Book Reviews—What's the Purpose? What's the Use?: A Review of a Management Science Special Issue on “Urban Issues II”

In recent years, professional journals have occasionally issued a number devoted to a specific topic. Given a tendency toward increased specialization and fragmentation of many professional disciplines, this practice is as inevitable as it is understandable. However, it places specific burdens on a reviewer, burdens shared to a lesser extent by the reader, to determine what purposes the special issue serves and to venture some speculations about the principles used to guide the selection of contributions in the issue. There are some general procedural clues.

A special issue could be used to provide an overview, a historical background, or a summing up of some specialized field. Unfortunately, the concept of “urban issues” is so vast and ill-defined that this purpose is probably as inappropriate as it is impossible to fulfill.

Perhaps the issue could be devoted to a thorough presentation of the state of the art in some area or field, which would also provide clues about further, needed developments. But could the state of the art of urban issue analysis be contained within 135 pages of a single journal? At best one might hope that a few selected aspects would be detailed to indicate, even if partly, what the state of one or a few procedures, theories, or techniques might be.