Book Review: Boone, Christopher G., and Ali Modarres. 2006. City and Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 221 pp. $74.50 and $25.95. Hardcover and Paperback. ISBN: 1-50213-283-9 and 1-59213-284-7

I will boil my suggestions down to three points. The first has to do with the maps and photographs. I have seen these maps many times in the course of my working life in the District; they were in color and relatively easy to read. In black and white they are impossible to understand. I would have redrawn them so that they are legible. To the extent necessary, I would have keyed some of the text directly to the maps to fully understand the geography of some of the facts and issues. In the same manner, the photographs, some of them very bad in the original, should have been enhanced, so that they don’t look like an afterthought of some kind. Second, I would have preferred that the chapter on plans to be on the one hand, simpler to understand and on the other hand, much longer. Much like The Da Vinci Code, there are so many characters with so many different ideas that I just could not keep track, even after I reread the chapter in part three times. I think giving the important ones more space, and eliminating some of the lesser ones, would have helped. I had the same problem with the proposed subway routes and stations maps. I couldn’t read them because they were so small and illegible. Perhaps they should have been diagrammatic instead of being imposed on a street map. I asked myself about the thinking behind the configurations and why there were so different. Finally, I would have liked to understand more clearly how the expansion of the region over time related to the thinking about highways and proposed rail service. Allied to this I would have liked some clue about the land use considerations that were given by the individual jurisdictions that resulted in less intense and diverse land use around the stations. In fact, I think the region chapter should have been longer. The Great Society Subway is one terrific book that belongs on lots of shelves, from planners to historians to rail buffs to politicians. Perhaps the most significant lesson to be gained from this book is that Metro was conceived in a very different time, a time when a U.S. president from hardscrabble Texas cared about cities and fast public transit for all citizens.