VISUAL SIMULATION: A USER'S GUIDE FOR ARCHITECTS, ENGINEERS, AND PLANNERS

adjustment is made, the richness of writing styles becomes an advantage. Public Places and Spaces is fascinating to read for anyone interested in the design, planning, and management of the American public realm. Robin Moore in his article "Playgrounds at the Crossroads: Policy and Action Research Needed to Ensure a Viable Future for Public Playgrounds in the United States" draws on his twenty-four years of experience with playground design and research to discuss children’s outdoor play. His Berkeley Environmental Yard, tbunded in 1971, has yet to be surpassed for its natural environmental richness within the usually sterile, traditional public school yard. As a concise source for playground design, his article is outstanding. A six-page bibliography and an eight-page appendix of detailed design recommendations make this article particularly useful as a reference work. Noted environmental psychologist Robert Sommer draws on his eleven-years of experience with farmers’ markets to discuss the market as a community event. It is difficult to question the authority of an author like Sommer, who has co-authored an article on the quality of tomatoes and bell peppers purchased in a farmers’ market. His article especially raises the expectations of the reader that the design implications would be more profound or directive. His perspective is, very naturally, the environmental psychological implications of farmers’ markets. Yet with the ~nore specific design and planning articles written by the designers and planners, readers are left with the desire that they could have the best of all worlds and combine the expertise of the psychologist with the more judgmental or at least directive writing of the designers and planners. In Sommer’s article, only two paragraphs are devoted to the physical design characteristics of the farmers’ market, under the general headings of site and shelter. Perhaps Sommer would maintain that the specific design issues are secondary to the more fundamental issue of products, schedule, vendors, organization, and local traditions. Given the range of professions represented, a critical reader begins to apply the standards of the scientist to the designers and the standards of the designer to the scientists. With the exception of the Stankey article, the articles by the designers and planners have the sort of mix of research findings and the direct connection to specific solutions that seem most helpful to the designoriented reader. Perhaps that is my particular bias, which other readers may not share. Certainly the psychologists and ecologists may have the exact opposite criticism of the design and planning articles. This sort of discussion is the price to be paid in most interdisciplinary fields. For no matter how outward-looking professionals are, they cannot escape the traditions and possible orientations that come from their particular fields. This disciplinary bias is precisely why interdisciplinary collaboration is needed in the environmental design fields. Jack Nasar continues in the great design/social science tradition of the late Donald Appleyard and Kevin Lynch. Nasar, however, attempts a more quantitative approach to empirically study urban aesthetics and presents "evidence of both systematic commonalities and sociodemographic differences in cognitive and evaluative response to attributes of the urban environment" (p. 53). In the thirty years since Lynch wrote the classic urban design book, Image of the City, we have progressed in the science of perception, but not in the application of the perception findings. I am not sure of the larger significance of the finding "that Buffalo suburbanites preferred Tudor and Farm to Modern" (Langdon 1982, quoted in Nasar, p. 47). Whether we believe that these findings are significant depends on our professional orientation towards the American vernacular. Brill believes that not to focus on the vernacular is simply irrelevant design elitism. Sommer has shown in other works that design awareness is a dynamic process and that the Buffalo suburbanite may next year just as easily prefer PostModern Victorian, as the new Toronto suburbanites in Markham did in the mid-1980s. Nasar avoids the debate and simply reports the available perception research findings. Jeff Hayward’s article on urban parks is primarily directed to park managers and summarizes the major trends in urban park design, planning, and management. The short case-study on the Lowell, Massachusetts, urban historical park is a useful summary of the nation’s first urban National Historic Park. Hayward’s article, with its orientation, raises the issue of whether the majority of the authors within this volume are interested in research for research’s sake. Certainly research must be rigorously completed to ensure reliabilty and validity. However, little attempt is made to package the research findings to appeal to practicing designers and planners. More graphic material, both charts and graphs, as well as perspectives and other design images would help in disseminating this useful behavior and environment research to the practitioners who are actively modifying the environment. Designers, planners, and managers of public places and spaces also have the responsibility of staying current with the recent research. Nevertheless, anyone concerned with the future of the American public realm would benefit from reading Public Places and Spaces. Madis Pihlak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Planning, College of Environmental Design, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85281-2005.