Planners, both academic and professional, have good reason to be grateful to Christopher Steins and his collaborators for creating and sustaining Planetizen, the lively and provocative web site devoted to ideas and practice in urban planning. Planetizen's appearance in 2001 was a landmark in moving planning into the internet era, and it continues to be a valuable asset for the field. Now, together with co-i!ditors Abhijeet Chavan and Christian Peralta, Steins has produced a book that provides a sampling of Planetizen's past offerings cast into the form of debates in planning. To pull this off and to review the results are no mean tasks. In 183 pages, the book manages to include essays by no less than 31 authors, in addition to comments by numerous anonymous respondents to the original website postings. Some essays were written specifically for the book, but the majority date from Planetizen postings during the years 2001 to 2006.

The central problem of local economic development, namely, how to guide declining cities toward renewed prosperity, remains stubbornly resistant to resolution, both theoretically and in practice. Despite a long history of theory and empirical research going back to the economic base model of the 1950s, and an even longer history of practice, dating to the 19th century, cities and states in the U.S. are still chasing jobs, industrial plants, and football teams, offering huge subsidies. They are bemused by nostrums, such as the creative class, which promise success, but rarely deliver. On the academic side, much excellent research has been done, for example on industrial clusters, and many books have set out the principal tools for local economic development that planners have employed. Still, success eludes most of the places that really need it.

The total damage to human lives and property caused by deindus- trialization in U.S. and European cities over the past forty years has never been fully assessed. What we know and see is that major cities were devastated by the loss of employment and income that accompanied the movement of manufacturing to offshore locations with lower labor costs. Policy makers and planners in cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh struggled to respond to the crises that they faced, but researchers have tended to be more bemused by new industrial growth, exemplified by Silicon Valley, or by the search for nostrums such as the creative class. Thus, Phoenix Cities comes as a welcome effort to document both the scale of industrial decline and the efforts to alleviate it.