Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California.George Harwood Phillips. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. xi + 225 pp., illus. $10.95.

Practitioners and theorists have long searched for a clear definition of the role of planning. The attention to the subject is not surprising since a clear role lends any profession’s sense of identity, integrity, and legitimacy. Wildavsky (1973) criticized the planning profession’s lack of clarity in this regard, implying that the profession was attempting to encompass too much. He suggested that if “planning is everything, maybe it is nothing.” This view exemplifies a debate common to many disciplines over what constitutes core theory and practice.

However, such debates are particularly important for inter-disciplinary professions such as planning. This essay argues that, for the planning profession, infrastructure is the organizational backbone around which basic principles, technical methods, professional norms, and even research are expressed. Interpreting its meaning liberally, infrastructure defines the very nature of planning. In turn, infrastructure requires planning, perhaps now more than ever. This symbiotic relationship between planning and infrastructure is unique and helps provide a clarity and focus that allow the profession to be sufficiently comprehensive without losing its meaning and purpose.

Reviewed for TRANSIT by Mason Allred, University of California, Berkeley

Artificial intelligence (AI) can infer health data from people’s behavior even when their behavior has no apparent connection to their health. AI can monitor one’s location to track the spread of infectious disease, scrutinize retail purchases to identify pregnant customers, and analyze social media to predict who might attempt suicide. These feats are possible because, in modern societies, people continuously interact with internet-enabled software and devices. Smartphones, wearables, and online platforms monitor people’s actions and produce digital traces, the electronic remnants of their behavior.

In their raw form, digital traces might not be very interesting or useful; one’s location, retail purchases, and internet browsing habits are relatively mundane data points. However, AI can enhance the value of digital traces by transforming them into something more useful—emergent medical data (EMD). EMD is health information inferred by artificial intelligence from otherwise trivial digital traces.

This Article describes how EMD-based profiling is increasingly promoted as a solution to public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence, and the opioid crisis. However, there is little evidence to show that EMD-based profiling works. Even worse, it can cause significant harm, and current privacy and data protection laws contain loopholes that allow public and private entities to mine EMD without people’s knowledge or consent.

After describing the risks and benefits of EMD mining and profiling, the Article proposes six different ways of conceptualizing these practices. It concludes with preliminary recommendations for effective regulation. Potential options include banning or restricting the collection of digital traces, regulating EMD mining algorithms, and restricting how EMD can be used once it is produced.

Sustainability is a serious concern for future transportation planning, but it should not be regarded as a straightforward problem with a simple but difficult solution. Achieving sustainability is a contextual and multi- dimensional process. Just as transportation pollutes the environment in a variety of ways and over a long period of time, addressing these pollut- ants requires a long-term, incremental, and multi-dimensional strategy to achieve sustainability. Genuine sustainability will likely take generations to achieve, but such a goal is most likely to be achieved through steady, incremental understanding and improvements in environmental impact. Given that sustainability is a long-term agenda, history is a useful and essential guide.