Both Jason Corburn and Nicole Stelle Garnett understand, appreciate, and elucidate the complexity inherent in studying the city. Neither author is content to treat urban problems in isolation, because both realize that issues that might seem at first blush to be discrete items on any city council's agenda—zoning ordinances, policing practices, transit routes, and housing subsidies, just to name a few examples—are inextricably linked, and that changes in one set of guidelines or expectations will necessarily have effects in other areas. Both books carefully document these complexities of cause and (often unintended) effect, drawing on the history of US urban planning and contemporary planning initiatives. Both offer incisive critiques of the planning status quo, and both make compelling arguments—in very different ways—for broadening our understandings of public health and land use policies, their respective areas of attention.

In Toward the Healthy City, Corburn urges urban planners to take an expansive view of planning, so that it encompasses and is accountable for promoting and sustaining public health. Such a view is inherent in the modern planning profession's origins, according to Corburn; the field was founded on nineteenth-century concerns about waste management, infectious disease, and the consequences of concentrated poverty on both physical and moral well-being. It was only with the success of the City Beautiful movement, with its focus on both the aesthetic and scientific rationalization of city building, that urban planning became uncoupled from its social justice agenda. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the author laments, urban planning and public health have developed as distinct, and distinctly unequal, fields, where concerns about design and efficiency have more often than not trumped our need for safe, healthy, and environmentally sound cities (Chapter 2).

The heart of Corburn's book consists of three carefully researched case studies that demonstrate how planning issues might be reconceived utilizing an effective, healthy, urban governance approach. Taken from his extensive fieldwork in San Francisco, these three cases are instances of how traditional planning problems—specifically, housing, zoning, and environmental impact assessment—were recalibrated to include public health and social justice priorities (p. 69). In each case, he traces how various groups and agencies were able to work across traditional boundaries to bring about both procedural and substantive changes in citizens' lives.

While the case studies are rich in detail, one wonders about how exportable these laudable models are to other urban areas, especially struggling ones. Although Corburn assures his readers that San Francisco is an “ideal site” for such investigations because its problems mirror those in many other postindustrial areas (p. 18), this city is hardly typical; rather, it is an international financial center and a perennial tourist destination, and it possesses one of the highest median household incomes of any city in America. It is also, as Corburn only briefly acknowledges, on the cutting edge of many social and environmental justice issues, surely making the political environment there more amenable to the type of transformation he advocates than it might be in many other urban milieus. His argument would have been strengthened, in other words, by spending some time exploring the differences between San Francisco and other contexts, rather than simply asserting their similarities.

Two other, related problems temper my enthusiasm for this otherwise engaging and inspiring book. One is a worry that by expanding the definition of public health to encompass so many aspects of urban planning, Corburn risks rendering the term meaningless, or at least less meaningful. “Healthy urban governance,” in his view, should extend to both the process and content of development decisions, so that such governance can only be considered “healthy” if it considers residential integration, living wage laws, mandatory health insurance, ample green space, child-care provision, and equitable access to essential goods and services (among other goals) as intrinsic to public health efforts (pp. 68–81). While I applaud Corburn's ambitious (re)definition of public health and I would certainly want to live in any community where these principles are taken seriously, it is unclear to me how healthy urban governance is to be distinguished—or if it is to be distinguished—from a progressive urban planning agenda.

This leads me to the second issue. Corburn admits that he spends little time detailing how private developers and what he broadly refers as the “growth machine” impact urban social justice efforts, even as he acknowledges that developers' focus on the city's economic health is the “classic constraint on city politics” (p.65). Given his lack of emphasis, and given the growth machine's dominance in so many urban planning discussions, it is unclear how he expects the sweeping “epistemological and institutional changes” that he recognizes as necessary for a transformation in public health and urban planning practices to occur (p. 199). This does not mean that these changes are unlikely or overly idealistic, but it does suggest that there is work to be done in examining how these changes can take place in concert with—or perhaps in spite of—city officials' often single-minded pursuit of development dollars.

Garnett's Ordering the City takes a decidedly more concentrated approach to the evaluation of contemporary urban planning policy. Like Corburn, Garnett persuasively argues that our conversations about cities and their problems too often fail to recognize the interconnections between various aspects of urban governance. Her focus is the lacuna that exists between land use policies and city policing practices, despite their common project of disorder suppression (or, conversely, order maintenance). Garnett argues that those interested in city life have spent decades engaged in “ordering the city” through these two types of actions, although there is little consensus on precisely what disorder is, and whether it is good or bad for urban areas. Specifically, she explores the disconnect between Jane Jacobs's trenchant critique of midcentury modernism—namely, that it kills neighborhoods through the systematic extraction of disorder—and James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's equally influential “broken windows” hypothesis: that even a small measure of disorder can become a catalyst for crime, blight, and eventual urban decline (p. 50).

One of Garnett's central concerns is the unintentional transfer of power that has occurred in recent decades from city police to city planners as officials have attempted to control urban disorder. She observes how our (often justified) suspicion of police discretion, and the subsequent protections erected to limit that discretion, have in practice led city officials to pursue order-maintenance strategies through zoning policies; this has the effect of giving broad discretion to city planning officials, who are then rarely subject to the same level of scrutiny as a city police force (p. 124). As Garnett argues, current attempts to relocate the disorderly through land use restrictions (for example, by creating homeless campuses and exclusion-zone policies, and by conducting regulatory sweeps) also necessitate “ex ante determination[s] of who the disorderly are and where disorder is most harmful” (p. 103). And our history of aggressive attempts to reorder American cities (most notably midcentury urban renewal efforts) suggests similar consequences when wide-ranging discretion is given to city officials and planning agencies.

Garnett's book is wonderfully written, and the author brings together several disparate literatures in order to tackle her common themes of order and disorder. For example, she thoughtfully discusses the empirical literature, testing both Jacobs's advocacy for mixed-use neighborhoods and Wilson and Kelling's support for immediate order-maintenance activity. The conclusions drawn in the empirical literature are, unsurprisingly, not entirely clear. In many cases, empirical studies refute Jacobs's insights, although Garnett points out that especially in struggling neighborhoods, “some disorder-suppression efforts may conflict with the goal of fostering needed urban vitality” (p. 74). Similarly, while the evidence that order-maintenance efforts reduce actual crime is mixed (p. 25), there is reason to believe that these initiatives (most commonly seen in community policing practices) do reduce the fear of crime, which can impact citizens' efficacy and residential stability (p. 148). Instead of requiring students of urban life to choose between Greenwich Village and Levittown, then, Garnett's work shows that “perceptions of disorder are contextual and political” (p. 74), and that a single prescriptive formula for a city's success is ill-advised.

At times, Garnett downplays the social justice questions inherent in these discussions, in much the same way that Corburn neglects city planners' economic development imperative. For example, in her treatment of postwar order-construction efforts, Garnett is quick to condemn high-rise public housing projects as “abysmal failure[s]” (p. 151) for their inability to provide safe, clean residences integrated into the fabric of the city. While her assessment of the situation is no doubt correct, her criticism of what has come to replace those high-rise buildings is surprisingly muted, given the fact that for all of HOPE VI's success, it has also been accused of providing the means by which public housing authorities can evict and then fail to relocate vulnerable residents.

Garnett's conclusion, which recommends incremental land-use reform and an ethos of humility in responding to urban problems, is impressive in its modesty. We academics, much like city planners, are often tempted to embrace (in Daniel Burnham's words) “grand plans” that promise a one-size-fits-all recommendation to resolve—or at least mediate—the complexities we confront (p. 190). Garnett admirably resists this temptation, arguing instead for us to learn from past urban planning mistakes and to recognize the troubling similarities apparent in any order-construction scheme. Yet Garnett, like Corburn, does not equate an appreciation for complexity with passivity; instead, she suggests concrete ways in which overlapping areas of urban life might be modified to better accommodate the diversity inherent in our cities. For this reason, both Toward the Healthy City and Ordering the City should be of great interest not only to scholars of cities but also to urban planning practitioners.