There may be no more important political issue today than how we govern land use. Global warming, urban sprawl, water issues, the decline of civic fauna and the displacement of politics, to name only a few examples, are among the vast array of concerns that pivot around land use issues. This real world political issue raises an important question for social and political theory, too: Contemporary development practices, critics claim, contribute to the obliteration of place and the displacement of politics. Those who occupy positions in what scholars call ‘the growth machine’ equate aggressive land use policies with economic growth and even progress. Activists who respond to what they regard as the baleful impact of such development often answer as if the present—or an idealized vision of a near recent past—can be frozen in amber, allowing us to hold on to the values threatened by development.

The Working Environment by Peter F. Cannavò accomplishes an important task for political theorists, citizens, and policy makers engaged in land use politics. Cannavò shows that the warring perspectives of ‘founding’ (the term he uses to describe the development-as-progress view) and ‘preservation’ constitute a false dichotomy. While he admits his sympathy with those who stress the value of preservation over those who endorse founding, his important contribution is that he offers a synthesis of both views in his concept of ‘the working landscape.’ If we reconsider land use as the ongoing progression of place-making and renewal, we can redeem the value of creativity entailed in founding, and the values of democracy, civic engagement, and environmental stewardship entailed in preservation. A crucial virtue of Cannovò's tack is that he points us not only in the direction of what goals land use policies should prioritize, but on what scale such policies should be made (the regional and local) and what procedures should be used to make them (deliberative democratic).

Cannovò shows preservation and founding at work in disputes over the use of land. He offers three case studies to make his argument. These three contentious sites exemplify how both concepts come up, usually in opposition to each other, but also how each forms a rationale for the way land should be managed. The first case involves the management of vast expanses of forest in the Pacific Northwest. The second focuses on the broad issue of urban sprawl. The third, and more particular dispute, takes up the controversy about the redevelopment of the area surrounding the World Trade Center. In each case, overt controversies surrounded how concerted efforts to shape and build these environments broke out. The author claims that sides in each dispute formed around whether geographical terrain should be treated as open to founding (a new location for human administration) or as a special place that people should preserve. The practical results in each case are desultory—not outcomes anyone really would have chosen.

There is a fundamental ambiguity in the dichotomy at the heart of the book, the distinction between founding and preservation. The cases used to illustrate the dichotomy are oddly asymmetrical. The first two refer to controversies that spanned generations. The third deals with an issue of a very short duration. Even according to the text, sprawl is a vastly complex phenomenon composed of a variety of different processes, including changes in global capitalism and the evolution of the nation state. The forest of the Pacific Northwest and the area known as ground zero are self-contained locales, as were the controversies about how they should be managed. These asymmetries, along with a dearth of close theoretical elaboration, make it hard to know how to evaluate the general claim that the foundation/preservation dichotomy plays a role in the whole contemporary process of land use and place-making. Similarly, the evidence brought to bear is uneven. Especially in the first two cases, the actual textual evidence that the concepts founding or preservation is illuminating—either as overarching ideals or as rhetorical framing devices—is thin. The author offers up few specific instances of these words being mobilized. He provides even less close analysis to show how the concepts operate more generally in these cases. These deficiencies limit how convincing this text would be to a skeptic who might argue, for example, that talk about ‘founding’ is mere justification for actions with very powerful material motives. Furthermore, as a matter of theory, it is not clear what the status of the founding/preservation dichotomy is. At times each concept appears to be little more than rhetoric, while at others times the text presents ‘founding’ as a metaphysical commitment similar to that of modernity itself, and ‘preservation’ as ideally linked to the very notion of democracy. And yet it is hard for anyone familiar with practical disputes about development and land use to disagree with Cannovò that these two concepts are used time and time again by advocates of opposing parties. So, while the discussion of preservation and founding may not be sufficient in itself, it serves its purpose by setting up the need for a vision of place-making and land use that transcends the limitations of current debates.

Cannovò's real accomplishment comes in his judicious proposal that we begin to consider land use as the management of ‘working landscapes.’ The working landscape involves the interplay of founding and preservation, as it focuses on the ongoing reshaping of places that structure human activities. Cannovò extends this working landscape idea to the challenge of not only building specific places, but also managing their relationships at a regional level. Here Cannovò synthesizes the ideas of others creatively and makes a strong case that there is a way to transcend the pitched battles that often characterize local and regional land use disputes. The ‘working landscape’ might be characterized as a long-term commitment to building spaces on a human scale that are also environmentally sustainable. Getting it right means recognizing that the work of place-making is never finished. With this in mind, deliberative democratic practices are the most appropriate way of deciding about land use. The book's closing discussion of a policy agenda is more of a sketch than a full agenda, and the good news is that there is more creative work being done on the ground consistent with the regional, participatory place-building approach Cannovò advocates than he acknowledges. Nonetheless, this comment only reinforces the conclusion that The Working Landscape provides an valuable heuristic for understanding an important and long-needed shift in the way we think about acting concertedly on the built environment.