Book Review: Planners in Politics

Eduardo Oliveira writes a book review of Planners in Politics: Do they Make a Difference? for the European Planning Studies journal, providing the following assessment:

The book evidences that planners-acting-as-politicians can effectively shape, for example, housing policies or navigate through the stakes of private groups or opposing parties in order to develop plans or implement projects. 

According to Oliveira, the editors systematically chose their subjects and posed questions that invoked a consistent storyline in examples as varied as mitigating urban inequalities of favelas in Brazil to regional innovation strategies in Portugal to the development of Iowa's City strategic plan.

Each chapter is penned by a planner that transitioned to an executive-level politician, like Jaime Lerner, for example. According to Oliveira, each of the contributors detailed how they achieved change in their communities.