Your City Tomorrow by GUY GREERReview by: Bryn J. HovdeSocial Research, Vol. 15, No. 2 (JUNE 1948), pp. 258-260Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40982214 .

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258 SOCIAL RESEARCH

indication of a positive possibility. What Dr. Fellner calls "sur- production généralisée" needs more study than he gives to it.

The book contains numerous other stimulating attempts at statis- tical verification of significant hypotheses, particularly of the "stag- nationist" and inflexibility varieties, but they are not, for the most part, very convincing. Nevertheless it is interesting to consider such a result as that which indicates that it is impossible to verify his- torically that the propensity to consume declines with increasing total income (which disagrees with the result obtained from budget studies). On the whole, however, the dust jacket's assertion that the book gives an answer to the question, "How far can we go in the attempt to create and to maintain full utilization of resources with- out adopting a comprehensive system of direct controls?" whets the reader's appetite for more than the menu provides.

Colgate University Herbert K. Zassenhaus

GREER, GUY. Your City Tomorrow. New York: Macmillan. 1947. xiii & 210 pp. $2.50.

The problem of urban planning is a perennial producer of confer- ences and books. These have brought their few readers finally to the point where they almost all speak the same language, use the same clichés, and admit the same general difficulties. By and large they are equally fuzzy in their proposals for action. The reason is perhaps that the planners have been so badly starved financially and have been given so little responsibility that they have not yet lost their milk teeth.

People learn by doing things. With the exception of some achieve- ment in the area of transportation, a little in parks and recreation, and some public housing, planners have not had the chance actually to do very much. Hence the wistful rosiness of their language. The most intellectually virile are probably Catherine Bauer and Charles Abrams, both of whom are well grounded in the housing problem, and Robert Moses when he writes what he knows about, namely, superhighways and bridges. In the planning profession there are many good minds, but they need more than anything else to buck up against the hard, concrete problems of realization. They have groped too long in the formless cloud of public indifference.

In this little volume Guy Geer has tried to find and describe the media by which public indifference to planning may be converted into public concern. It is a short, readable book for the layman, a

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BOOK REVIEWS 259

popular presentation of the planning ideal, with suggestions for en- listing public cooperation. The latter draw heavily upon the civic planning ventures in Syracuse and Boston during the war years. Both these efforts have come to the stage of desuetude, as have so many other temporarily promising beginnings. Greer's enthusiastic description of them now leaves the informed reader with a sense of drinking stale water. And yet, it is hard to say that he is wrong in his recommenda- tions. He certainly knows that planning needs public support, that the most expert planning is futile without a public will to realize it, and that the greatest problem is how to arouse that public will. His own contribution is commendable.

Mr. Greer very properly deals at some length with the problem of an adequately empowered local planning authority. The bizarre situa- tion, so common in the United States, that metropolitan areas are fragmentized into a score or more municipal governments of equal status, is clearly recognized as a political-constitutional problem. It may be seriously questioned whether such a mild-mannered compro- mise as an ad hoc federation of municipalities is a more realizable goal than outright consolidation, and whether such a federation would actually suffice. But the problem is described. Similarly, it is doubtful whether Greer's rather synthetic plan for the reorganization of tax- ation and public finance (at all levels of government) is more prac- tical than the far more radical measures that seem to be indicated for larger, and not merely planning, reasons. But Greer's discussion does show clearly that local governments are paralyzed in their planning functions for lack of adequate fiscal power. On these basic issues, how- ever, nothing is gained by halfheartedness and compromise on the part of the planning leadership. Plenty of that will be supplied by the legislators.

Mr. Greer knows very well, as many other planners have been slow to learn, that planning is merely superficial if it fails first of all to be concerned with housing. Our cities will be whited sepulchers if we plan only good transportation, some parks, and some recreation spaces to enable American families to get away from, and for the moment to forget, the drabness of their homes. We know now how to deal with housing at every level of income, even the lowest. The worn-out parts of any city can now be recovered. Public housing has proved that. It is snobbishly fashionable in some quarters to point the finger at public housing for having failed to achieve complete perfection. Mr. Geer takes more notice than necessary of such criticism. Public housing has, of course, not attained absolute perfection. But for the

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26o SOCIAL RESEARCH

lowest income group nobody else has done enough to make any mis- takes. And nobody else has done anything comparable to recover worn-out residential areas.

Rryn T. Hovdf.

ODUM, HOWARD W. The Way of the South. New York: Mac- millan. 1947. 350 pp. $3.

In his latest book Professor udum has set himself a most laudable objective: to give a dynamic portrait of Southern society and culture, such as obviously no single social science discipline can give, by draw- ing into a synthesis the geography, history, economics, sociology, and folklore of the South. Because Professor Odum is a veteran authority on the South, and a pioneer in scientific regional studies of that area, such an undertaking on his part inevitably raises high expectations. Perhaps we are at last to receive from a Southerner of perspective and insight a definitive and unimpeachable interpretation of this much- discussed and, as Southerners insist, much-misunderstood section of our United States, something to supersede the paradoxical pros and contras voiced by partisan sectionalism.

But even in this interesting and informative panorama of Southern history and the penetrating analysis of the South's traditions and mores, no such high expectations are realized. The Way of the South vacillates between sociological realism and romantic sectionalism, between ob- jectively descriptive analysis and partisan apologetics and special plead- ing. At one point (p. 33), the reader may encounter such forthright realism as the following: "It came to pass, therefore, that the cotton economy, which brought the South into a one-crop system - a cash crop in which tobacco later played a part, led it into that colonial economy from which it has not yet freed itself. At the same time the region was weakened in its human and cultural resources, and was neglecting its technological resources in science, invention, and organ- ization, so far as to fall behind the rest of the nation before the Civil War and especially after it." But later, when Professor Odum con- fronts the basic dilemmas of the South's life today, whether found in its racial creeds and practices or in its relationship to the national econ- omy, no comparable realism is forthcoming. Instead he offers as his solution for the South's racial problem the "planned voluntary migra- tion of at least half the South's total Negro population to other regions of the country"- as unrealistic a measure as could be devised, unless we construe it merely as a temporary concession to the South's inveter- ate dual system and its double standard of democracy.

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