This is the age of the train: certainly in Japan and in Europe; probably, soon, on the East Coast. The urgent question is whether California will catch the train, whether indeed it should catch the train, and if so how. 

Modern high-speed train travel involves trains that achieve sustained high speed - a minimum of 125 mph, a maximum in revenue service so far of 187 mph - between cities that are typically between 100 and 500 miles apart. It all began exactly thirty years ago, when the Japanese opened their Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka. It took nearly another two decades before France followed suit with its TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) over the 270 miles between Paris and Lyon in 1981. But since then, high-speed trains have proliferated.

Major western cities have experienced strong growth in the 1980s and have become poly-nucleated urban areas. In order to solve the problems that growth and decentralization have created or exacerbated-in particular, housing and transportation problems-officials and planners have proposed and sometimes implemented new development policiesandnewformsofmetropolitanplanning. Thisarticle provides an overview of the major issues facing western world cities, presents the pros and cons of alternative courses of action, and proposes a set of guidelines to mitigate the social costs of cu"ent metropolitan growth.

In urban planning conflicts, how do we view the actors? Do we see them as constrained by their class position to play roles already predestined for them? Or do we regard them as free agents, playing parts in an unstructured and unscripted drama in which each piece of the action provides the trigger for the next? Or something in between? Most of the rich contemporary debate in the literature of urban politics, it seems to me, centers on this central question of the degree of freedom allowed both to individual actors, to groupings of these individuals, and to coalitions between these groups.

In this edition of the Berkeley Planning Journal we explore the renewed interest in regions and regional planning. Many writers have commented on, and attempted to theorize, the surprising re-emphasis of the regional within an increasingly global world. It might be convenient to write this off as an assertion of defiant localism in the face of powerful multinational corporations and remote international treaties and organizations. However, for planners concerned about the growth and development of places and people, globalization presents a serious challenge to develop a coherent action agenda at the regional scale. Yet, if the challenge is great, it is not clear that the analytical paradigms and the policy tools of the academy and the profession are adequate.