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(3% of the Greater London owner-occupiers lack a fixed bath etc) persists:
there is nothing on subjective orientations to houses and places, on the
social meaning of housing or, in regard to the interesting questions hinted
at by Pahl (p. 113) on the varying income-generating opportunities offered
by differing areas with different housing stocks (e.g. for permanent or
holiday letting, home working, gentrification etc).
As with earlier historical interest in ‘the urban’, the emphasis on the
‘have-nots’ and unemployed may be morally legitimate though more atten-
tion to processes of de-urbanisation, the outer city and expanding high tech,
greenfield urbanism in growth areas would have suggested more about the
future. Pahl concludes that ‘the local context will have greater salience in
the 1980s’ and suggests that urban sociologists are returning to detailed
ethnographies of local populations. Unless this approach is undertaken with-
in a larger, non-local framework of the world economy and with reference
to other societies, cultures and economies, urban sociology - whether as
humanistic education or as a guide to policy - will atrophy into the narrow
and dismal science it frequently was before 1970.

A.D. KING
Sociology and Environmental Studies
Brunel University, Ux bridge UB8 3PH, Great Britain

URBAN NATURE AND HUMAN DESIGN

The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, Anne Whiston Spirn.
Basic Books, New York, NY, U.S.A. 1984. 334 pp., $ 25.95.

Cities, these most complex of artifacts, can be conceptualized as con-

sisting of many subsystems, Some (spatial, technological, economic) have
been much studed; others (human, energy, natural) much less so.
This book seeks to rectify the ommission regarding natural subsystems.
It considers air, earth, water, life (plants and animals) - and finally the
natural urban ecosystem as a whole, concluding with examples of a dystopia
and utopia. The stress is always on design implications. All this makes the
book innovative and potentially useful. Although many of the topics have
been covered elsewhere (e.g. in this Journal) the systematic treatment of
the full range of natural subsystems in a single place is new and worthwhile;
so is the emphasis on design. There is a great deal of useful material and one
strength is a series of interesting examples/case studies from a number of
countries. In spite of these, however, the book is very US oriented and
shows no sensitivity to cultural differences or issues. This is one of the faults
which, on balance, outweigh the positive issues. A review article could be
written listing the faults and arguing them (with references), but I will only
make some very general comments.
 The material in the book often seems randomly assembled so that the
useful and interesting data is difficult to extract from the necdotal, irrelevant
or trivial. Design suggestions and case studies are often too specific (at the
‘how to’ level) or overgeneralized.
The author is a victim of the Romantic fallacy. In spite of some evidence
to the contrary in the book itself she regards cities of the past as cleaner and
healthier than those of today. In fact, cities today are arguably the cleanest
and healthiest they have ever been. In any case evidence is missing - as for
many other assertions in the book. This is part of the exaggeration and
alarmism characteristic of the more extreme segments of the so-called en-
vironmental movement. It is also typical of that movement, as it is of most
designers, that a set of values and perceptions are assumed and never ex-
amined: what they see as important and desirable is taken as self-evident and
normative. This assumption, clearly wrong, is never examined.
One result is excessive generalization neglecting the variability of per-
ceptions, cognitions, preferences etc. of different groups for which there is
so much evidence. Sweeping generalizations about traditional cities, ‘primi-
tive’ settlements, univeral preference for public squares, water symbolism
or the centrality of streets to people’s lives (among many others) are often
wrong and always grossly oversimplified; much more evidence must be given
to be convincing. The auther cautions (p. 105) against the use of a single
label for something as heterogeneous as urban soils yet ignores the much
greater complexity and heterogeneity of human settlements.
There are major gaps in the coverage and even the bibliography: to men-
tion just one there is no reference to the most thorough urban ecosystem
analysis by S. Boyden et al., The Ecology of a City and its People.
There is no MES (Man-Environment Studies) material, critical to ‘human
design’. Neither are humans included among the city’s living systems, either
as major components, or creators, of the urban ecosystem. The result is that
recommendations, eg streets for trees may be totally wrong for people (e.g.
too wide); buildings which discourage pigeons and starlings may conflict
with human needs for complexity; parks designed for species diversity may
be in conflict with certain latent functions demanding long edges; parks
treated as a ‘forest’ may be at odds with human perceptions, status consid-
erations, definitions of environmental quality of parks, various activities in
parks etc etc. There is thus a constant problem with sub-optimization and
a neglect of the inherent conflicts among requirements, the resolution of
which is the essence of design. The concern for trees is weakened by the now
standard attack on dispersed settlements. This is not only at odds with ex-
pressed preferences for housing types and settlement form. These forms also
typically support more trees and other vegetation than do parks in many
cities! Moreover, the energy use data for dispersed settlements are not clear-
cut; recent data (quoted in D. Brodsly, 1981, pp. 142-146) suggest that
caroriented cities may be more economical in cost, and even more energy
efficient, than those relying on rapid transit. In any case much more serious
analysis is clearly necessary.
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It is assumed throughout that the problem is known and just needs to

be solved. In fact, defining the problem is typically the difficult task; more-
over, from a human point of view ‘the problem’ has multiple perspectives
which need to be analyzed and resolved. The complete lack of linkages to
other approaches to the city is a serious problem. Since ‘human design’ is
an important aspect of the book, at the very least MES must be considered;
the neglect of a potentially fruitful link in the very sophisticated MES
literature on natural landscapes is particularly puzzling. An even more
serious problem, finally, is an implicit and simplistic environmental deter-
minism. Clearly cities will always be designed for human needs. Natural
systems are best seen as providing possibilities, setting limits and constraints.
In order to use natural systems in that way in design, and to integrate
them with insights from work on all the other sub-systems, one requires
thorough, solidly based knowledge and research on the systems which
form the subject matter of this book. While this book may do something to
raise awareness among some it is, unfortunately, not the book which at
first glance it seems to be - or which is needed.

AMOS RAPOPORT
School of Architecture and Urban Planning,
The University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413,
Milwaukee, WI 53201,
U.S.A.

REFERENCES

Boyden, S., Millar, S., Newcombe, K. and O‘Neill, B., 1981. The Ecology of a City and
its People. ANU Press, Canberra, A.C.T.
Brodsley, D., 1981. LA Freeway. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 165 pp.