrated in Lynne Sagalyn's deep analysis in Downtown Inc. and Times Square Roulette (2001).[4] Fainstein's text is supplemented by a few basic statistical tables in an appendix, but these are used sparingly. The book's argument rests on solid qualitative research, with the interviews and texts updated in 1999-2000.
Structure and Content
The London and New York case studies are presented in four chapters in the middle of the book. The cases are preceded by five introductory chapters on theory and context and followed by two chapters with conclusions and recommendations. The introduction describes the research methods and provides a general platform of political-economic theory for urban redevelopment. A 1994 appendix surveying theoretical controversies has been incorporated in the first chapter of the second edition, making it more useful as an introductory reading for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in urban politics. The next two chapters discuss real-estate development from the perspective of political economy. "The Development Industry and Urban Redevelopment" situates the London and New York property industry within the context of global cities, drawing upon Sassen and Castells' work.[5] Fainstein describes the general effects of the 1980 boom, the early 1990 bust, and the late 1990s revival in London and New York, focusing mainly on the local office markets.
In the "Markets, Decision-Makers and the Real-Estate Cycle" chapter, she discusses the boom-and-bust cycle, trying to establish why it happened in each city. The 1994 edition went to press at the nadir of the bust, and she was not sure whether this was a permanent structural change in the office market or whether we were just at the low point of the cycle. Fainstein cited counter-arguments that perhaps empty office buildings do no harm (1994:74). Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, the second edition can report that the early 1990s were a rather severe trough and the low-priced vacant space contributed to the recent boom (p. 78). These observations on developer behavior and market cycles are commonplace in real estate development literature, but Fainstein's innovation was to integrate them into the urban critique.[6] The revisions to explain the late 1990s boom have made the chapter a more balanced discussion.
The following pair of chapters provides the political and planning context for the case studies. "Policy and Politics" is a brief history of New York and London urban politics in the last third of the twentieth century. Political fortunes cycle just as strongly as real estate markets, with national political control passing back to Tony Blair's Labour Party in 1997 after eighteen years of Conservative rule, and to the Clinton Administration in Washington after twelve years of the Republican regime. At the local level, Fainstein brings the account up to date with the Giuliani administration in New York and the first tentative steps of the re-established London metropolitan government after its abolition by Thatcher in 1986.
"Economic Development Planning Strategies" describes how the American and British urban planning systems converged on a strategy of public-private partnerships for economic development in the 1980s, despite widely differing starting points. London's Labour boroughs fiercely opposed the initiatives of the national Conservative government in the 1980s, and New York's neighbourhoods often resisted the initiatives of its private developers and public urban redevelopment agencies. However, at the end of the 1990s, Fainstein finds policy diverging again, as Blair's government did not abandon public-private partnerships, but merely continued to expand the social considerations to the process added in John Major's Tory regime. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress provided less urban assistance than the progressives expected, and Giuliani's priorities seemed to lie with law enforcement and away from neighbourhood revitalization. Of course, New York's urban redevelopment agenda changed abruptly again as the second edition of the book was released in September 2001. The City is likely to be even more focused on central business district redevelopment following the destruction of the World Trade Center.
The Case Studies: King's Cross and Times Square
Much of the early descriptive material in the six case studies has remained the same between the two editions, but the author has brought each case up to date to the end of the year 2000. In 1994 Fainstein seemed to judge only Brooklyn's MetroTech as a clear success, with qualified praise for Manhattan's Battery Park City, which was then stalled. New York's Times Square and London's King's Cross, Spitalfields, and Canary Wharf appeared to be failures, if not candidates for a new edition of Peter Hall's Great Planning Disasters.[7]
After six years of growth and with more hindsight, we can see that Battery Park City, Times Square, and Canary Wharf now appear successful on their own terms, and the other two London projects have made substantial progress. The author clearly has some explaining to do, but fortunately her qualified consideration of the benefits and disbenefits of the projects in 1994 left some room for revision. While King's Cross and Times Square seemed stalled in a similar purgatory in 1994, their relative positions were far apart in 2001. Both projects were hotly contested plans to redevelop key sites within the existing Central Business Districts. Their redevelopment agencies both had little to show for over a decade of planning in 1994.
The King's Cross project covered 134 acres of derelict railroad facilities in the central London Borough of Camden. British Rail awarded the contract to a partnership of National Freight (a privatized rail company) and Rosehaugh Stanhope, developers of the successful Broadgate project at Liverpool Street Station. Over five million square feet of offices were proposed for the site, which was expected to become the terminus of the Channel tunnel train. Camden council opposed the scale of the project and bargained for social housing, worker training, and other benefits. The whole project stalled with uncertainty over the Channel tunnel terminus and the early 1990s decline of the London office market. Rosehaugh Stanhope collapsed, and a new King's Cross Partnership emerged with public and private stakeholders. They received government funds for small-scale social housing, training, and service initiatives, while some commercial development and railway terminus are still on hold.
Times Square had an even higher-profile site than King's Cross, but was similarly stalled in 1994. The "Crossroads of the World" was in terrible shape in the 1980s, inundated with pornography shops, adult cinemas, prostitutes, drug dealers, and a serious crime problem. A 1981 plan by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee collapsed despite the deep pockets of the Prudential Insurance Company in the development partnership. The 13-acre project was brought to its knees by a continuous series of lawsuits filed by property owners and a coalition of civic groups concerned with urban-design issues. A new plan appeared to be going nowhere in 1994, with vacant lots and buildings emptied of their tenants following expropriation by the redevelopment agency. The first edition of The City Builders was in press when the key events in Times Square's reversal of fortune occurred in 1993. Fainstein can be forgiven for not noticing the significance of the media giant Bertelsmann's purchase of the vacant new office building at 1540 Broadway in March 1992.[8] Morgan Stanley's August 1993 purchase of 1585 Broadway, which signaled the westward shift of the Midtown financial district, also occurred too late to influence the analysis in the first edition. After all, the 42nd Street Development Partnership collapsed in August 1992, and the situation on the Times Square site appeared to be getting worse. Finally, the City of New York negotiated the agreement for the New Amsterdam Theatre in late 1993, but the lease with Disney was not signed until after the book was published.
The post-1994 renewal Times Square is now almost complete, with all four office towers built or under construction, renovated theatres, lively retail, and a successful Business Improvement District keeping the area clean and safe for the employees, residents, and tourists. Fainstein takes other critics [9] to task for simplistic attacks on Disney and the middle-class crowds that have returned to the Square, arguing that the absolute number of poor and minority visitors may not have declined: "Should we say that a place is less diverse or less democratic because it now attracts the middle class, when previously poor people of color were perceived to dominate? Are visitors better off with real risk than ersatz adventure?" (p. 135)
In the first edition of The City Builders Fainstein concludes that "many viable businesses have been driven out of the area and two large office buildings, which will be extremely difficult to refill, stood empty." (1994: p. 140). In the second edition, she still criticizes the public agencies for tax giveaways, lack of exactions, and bulky buildings (p. 136). She believes that the smaller-scale improvements to the theatres and public spaces hastened the recovery of the office market, but her overall evaluation is rather positive: "A visitor to Times Square encounters vast crowds and sensory overload. If economic expansion, visual excitement and popularity are the criteria for successful redevelopment, then Times Square is a winner" (p.140).
The Sub Centers: Spitalfields and MetroTech
The Spitalfields and Brooklyn case studies reported in chapter 7 of The City Builders did not experience the dramatic changes reported in her other projects during the 1980s. The Spitalfields projects are located just outside the CBD of the City of London in the Borough of Tower Hamlets. The large commercial projects proposed for this impoverished borough have stalled out in 1994, but smaller-scale mixed use redevelopment of a brewery and market has recently helped rejuvenate the Spitalfields Market site and nearby Brick Lane. The Blair government's adjustments to the British urban regeneration programme appear to have empowered development here that is similar to the impact of its policy on King's Cross. Fainstein concludes that, ironically, the crafts market and ethnic restaurants have made the area safe for large-scale investment by changing its image, possibly leading to their future displacement (p. 146). Fainstein's analysis of the MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn has not changed substantially since 1994. She believed that it was a successful initiative of the City of New York, preventing data-processing operations of some Manhattan financial firms from relocating to New Jersey. She praised its developer, Forest City Ratner, for its commitment to the public process and plan, concluding that the project contributed to stabilizing downtown Brooklyn (p. 157).
Creating a New Address: Battery Park City and the London Docklands
The final two cases in The City Builders are probably the two most high-profile redevelopment projects in New York and London during this era. Battery Park City is widely regarded as a triumph of urban design and a model of financial management during the 1980s and 1990s,[10] yet it attracted fierce criticism from the academic left for its symbolism and housing policies.[11] The 92-acre site became too prominent again in September 2001 with the destruction of the adjacent World Trade Center, which damaged adjacent office buildings in Battery Park City.
The 5,200-acre London Docklands was perhaps the largest redevelopment site in the Western world in the 1980s. It was enormously controversial politically and largely condemned in the academic press during the decade.[12] The 1993 bankruptcy of the world's largest office developer, Olympia and York, at Canary Wharf attracted worldwide media attention. The post-1994 recovery of the Docklands in general and especially Canary Wharf has been under-reported in the academic and popular press. Fainstein provides a brief overview of the 1960s origin of the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA), avoiding the temptation to lapse into conspiracy theory over the role of Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller in its inception.[13] The state agency initially attracted the fierce opposition of Mayor John Lindsay and very nearly went bankrupt in the late 1970s New York fiscal crisis. Fainstein correctly identifies the pivotal role of New York Urban Development Corporation chairman Richard Kahan in turning around the project's finances and commissioning an innovative urban design plan by Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut in 1979. However, given the agency's previous conflicts with the local government, the book's political analysis might have been stronger if the author had reviewed the agreements reached between BPCA and the City of New York, where Deputy Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. played a leading role.
Fainstein briefly describes the first-rate public spaces and 14,000 apartments planned for most of the Battery Park City site. However, she devotes most of the case to the World Financial Center, the office complex that turned around the finances of the agency. Canadian developers Olympia and York were little known before they completed this signature complex, although they were already New York's leading office landlord. The company was privately owned by Toronto's Reichmann family, devout Orthodox Jews who hardly fit the typical developer profile with their conservative demeanor and modest lifestyle.[14] Fainstein demonstrates that despite appearances, Paul Reichmann was one of the biggest real-estate risk-takers of the era, gambling his family's fortune in "creating a new address"--a new corporate-headquarters location on abandoned landfill in Lower Manhattan. The strategy worked in New York, but few would have believed it at the time. If the book had been written in 1982, at the end of that market cycle, few authors would have picked the WFC as a winner. In hindsight, it appears likely that the Battery Park City site would be valuable once the glut of office space caused by the opening of the World Trade Center at the beginning of the recession was absorbed.
In 1994 Fainstein concluded that Battery Park City "is a carefully co-ordinated total environment, with substantial financial benefits disseminated to the general population. Its principle private developer went beyond meeting its contractual obligations and provided the public with significant amenities. The authority has also used its funds to make the city more appealing. Nevertheless, except in some of the park planning, it has involved no public participation whatsoever. Its commercial and residential structures are reserved for the wealthiest corporations and families in the United States, although any well-behaved individual can use them on a daily basis. She says: "Within the constraints of New York's political and economic situation, however, it is hard to imagine an alternative strategy for the site that could have resulted in a more desirable outcome or that, in the absence of any development there, commensurate resources would have been mobilized for a more socially beneficial course" (pp. 184-5).
When I first read these words in 1994, I did not understand that this was as close as it gets to a good review of a privately developed project in radical political economy. As a practicing planner and public-redevelopment manager, I was familiar with the litany of praise for the project. Perhaps to protect her left flank in the academy, Fainstein had couched her positive evaluation in careful academic prose and bracketed it with criticism of the authority and observations on its elite residents. I didn't realize that she liked Battery Park City, too. Mea culpa.[15]
Moreover, Fainstein upbraided commentators like Sorkin and Boyer, who attacked Battery Park City's public space as too clean, too safe and inauthentic: "Leftist urban critics like to put down sanitized environments, but gritty is not necessarily preferable to pretty. There are few New Yorkers of any social stratum who do not welcome the occasional opportunity to visit a park open to the sea and unsullied by detritus; Battery Park City satisfies a genuine human need" (p. 184).
Fainstein has updated the case, adding new information about the final construction projects and the BPCA's efforts to support affordable housing over the past decade. The case must have seemed closed in early 2001, but the destruction of the World Trade Center has created an unexpected and unwelcome opportunity to correct Battery Park City's worst urban design flaw--its weak connection to Lower Manhattan across the West Side Highway. We can only hope that the planners will do better the second time around.
The London Docklands and Canary Wharf
It is tempting to conflate the story of Canary Wharf with that of the London Docklands, but even in 1994, the perils of this approach were becoming clear. The 5,200-acre Docklands project was more than an order of magnitude larger than Battery Park City, and Canary Wharf only comprises 82 acres of the site. Fainstein's chapter barely has room to acknowledge the Docklands' new airport and 24,000 additional housing units, ranging in scale from small historic infill to a new town-in-town at Newham. Peter Hall and Michael Hebbert were among the first academic observers to look beyond Canary Wharf battles and notice that the Docklands were not a complete disaster, and some interesting planning and development was underway.[16]
Fainstein concentrates on Canary Wharf, where Paul Reichmann attempted to repeat his Battery Park triumph at over twice the size - almost 12 million square feet, with over five million in the ill-fated first phase. The reasons for failure in London versus success in New York seemed obvious in 1994: demand for office space had collapsed in the recession, there was much competing new space in the City, transportation improvements were stalled or late, British firms would not locate outside of the City, and Canary Wharf was three miles from the CBD, while Battery Park City was across the street from the World Trade Center. The only question seemed to be whether this situation was merely the trough of another market cycle or a structural change in the office market.
Fainstein considered both possibilities and three options for the future (p. 212): -- an empty white elephant -- a secondary back-office center like Croyden -- a government bail-out by relocating civil servants[17] She did not consider the possibility that the Canary Wharf project might simply be stalled and would be completed as a major office headquarters according to the original plan. However, Fainstein, swam against the tide of academic criticism in 1994, endorsing Canary Wharf as a business center in underutilized land that required greater governmental commitment to infrastructure. She proposed that in return for this support, the government should receive ground rent similar to Battery Park City. (p. 249). The reviewer in the leading British planning journal was astonished that she had anything good to say about the project.[18]
Fainstein has re-written the outcome and her conclusions on the case. She describes the unforeseen re-purchase of the project by a consortium led by Paul Reichmann and its remarkable turnaround. Once again, events in the boom have run ahead of the publishing cycle, and the last elements of the project went into construction in 2002.[19] Fainstein now concludes that "Canary Wharf can now be seen as the total success in relocation to the goal of reviving the economy of the Isle of Dogs, even if the path toward its triumph was less direct and more time-consuming that had been foreseen." (p. 191). She also re-wrote her conclusions about the rest of the Docklands, reflecting the positive evaluations of the residents and the Blair government. This replaces her earlier summary that "the whole Docklands experience exposes the fatal weakness of relying heavily on property development to stimulate regeneration..." (1994:213).
Fainstein's Conclusions
The final two chapters of the book evaluate the nature of real estate development and make suggestions for future urban policy. "Real-Estate Development: Why it is Special and What is its Impact?" examines the development industry, starting from the Marxist critique of economic structure. She gently lets the air out of a few post-structuralist balloons about diversity, authenticity, and democracy (pp. 202-213; 224-236): it is not offensive to value safety, since it is a legitimate human need; it is acceptable to prefer a clean public place to a dirty one; authenticity is a relative term in urban design, since most architecture in the past few centuries is a reworked form of a previous style; and a true commitment to diversity should not be offended when middle-class people also use public space, since the vast majority of Americans are middle-class.
Fainstein's final chapter, "Development Policy for the Inner City," starts from the premise that while redistribution and affordable housing are important goals, socialist urban redevelopment programs must also encourage economic growth to have mass appeal in the USA and UK. While acknowledging the post-structuralist criticisms, she demands that a better alternative must be available before redevelopment projects are rejected. For example, she concludes that business sub-centers like MetroTech and Canary Wharf are less environmentally and socially destructive then intensifying development within already crowed central business districts.
Fainstein suggests that public-private partnerships are inevitable where giant multi-national service corporations dominate economic transactions. Rather than rejecting them on moral grounds, she recommends improving public-private partnerships for better social results. She recommends seeking the participation of smaller firms and admires the changes made in the British Single Regeneration Budgets (pp. 224-5). Unfortunately, this is perhaps the weakest portion of the book, for although the new edition has a brief reference to Amsterdam, the author has few proposals for specific improvements that could improve practice. Political economists can help improve planning and urban redevelopment policy with case studies of projects that are successful at encouraging public participation and affordable housing. For example, the public administration literature on development authorities has suggestions on how they might be made more politically and financially accountable.[20] Other authors have examined how the urban redevelopment process has created affordable housing.[21]
What Has Changed Between the Editions?
A second edition of a book of this type often consists of an extra chapter tacked onto the end, bringing us up to date on the changes in the past decade. Fainstein has instead made extensive revisions to the six case studies in the central chapters and minor changes to her theoretical introduction. The conclusions have hardly been amended, which is remarkable, considering the reversals in fortune in two of the cases and improvements in two others. The author can still justify her conclusions because the original discussion was reasonably balanced. While she appeared to be leaning to the left in 1994 in some cases, she acknowledged other possible outcomes that were subsequently confirmed. However, static conclusions after such considerable changes in key cases makes the case-study method seem a bit suspect.
The revised text reads a little more smoothly, after editing the passive voice and extensively updating the bibliography. Some stock pictures have been replaced with the author's own photographs. It is a pity that the cases are not more fully illustrated, especially when urban design issues are important, such as the rejection of the Philip Johnson plan for Times Square. The lower quality of reproduction of the maps and photos in the current edition also reduces the book's suitability for urban design and planning courses.
The Reviewer's View
Beware of jumping to early conclusions when reviewing major urban-redevelopment projects. Five to ten years is an average time for start-up planning, and some relatively small projects like Battery Park City (92 acres) may take three decades to complete. It is perfectly possible for a project that has been underway for fifteen years to be stalled out with no private buildings, if a real estate recession hits at the wrong time.[22] Susan Fainstein adjusted to the problem with both editions of The City Builders, but others did not, and their work quickly became obsolete.
Any academic or professional library that holds the 1994 version should purchase the 2001 edition, since the revisions are substantial. Course reading lists should certainly be updated to the new edition. The 2001 book should continue to have a good market as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, since the new publisher offers a paperback edition that is actually cheaper than the 1994 edition. It should continue to find most use in urban politics and urban studies courses. The City Builders may have a lesser market in urban planning and design, because of its focus on explanation and critique rather than future action. Finally, some New York and London researchers may want the new edition for their personal libraries, to track the changes in the cases, but since the conclusions are largely unchanged, other academics who own the original may find a second copy unnecessary.
The cover illustration of the first edition of the book was Davringhausen's Der Schieber ("The Profiteer"), portraying a fat white businessman relaxing in his penthouse office with port and cigars, surrounded by modern commercial buildings. The ugly face of capitalism was replaced on the cover of the 2001 edition with a model photograph of MetroTech, the downtown Brooklyn public-private partnership that the author considers a success. We shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but it is hard not to observe the improvements to Fainstein's book in this switch. The second edition of The City Builders has become a much stronger book by explaining and acknowledging the changes in the case studies and analysis that occurred in the past decade.
Notes
[1]. Susan S. Fainstein. The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994. xiii + 298 pp. 16 figures, 11 tables, notes, bibliography, and index.
[2]. Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Post-Modernity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Thornley, A. 1991. Urban Planning Under Thatcherism: A Challenge of the Market, London: Routledge; Sorkin, M. (ed.). Variations on a Theme Park, New York: Hill and Wang; Boyer, M. C. 1994. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
[3]. Altshuler, A. A. 1965. The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; Savitch, H. V. 1988. Post-Industrial Cities: Politics and Planning in New York, London and Paris, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; Frieden, B. J. and L. B. Sagalyn. 1989. Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
[4]. Sagalyn, L. 2001. Times Square Roulette Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
[5]. Sassen, S. 1991. The Global City, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City, Oxford: Blackwell.
[6]. Weiss, M. A. 1991. "The Politics of Real Estate Cycles," Business and Economic History, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 127-135; Miles, M. E., R. L. Haney, and G. Berens. 1996. Real Estate Development: Principles and Practice, Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, chap. 9.
[7]. Hall, P. G. 1980. Great Planning Disasters, Berkeley: University of California Press.
[8]. Adler, J. 1993. High Rise: How 1000 Men and Women Worked Around the Clock for Five Years and Lost $200 Million Building a Skyscraper, New York: Harper Collins. It is odd that this best-selling book is not included in the extensive bibliography of either edition of The City Builders.
[9]. Reichel, A. 1999. Reconstructing Times Square, Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas; Berman, M. 1997. "Signs of the Times," Dissent, vol. 44, no. 4 (Fall), pp. 76-83; Sorkin 1992, op. cit.
[10]. Garvin, A. 1996. The American City: What Works, What Doesn't, New York: McGraw Hill; Gill, B. 1990. "The Sky Line: Battery Park City," The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 1990, pp. 69-78; Goldberger, P. 1986. "Battery Park City is a Triumph of Urban Design" The New York Times, August 31, 1986, Sect. I, p. 1.; Time. 1990. "Best Of The Decade," June 1, 1990, pp. 102-103.
[11]. Boyer 1994, op. cit.; Sorkin 1992, op. cit.; Deutsche, R. 1991. "Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City," in D. Ghirardo, Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, Seattle: Bay Press; Russell, F. P. 1992. "Battery Park City: An American Dream of Urbanism," in B. Lightener (ed.), Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Design Review, Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati Center for Urban Design; Schuman, T. and E. Sclar. 1996. "The Impact of Ideology on American Town Planning: From Garden City to Battery Park City," in M. C. Sies and C. Silver, Planning the Twentieth Century American City, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 428-448.
[12]. There is considerable critical literature on the Docklands. See Brownill, S. 1990. Developing London's Docklands: Another Great Planning Disaster?, London: Paul Chapman Publishing; Thornley 1991, op. cit.; Docklands Consultative Committee. 1992. All That Glitters Is Not Gold: A Critical Assessment of Canary Wharf, London: DCC, May 1992.
[13]. Fitch, R. 1993. The Assassination of New York, New York: Verso.
[14]. Bianco, Anthony. 1997. The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of Olympia & York, New York: Random House; Foster, P. 1993. Towers of Debt: The Rise and Fall of the Reichmanns, Toronto: Key Porter Books; Stewart, Walter. 1993. Too Big to Fail: Olympia & York: The Story behind the Headlines, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
[15]. I will mimic one of the charming aspects of the book, where Fainstein discusses her personal motivations in the endnotes. I studied Battery Park City after a Toronto waterfront project I helped develop fell apart politically in the late 1980s. My conclusions were that the post-1979 Battery Park City Authority was the best-managed redevelopment authority of the five that I studied, with many practical political, financial and urban-design lessons for professional planners. See Gordon, D. L. A. 1993. "Architecture: How Not to Build a City: Implementation at Battery Park City," Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 26, pp. 35-54; 1996. "Planning, Design & Managing Change in Urban Waterfront Redevelopment," Town Planning Review, vol. 67, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 261-290; 1997.Battery Park City: Politics and Planning on the New York Waterfront, New York: Routledge; 1998. "Canary Wharf & Battery Park City: Implementation Lessons for the New Millennium," Rising East, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 160-188.
[16]. Hall, P. 1988. Cities of Tomorrow, London: Basil Blackwell; Hebbert, M. 1992. "One 'Planning Disaster' After Another: London Docklands 1970-1992," The London Journal, vol. 17, no. 2 (Fall 1992), pp. 115-134.
[17]. Incidentally, this is how Nelson Rockefeller bailed out his brother's initiative, the World Trade Center, in the 1970s. The State of New York leased almost half of the space at very favourable rates. See Darton, Eric. 1999. Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center, New York: Basic Books, p. 204.
[18]. Colenutt, R. "The City Builders," Town Planning Review, vol. 67, no. 1 (January, 1996), pp. 123-124.
[19]. Gordon, D. 2002. "The Fall and Rise of Canary Wharf," Wharton Real Estate Review, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 75-85. It is hard to keep up with development events on an academic publishing cycle. An earlier version of this paper, published in Planning Theory and Practice in September 2001 was out of date by the end of the year because the developer leased the last of the buildings and rushed them into construction despite the destruction of the World Trade Center.
[20]. Mitchell, J. (ed.). 1992. Public Authorities and Public Policy: The Business of Government, New York: Praeger.; Axelrod, D. 1992. Shadow Government: The Hidden World of Public Authorities and How They Control $1 Trillion of Your Money, New York: John Wiley; Walsh, A. H. 1990. "Public Authorities and the Shape of Decision Making," in Bellush & Netzer, Urban Politics New York Style, New York: Sharpe; Walsh, A. H. 1980. The Public's Business: The Politics and Practices of Government Corporations, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Gordon, D. 1997. "Managing The Changing Political Environment In Urban Waterfront Redevelopment," Urban Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (January, 1997), pp. 61-83.
[21]. For Boston, see Drier, P. & B. Ehrlich. 1991. "Downtown Development and Urban Reform: The Politics of Boston's Linkage Policy" in Urban Affairs Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3 (March, 1991), pp. 354-375; Drier, P. & W. D. Keating. 1990. "The Limits of Localism: Progressive Housing Policies in Boston, 1984-89," in Urban Affairs Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2 (December, 1990), pp. 191-216. Also, Montgomery County, Md. has an inclusionary zoning policy for suburban development that has been effective.
[22]. Gordon, D. 1997. "Financing Urban Waterfront Redevelopment," Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 63, no. 2 (Spring), pp. 244-265.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-urban.
Citation:
David L. A. Gordon. Review of Fainstein, Susan S., The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000.
H-Urban, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6384
Copyright © 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.