Using the New York metropolitan region as a model, Princeton
professors Danielson and Doig (both, Politics and Public Affairs)
have assembled a compendium of insights into the consequences of
overgrowth - leaving it up to others to devise practicable
solutions. Strictly on its own terms, the book is not without
flaws. On the plus side, the authors succeed in explaining the
forward progress of a metropolitan region overlaid by 2,191 state,
regional, county, district, and municipal governments. They
effectively argue that the region is well into long-term governance
beyond responsive - or perhaps even responsible - management by
many of its jurisdictions. By use of the case method, they
delineate and explain the diverse public sector agencies,
commissions, departments, and committees inter-relating and
cross-functioning in and about the area's far-too-many politically
untouchable levels of government. On the debit side, the book's
many anecdotes may lead novices to believe that the good and bad
results of this governmental potpourri derive personally from
Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Moses, Austin Tobin, John Lindsay,
William Ronan, and a clutch of New Jersey officials now remembered
mostly there. Individual sections - on the Port Authority's
ill-fated new jetport proposal in the 1960s, the same agency's
writhing and waning in the '70s, Newark's stop-and-go economic
development patterns over two decades - show some hasty
generalizations. The book's overdone tidbits on the Port
Authority's one-man-rule during the later Tobin years and the
succeeding "Wholly Ronan Empire" ignore the uninspiring fact that,
in the opinion of many viewers, the bi-state agency's
accomplishments under its present "regional recovery" program are
largely cosmetic. Spotty, then, and near-useless for remedies (too
many jurisdictions? - just try to get rid of them!); but a prime
resource, nonetheless, for scholars and practitioners in the field.
(Kirkus Reviews)
This volume is the fourth in the Franklin K. Lane series on the
governance of major metropolitan regions. The series is sponsored
by the Institute of Governmental Studies and the Institute of
International Studies, University of California in Berkeley.
Readers of these volumes and other relevant literature will no
doubt agree with the authors of this book that similar patterns are
found in New York, London, Toronto, Stockholm, and indeed in "every
other major metropolitan region in the United States and in other
advanced industrial societies." The presence of such common factors
and trends, although they assume different configurations in
various metropolitan regions, has been demonstrated by the work of
many scholars, including Peter Hall, Brian Berry, Marion Clawson,
Jean Gottmann, Larry Bourne and William Robson, as well as by the
authors of the other Franklin K. Lane books-Donald Foley, Albert
Rose and Thomas Anton. In the present volume Michael Danielson and
Jameson Doig have described and analyzed the cultural, economic,
political and other social forces shaping development in the New
York region. They present a picture of a region singular in its
attractions, problems, geographic scope, magnitude of development,
and complexity of the network of organizations involved in its
governance.
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