Shaping Suburbia: How Political Institutions Organize Urban Development.

Paul G. Lewis, Shaping Suburbia: How Political Institutions Organize Urban Development (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 288 pp., $44.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

The past few decades have witnessed a "third wave" (p. 6) of suburbanization--in which service-oriented sectors of the economy have located in office parks and shopping malls in outlying areas--but this development has been ignored by urban political economy theorists who focus only on the central city. In Shaping Suburbia, Lewis proposes to rectify this situation by studying the spatial forms of suburban growth and focusing on how the locational decisions of developers are influenced by political institutions. According to Lewis, regional governmental institutions that centralize land-use planning and that steer development throughout metropolitan areas are necessary if cities are to address effectively various problems in their physical environment, …