Book Reviews 171

efforts, most British research still seems more concerned with the detailed dissection of policies, paying scant attention to the wider workings of land markets and how they are socially, economically and politically constructed.

Michael Harloe University of Essex, UK

PAUL L. KNOX (Editor), The Design Professions and the Built Environment. Croom Helm, London, 1988, 313 pp.

This thoroughly mediocre book comprises a collection of 13 essays of which 12 are drawn from papers given at the third Policy Review Forum held at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (USA) in 1988.

While the theme for the Forum from which the papers are drawn was The Design Professions and the Built Environment, it is acknowledged by Knox that the papers do not purport to address systematically “the issues attached to the question of a post- modern epoch”. However, it is claimed that the papers do reflect the multi-disciplinary breadth of interest in the changing role and condition of the design professions in terms of such factors as: the interaction of social issues with the imperatives of professionalis- ation; the relationship between the media and designers, the geographical distribution of design professionals, conflicts arising from changes within the construction industry, and the relative autonomy of design professionals. Given this diversity, Knox holds that certain themes recur within the book; notably, the “imagery and symbolism” surrounding the built environment and the design professions and questions relating to the autonomy of designers as key factors in the production of built environment.

The essays within the book cover: (1) The design professions and the built environment in a post-modern epoch; (2) Professionalisation and the social goals of architects: a history of the Federation

of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians; (3) Drawing and the social production of architecture; (4) Urban geometry in image and discourse; (5) Issues in architecture: perceptions by the popular and professional press; (6) Where architects work: a change analysis 1970-1980; (7) Myth and paradox in the building enterprise; (8) Knowledge-power and professional practice; (9) Sources of influence in planning practice and their implications for development

negotiations; (10) Professional orientations of French urban planners; (11) Making places: urban design in Britain; (12) Computer modelling for urban design; (13) The future of the metropolis and its urban design, function and form. A glance at the various titles listed above may indicate a central weakness of this book;

this is, its lack of thematic coherence. In this respect, one might refute Knox’s claim that there are recurrent themes within the book or that the essays evolve about any central axes. Some of the essays are relatively lacking in coherence which compounds the reader’s sense of confusion (see for example, Ventre, pp. 147-174). Moreover, some readers may feel that there is little in this book which is original, incisive or rigorously handled. Some of the essays have all the snap, crackle and pop of journalism studded with opportunistic references; for example, to Foucault, deconstruction or post- modernism. We may take as an example Knox’s attempt to summarise recent social transformations in terms of “. , . the entry of the baby-boom generation into housing and labour markets, the changing structure and composition of private households, the development of advanced telecommunications and high-technology industries, the articulation of liberal/ecological values of the middle-class baby-boomer counterculture,

172 Book Reviews

the retrenchment of public expenditure with the rise of the “new right”, and the emergence of distinctive (post-Modern) movements in the arts, literature and design.”

Applied to the “design professions”, and thus presumably to architecture, the term post-modernism has a distinct meaning with respect to the tenets of Modernism coined in the 1920s and 1930s and their revival and transformation in recent years. Thus, the term post-modernism may be appropriately applied to the work of specific architects but cannot be used to cover the full range of recent theoretical positions within architecture. However, Knox would seem to suggest that post-modernism is the only (or predominant) theoretical strain in recent architectural activity. Moreover, as an example of the journalism characteristic of many of the papers in this book, we may note Knox’s suggestion that at the heart of the post-modernist approach lies deconstruction and the “structural transition to advanced capitalism”.

It is difficult to envisage a readership for this book in that those wishing to encounter a rigorous or deeper analysis of many of the topics lightly touched on within the book are likely to look elsewhere.

Patrick Malone University of Manchester, UK

JUDITH BANISTER, China’s Changing Population. Stanford University Press, Stanford (California), 1987, XIII + 448 pp. (bibl. + index).

Despite the abundance of information on China’s population which has become available in the past decade, understanding what is happening still takes a great deal of careful detective work and indirect inference. Given that the Chinese government has pursued one of the most explicit - indeed, ruthless - population policies, the basic data is of more than usual importance. For example, with well over a thousand million people, China’s rulers had hoped for a level population of 1.2 billion by the year 2000, and thereafter, a decline to 700 million by 2050. Despite the rigours of the one-child family policy and despite 20.8 million sterilisations in 1983, they have already missed the target. There may be an extra 84 million people in the year 2000 by current trends. The one- child family policy produced a completed fertility per average Chinese woman in 1985 of 2.1 children, but in 1986, 2.4. And even if the government did succeed in the one-child policy, by 2050 that would have created a situation where some 2/5 of the population (or 300 million) would be over the age of 65, depending, without pensions for the majority, for support on the dwindling workforce. There would be 89 dependents for every 100 workers (no rich country has yet faced the situation where those over 65 have been more than 16%).

Dr Banister has written a quite superb analysis of China’s demography since 1949, an account that will henceforth be the authoritative summing up of the state of the evidence in the mid-1980s. She exercises the utmost care in evaluating the evidence, supplement- ing it with press reports and other sources, always exercising sympathy for the Chinese case, particularly the impressive achievements in preventive medicine, but without concealing either the problems of, or the considerable errors in, public action. She is particularly good in locating the evolution of population and policy in the general political, social and economic history of the country.

The weight of sheer human misery in the record should not be underestimated - from the comparatively modest effects of raising the marriage age to now when, it seems (in at ieast some cases) the menstrual cycles of fertile urban women are monitored to ensure no unpermitted pregnancy takes place. If it does, compulsory abortion seems common, with the possibility of sterilisation if the woman already has a child. The compulsory direction of labour (regardless of family, origin or preference), the expulsion of urban youth from the cities while cheaper rural workers were recruited for urban jobs (but forbidden to