Abstract
The book Land Use and Society: Geography, Law, and Public Policy, 3rd ed., provides an eminently readable overview of the way in which geography, law, and public policy interact to shape human environments. Written by Rutherford H. Platt, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it is now in its third edition. Previous editions have been found applicable to a variety of fields, including geography, land use, and landscape ecology. For a book that is not about planning (per se), it does an excellent job of providing much of the “domain knowledge” necessary to both study and practice planning. It is recommended for either a lay reader or as an introductory textbook for a variety of fields.
The first section provides a general overview of land use and society and the interaction between geography and law. The second section provides a history of changes in American land use regulation during three periods (pre-1900, 1900–1945, and post-1945). The third section is organized topically, under the general theme of the conflict between property rights and the public interest. The way the chapters are sequenced reflect an excellent structure, beginning with a chapter on property rights, then moving onto local government powers and responsibilities, then to regional issues (such as sprawl, smart growth, and growth management), and finally to federal actions. An intermediary chapter provides the critical legal context for understanding issues at each geographic level.
This book provides an overview of the history of land use and land use regulation in the United States by an interdisciplinary scholar and expert of enormous erudition, thoughtfulness, and curiosity. Many of the images in the book are the author’s own photographs, reflecting a deep sensitivity to the ways in which the nexus between land use and land use regulation manifests in the world around us.
The style of the book very much reflects the author’s background in legal writing. Each chapter starts with an epigraph consisting of a pair of quotes, typically representing opposing viewpoints on an issue. They serve as reasonable abstracts for each chapter, which fully articulates the case for each and then reveals the current balance established between them. The author’s legal experience also provides an understanding of the importance of precedent in the context of legal and political institutions. Cases that establish new precedents (Euclid, Nollan, and Dolan) are rare. Likewise, as the author details in chapter 10, “Congress and the Metropolitan Environment,” the effects of a wide variety of legislation (National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act) enacted during the “Environmental Decade” of the 1970s tipped the balance by limiting private property rights in preference to the public good, resulting in decades of legal tussles on the application and interpretation of those statutes.
Even for the expert, this book has much to offer. The mantra of “Health, Safety, and Welfare” has greater historical depths than most realize. Setbacks and building codes on acceptable materials date from the 1666 Great Fire of London, and infrastructure planning from the sanitary movement’s efforts to prevent disease by providing clean water and sewerage to a dense urban population. Only the creation of special service districts (an innovation of the late nineteenth century) made it possible to offer urban services without municipal status, thus facilitating metropolitan fragmentation.
For a book inevitably winding its way toward being a classic “Introduction to” textbook, the question becomes not whether to buy the book, but rather which edition of the book to buy: when focusing on differences between the revised and third edition, the third edition is much more compact (305 vs. 450 pages), more affordable ($50 vs. $60, new), and more focused. While the revised edition contains twelve chapters, the third edition contains only ten. To achieve this, chapters 3 and 4 have been combined, and chapter 11 (covering regional, state, and federal lands) has been removed or combined with other chapters. In some cases, this creates a strange mélange; for example, zoning shares a chapter with regionalism and smart growth. Additionally, the ten-page long “Conclusion: Status and Prospects” from the revised edition has been omitted in the third edition.
Anyone looking for recent research to read or cite will be disappointed; nor can it act as a desk reference, as the index can be spotty. The book began as class handouts, and both the material and structure (plenty of bullet points) still reflect that. Omitting chapter 9 might have helped the book. A greater discussion on New Urbanism and the role of transportation planning in regionalism would have been appreciated; both get short shift.