The Berkeley Planning Journal chronicles not only the recent debates in our field, but also the life of our department. In recent years, the Urban Fringe blog has provided a constantly changing picture of the interests and travels of the DCRP community, while the Journal itself continues to provide an annual snapshot of the conversation in planning theory and practice. The former provides a concise but informed tweet or postcard from the ground, and the latter continues to be a consistent letter from home.

Much has been made recently of Los Angeles’s transformation to a transit- friendly city. A speaker at this spring’s Transit & Cities conference at UC Berkeley, hosted by the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, lamented the increasingly prohibitive housing prices in Downtown LA, even as there is demand for commuters to live closer to work and spend less time in their cars. Yet the traditional view of transit riders of “necessity” versus “choice” pits low-income bus riders against more affluent rail riders and raises questions about the much higher cost per rider of rail. What can planning scholars and practitioners do to inform and enlighten the political process around rail and bus development? What are the metrics by which we should evaluate investment in different forms of transit infrastructure before and after it is built? What should be the relationship between equity, cost, and political feasibility? The BPJ editors posed these questions to Professor Martin Wachs of UCLA and Professor Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley after their recent IURD Transit & Cities lecture on Elkind’s 2014 book, Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City (UC Press). The talk focused on the history of rail politics in LA and served as a useful springboard for further discussion in this journal on the role of planners today in promoting equitable mobility in cities.

On October 25, 2013, the Berkeley Planning Journal hosted Professor Manuel Castells in a round-table discussion with doctoral and master’s students from the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Castells is a leading expert worldwide in the social sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1979 to 2003. The Spanish sociologist is a prominent scholar globalization, and information society, and currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California.

The round-table discussion coincided with Professor Castells’s lecture at the College of Environmental Design entitled “Space of Flows and Space of Places in Networked Social Movements” and follows the publication of his most recent book, Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012). Both the lecture and the discussion focused on Castells’s most recent work on new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting across the world, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas of Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. Jake Wegmann served as the discussion moderator.

Planning often prioritizes transportation projects based on quantified costs and benefits to the community. Recognizing decision-making standard, in Bikenomics Elly Blue delivers a pro-bike argument with which planners and bicycle activists might be familiar, but she supports this argument with facts and figures that will make city comptrollers take notice. A Portlandbased
writer and bicycle advocate, Elly Blue backs her claims with research that spans popular blog writing, advocacy organization reports, and academic articles in a way that informs, engages, and entertains. She invites an understanding that individuals, businesses, and cities all benefit from more and safer bicycling in their communities.

Bikenomics is largely organized around common refrains about the impossibility of making bicycling a coequal mode in the US transportation system. In the first few chapters, Blue tackles the high cost of automobiles and car ownership relative to the bicycle. Costs are borne, Blue argues, not only by individuals who must spend a high proportion of their income on transportation, but by all taxpayers who must pay the long-term debt incurred by borrowing to build roads. On the other hand, investment in bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction to build and maintain and, as argued later, bring local economic benefits that a new highway interchange cannot.

The Great Inversion by Alan Ehrenhalt is, at this point, a couple of years old. The book’s outstanding virtue is that it has clearly named and defined what the author maintains is the most important high-level process restructuring metropolitan space across the United States: inversion. As he conceptualizes it, inversion is the reoccupation of metropolitan cores and favorably located inner suburbs by the wealthy, a dramatic reversal from their penchant for decamping to the metropolitan fringe for the better part of a century. Helpfully, inversion, which might be called a process of gentrification at the metropolitan, rather than neighborhood, scale, and one that unfolds in lockstep with a simultaneous devalorization of the exurban fringe, is described in terms of the type rather than the simply the number of people who have swapped their relative locations. This helps us distinguish Boston and Paris, both of which have lost population but gained economic vitality and housing units in the last 100 years, from Detroit and Cleveland, which have lost all three in recent decades.

Over the past decade, local, state, federal, and international entities have stressed the deteriorating state of infrastructure in the United States. While funding has often been named as the culprit, in Infrastructure Planning and Finance: A Smart and Sustainable Guide for Local Practitioners, Elmer and Leigland argue that the current failures in US infrastructure can also be attributed to a lack of coordination at the local, regional, and national scales to ensure that infrastructure investments reflect the dynamic and interconnected nature of today’s society. This textbook provides a historical and current analysis of infrastructure in the United States, clearly identifying the array of challenges and proposing an integrated vision to shift thinking on traditional infrastructure paradigms. Elmer and Leigland look at infrastructure systems, challenges facing them, and potential solutions exclusively from the perspective of the local practitioner, by which the authors mean anyone from a city planner to a director of public works to a mayor. The authors do not assume a baseline understanding of infrastructure planning and finance. Rather, they use an approachable format to provide a basic understanding of policy, regulation, and the range of systems that build the base for infrastructure in the United States.

Bowen Paulle’s Toxic Schools is an often-riveting transatlantic comparative ethnography that focuses on the psychosocial dynamics of high-poverty high schools in New York City and Amsterdam. Paulle, a native New Yorker and US-trained sociologist, is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His work builds not only on sociological theory, but also on public health and epidemiological research. Paulle argues that the heightened levels of violence and stress in highpoverty schools and neighborhoods are toxic to the health, well-being, and life trajectory of both students and teachers. His novel approach to toxicity offers rich material and insights for planning scholars and practitioners who work at the intersection of public health, education, and poverty studies.

Why do some city regions grow and others decline over time, and what are the defining local differences that make it so? Such complex questions are what motivate Michael Storper, one of the most cited economic geographers, in his new book, Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development. This wide-ranging work is hard to pigeonhole into the disciplinary boxes of fields—geography, economic history, and economics—that typically deal with such questions. Indeed, in Keys to the City, Storper is interested in connections between the different disciplinary optics.

The terms “low-carbon” and “zero-carbon” are now frequently bandied about in planning dialogues regarding sustainable neighborhood development. These terms—used in the context of neighborhood design and planning—possess increasing currency given the problem of climate change. In the past, zero-energy goals have been perceived as desirable but lofty and difficult or even impossible for planners and designers to achieve. However, in an era of adaptation to climate change, resilient infrastructure and built form is both warranted and necessary. Harrison Fraker—a pioneer researcher and professor in passive solar, daylighting, and other sustainable design techniques—presents this imperative with striking resolve in his new book. Fraker attempts to raise awareness about the “hidden potential” of sustainable infrastructure through an analysis of several best practice case studies in Europe. Exploring progressive neighborhoods at the forefront of environmental design in Sweden and Germany, the book outlines how planners, architects, and urban designers can design and build zero-carbon neighborhoods. Fraker chooses the four German and Swedish case studies specifically because the energy and performance data were available for the purposes of comparative evaluation. The case studies ultimately indicate that low-carbon communities are no longer a futuristic fantasy, but are now a reality.