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The local industry mix provides the conventional framework within which a city's economic position and prospects are evaluated and its redevelopment is planned. The industrial approach has been complemented here with an occupational-functional approach that measures the comparative advantage—competitive position—of a given urban area along five broad paths of economic development: entrepreneurship, central management, research and development, precision operations, and routine operations. Looking beyond the products a city makes to the roles it plays and the skills it performs shifts the emphasis from the immediate fortunes of a given industry and the direct flow of current income to the long-run power and potential of local resources, especially human resources. This new perspective is also more sensitive to state and local public policy, and illustrations are provided of the ways in which educational and other strategies have been used implicitly and could be planned more explicitly to guide cities through these most difficult years of industrial transition.

The right‐sizing concept in planning practice is a relatively new concept in contrast to previous orientations of planned growth. Right‐sizing recognizes that some shrinking cities will continue to shrink and it would be advantageous for these cities to plan for this shrinkage. One of the key indicators of success of a planned effort, such as right‐sizing, is city fiscal health. This article includes a multiple case analysis of five cities which are shrinking and right‐sizing. The purpose of the cases is to highlight the right‐sizing conception of planning and any possible linkages right‐sizing has with fiscal health.

There is robust literature examining the wide array of public policies and programs cities pursue in order to try to become more sustainable. Whether the focus of such programs is explicitly on improving the bio-physical environment, climate protection and adaptation, energy efficiency, land use regulation, or any of a number of other targets, such programs often carry with them an expectation that the programs will contribute to improve the health of populations. While there is significant attention to asserting that such a relationship exists, or ought to exist, there have been no efforts to explicitly and empirically link city policies to health outcomes. This paper tackles this issue head-on, investigating the extent to which cities in the US that have the most aggressive sustainability initiatives exhibit better health outcomes than cities with less aggressive sustainability initiatives. Using data from the largest cities in the US, this paper presents evidence concerning the strength of this relationship, discusses the foundations for the relationship, and provides a discussion of the implications for urban planning, sustainability policies and for improving the health of populations.

Reviewed in this essay:Han Meyer City and Port: Urban Planning as a Cultural Venture in London, Barcelona, New York, and Rotterdam. Changing Relations between Public Urban Space and Large Scale InfrastructureRichard Marshall (ed.) Waterfronts in Post‐Industrial CitiesRaymond W. Gastil Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront