Walkable cities Revitalization, vibrancy and sustainable consumption

Engaging pedestrians, space, and services in counterpoint to car culture and downtown declines concerns urbanists worldwide. Balsas (Univ. at Albany, SUNY) approaches these issues by considering a wide range of cities across the Ibero-American world, from the small Portuguese coastal resort of Figueira da Foz to global metropoles like Mexico City, Phoenix, and New York. While the diversity of case studies and themes may excite the reader, the book ultimately fails to develop a systematic perspective to organize such disparate topics, ranging from downtown malls to airport urbanism, homelessness, and solid waste. Instead, the book reads as a congeries of articles of variable depth loosely linked to analyzing city-center retail. It is thus unable to move beyond basic truisms that planned retail is important and involves multiple stakeholders in commerce, consumption, and governance. Moreover, the lack of a strong connecting thread allows for substantial omissions--class rarely appears beyond a discussion of homelessness in Phoenix, nor are issues of race and migration, so intrinsic to many changing center cities, given space. The volume's broad scope also entails that superficial histories and generalizations may undercut potential interest. Summing Up: Optional. General readers. --Gary Wray McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College