Blue-Green Province: The Environment and the Political Economy of Ontario

 

This book has beautiful clear maps and charts, and is an under-discovered gift to the people of Ontario. Whoever decided to create a free download option for avid readers has done a great service, and I can only hope that as many Ontarians as possible are reading this volume. Blue-Green Province is a go-to read-and-reread reference book, and not a book intended to be absorbed by skimming through once. The author is a meticulous scholar, and has an understated nonpartisan style while placing successive Ontario governments under a brilliant environmental lens. 

Winfield addresses his potentially vast topic with scrupulous diligence and his professional approach includes extensive and specific notes to important events that would have otherwise been lost in the archives of government data. His authority is indisputably the product of an exacting writer devoted to the merits of his work. Blue-Green Province as a history book divides its sections into a intriguing and entirely readable study of Ontario government eras. Turning point moments in Ontario's environmental policies are described by Winfield  in a compelling and coherent way. Environmental scaffolds in place today are suddenly made stark for the readers as the efforts of years of laborious process on the part of environmental advocates who have fought for decades, and fought in decades past to create accountability in this province. 

The preface reminds us of Ontario's record of great environmental achievements as well as several historic calamities, transporting us as far back as the 19th century which marked some of the beginnings of action on the part of policing the environment (Winfield, xiiv). Winfield also goes back to the forties and even thirties and references the governments of Frost, Robarts and Davies, and successfully creates needed continuum regarding the history of Ontario in the process (Winfield, page 6).

The book, as an environmentalist history, but rather than being structured around time periods, it is structured around specific government eras in Ontario. The effect of this approach allows readers to slowly build upon their Ontario environmental issue literacy, and use it to contrast the management and policy decisions of Ontario today. This creates for readers a sense of the urgency in past times, when Ontario’s environmental realm was entirely unregulated, and a look at how legal loopholes were left behind by successive governments that placed production above protection. Blue-Green Province gives an overview of past environmental records from each government era, beginning with the long PC "Dynasty" period, a daunting process something Winfield has written in a fairhanded manner and researched extremely well. The entire book is accompanied by footnoted text, providing several footnotes within each paragraph throughout. It is reassuring to read a book by an author so dedicated to ensuring academic sources are present and in place.

Another plot in the book is the tug-of-war between Ontario's private sector, who wanted to extract resources and pollute with a free hand, and environmental lawmakers, who wanted them to comply to environmental regulations, which were developing in response to a greater understanding of the harm pollution caused. Winfield uses the term "incremental" to describe the incredible slow pace and deliberately stalled progress and exemptions-making route that basic environmental regulations and their enforcement took in Ontario (Winfield, page 32). The book is also great at identifying key moments in time, such as the establishment of the Environmental Assessment Act in 1976 which resulted in the government being willing to actually consider prosecution for hazardous waste pollution by 1980 (Winfield, page 32). Blue-Green Province effectively recreates the controversies and challenges of the time and makes understanding these important historical events much more interesting as Winfield is a writer who is skilled at removing obsfucation and letting facts speak volumes.

For me there were many interesting moments and parts in the book, including the acid rain battle (Winfield, page 65) and Winfield's description of the Harris government, and the ways in which Harris sought to undermine past regulations, as well as the legislative and other responses to his attempts (Winfield, page 106). 

I highly recommend this book as there is great inspiration between its pages. Anyone who wishes to develop their literacy regarding the evolution of Ontario's environmental protection policies, the history of how they came to be in place and a sense of what more must be done will find Blue-Green Province unparalleled.  

If there is a term for dog-eared favourite in the electronic realm, I highly recommended this essential volume become a dog-eared go-to for all Ontarians. The contents are easy to grasp and important for every Ontarian to become versed in. It is an important work of outstanding academic calibre accessible to all. 

Winfield, M. (2012). Blue-Green Province: The environment and the political economy of ontario. UBC Press.

Facing The Climate Emergency

Facing The Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth is a book with an ambitious intention. Authored by Margaret Klein Salamon with an introduction by Molly Gage, the book is written to create climate activists. A slender volume, the first few pages are packed with praise from twenty-eight reputable editors, authors and directors of leading organzations addressing climate change today. Among the added remarks on the back cover, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion writes, "This work is not optional. Read it, use it, and rebel." The book's introduction is indeed extremely readable, and, like the rest of the book, it has a therapeutic tone, frankly discussing the challenge our society is facing regarding painful climate change truths. Such an accessible opener invites readers at any stage in their understanding to drop in and join the larger conversations in the book. This book also pulls no punches. The author presents the opiod epidemic and other mind-numbing addictions our society partakes in, remarking, "It is hard work not letting yourself feel your fears. When you avoid the truth, you put the energy that could be used towards preventing the climate emergency into safeguarding the fiction you've created for yourself."

While I was immediately impressed with the connection I felt to the writing, it was the breakdown of psychological factors involved for humans looking at climate change that really hooked me to read on. These factors included those of "Willful ignorance" and, my favourite, in true activist style, "Regression: We need the experts to handle this." From the first pages this book also names CEO's and specific corpoprations associated with blocking efforts to stop climate change, as well as making clear just who are the heavy hitters in working to stop climate change in various fields. Following an activist-rousing introduction, the book is divided into 5 sections, titled Step One, Step Two, etc., while the concluding Step Five, "Join the Climate Emergency Movement," offers detailed advice in a direct address to readers. It was an open invitation to all those seeking roles, purpose and action.

Step One also compares our curent lack of emergency response in comparison to "Allies entering emergency mode when mobilize to win WW2." This is a strong case, and I hope people take much inspiration from the example. As the authors remind us, "faced with the prospect of annihilation, Americans and Britons were expected to pull together by working in war jobs, growing victory gardens, contributing to scrap drives and -in Briton- volunteering as Air Raid Precaution wardens." I've heard the comparison before, and I welcomed encountering it in this book. Today, the book remarks, "this sort of necessary response is required but has yet to be engaged." I have to agree with the authors. This book is toned as an action call throughout, and I find it excellent. Any shortcomings have to be assessed given the purpose for which it is written. The author is brilliant in describing the way that movements can bring social truths to the fore, such as the #Metoo movement, or the civil rights movement, and other movements that allowed society to address injustices that were in some cases sensed but denied. They also discuss the "gradualist movement" which wants change done the books argues in such a gradual way that it is useless. It presents instead the climate emergency movement: "this movement demands what is necessary- a ten year transition to zero emissions plus drawdown." After such a strong opener, we wonder what is next. What exactly is "Step 2?"

Step 2 turned out to be a bit unexpected. It phases readers into a twenty-three page discussion of emotional work and of skills required for dealing with the fear that arises from facing climate emergency. It's a surprise to encounter this in a book of this sort, but an incredibly cool feature. The author also openly discusses how they sought psychotherapy for their own anxiety around climate crisis, an honest tone for a difficult topic. And, as in every chapter, a series of questions about the text are available at the end. For Step 2 the questions were personally challenging but excellent and I hope that personal emotional skills structured around Step 2 will help quell conflicts within the movement in a way that other movements may have overlooked.

Step 3 "Reimagining Your Life Story," is a chapter for people revising their personal script. It talks about heroic models and "saving the planet" in a way that addresses the reader's new information, cautioning against personal gradiosity contrasted with the need for everyday heroism.

Step 4, "Understand and Enter Emergency Mode" posits that human responses to crises, "fight, flight or flee," as well as writings on PTSD "contribute to collective paralysis." This is an example of a point in the book when I feel it is perhaps directed at a white middleclass readership. The statement is used to present the argument that, "these are not our only options. We can also be inventive and collaborative in our response." I find this opener a bit objectionable, even though it is building into a pitch for emergency action which is worthy, as it could stand to have been a bit more nuanced. It's not as if people simply choose PTSD, as much PTSD occurs to children, and the PTSD movement itself involves an army of inventive people who, for the sake of society, have accepted both diagnoses and drugs before recent healing breakthroughs that serve us all.

There were a few other points in the book where I thought the authors were lacking sensitivity, and I don't like "forgiving" anything I read as I go, but I did understand the message and intent were also well-intended and good. Because of the urgent message, I wish there weren't these points I object to, because ultimately, it is a super cool book.

Step 4 offers an historic distillation of some of the emergency responses (such as the Allies's rally to win WW2) but is perhaps my favourite chapter because it presents Larry Kramer and the ActUp! movement of the Eighties as a prime example of citizen action when "gradualism" isn't effecting change. This and other examples of emergency movements that created effective and lasting social change are what make the book great. It's an inspiration and call-to-action tome and very effective in its purpose.

I enjoyed this book and I actually cant reccomended it enough. Five stars, it was a dive into a cool and refreshing ocean of like minds engaging their democratic citizen duties by stepping up.

Public Gardens and Livable Cities: Partnerships Connecting People, Plants, and Place

Authors Donald A. Rakow, Meaghan Z. Gough and Sharon A. Lee have compiled a series of studies of public gardens broken down into six parts. The introduction addresses the urbanization of the future world, and the need to define and prioritize livability as distinguished from sustainability. It presents public gardens as "anchor institutions" just like libraries or parks, rooted in their physical location. Emphasizing the importance of partnerships between public gardens and organizations outside the gardens, the book explains types of partnerships in communities. Cooperative examples would be a garden shared by a school, while collaborative partnerships are those that share resources and decision-making while remaining independent. Collaborative partnerships are generally considered to be the strongest type. The final stage for any type of partnerships is collective action, which includes a shared committment to collective impact and a common agenda for moving forward.
The first chapter, titled, "Promoting neighbourhood safety and well-being," examines cities across the United States where there is a demand for more livability while introducing the idea of placemaking, a strategy that uses public spaces to promote social interaction and, of course, partnerships. The book examines many public gardens, and I will mention a few of my favourites here. In Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's Greenest Block Competition is a gardening initiative that has created an enthusiastic following and has improved public spaces throughout the borough. The Ambassador Program at the Queens Botanical Garden in NYC, like the Greenest Block competition, has powerfully developed community and built trust. However, I found the description of vacant lot programs particularly cool. Chapter one describes the Philadelphia vacant lot situation and the initiative of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in setting up a LandCare program in the 1970's, now one of the biggest vacant lot land programs in the US with over 12,000 properties. PHS has partners around the country, and participants come to Philadelphia to seek assistance from the PHS staff in designing a vacant land strategy for their own city. This chapter concludes with a topic I always look for data about, the issue of gentrification and the "long-term implications" of "beautification vs potential for resilience" regarding those newly-greened communities that have surely earned the right to hold onto their neighbourhoods and resist displacement.
The second chapter, titled, "Improving the quality of science education," addresses the job opportunity, safety and environmental sustainability spin-offs generated by community greening projects. It describes project Green Reach, which has helped Brooklyn kids grades K-8 access science information and observe nature's cycles first hand. This type of project was repeated in many other cities, including Chicago, where science class gets awesome as Chicago Botanical Garden students extract DNA in mentorship with research scientists. There has been a huge upswing in interest in urban gardening as a result of these efforts. By 2013, 2 million more households report involvement in some way in community gardening than those in 2008. In the case of Bronx Green Up, participants are awarded certificates for learning levels and skills gained, as well as practices implemented. Green Corps in Cleveland also does this, involving local teens while bringing fresh, organic produce to underserved neighbourhoods and selling produce at local farmer's markets each week. Green Corps is in an interesting partnership with the Cleveland baseball team, and maintains raised beds at the team's stadium as well as in the player's parking lot, with produce used by the team chef to prepare healthy dishes for the players.
Access to healthy food and promoting healthy lives through urban gardening partnerships are discussed in Chapter three, while Training and Employment programs are addressed in more depth in chapter four. Public gardening job training programs for veterans and an examination of the Riker's Island greenhouse program are included. The RIGP is a partnership with the department of corrections and the department of education, and develops horticultural skills while citing a forty percent reduction in recidivism as a spin-off of the program.
Chapter five explores initiatives to promote ecosystem and human health, while "strategies for the development of successful partnerships" is explored in depth in chapter six.
This is an amazing book. I truly enjoyed reading this volume and the enthusiasm regarding gardening partnerships shifted my own thinking in positive ways. The epilogue supplies a look at the future of public gardens and the book is made yet more accessible with extensive appendixing. Recognizing public gardens as anchors and the key to healthy communities is one of the most important message of our times. This energetic, reader-friendly book with many photographs shines a persuasive and motivating light.

Rakow, D. A., Gough, M. Z., & Lee, S. A. (2020). Public Gardens and livable cities: Partnerships connecting people, plants, and place. Cornell University Press.

City of Forests City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City's Nature

Lindsay Campbell is a Research Social Scientist who received a close-up view of the massive PlaNYC 2030 and its accompanying MillionTrees Project roll-out from her job posting within the US Forest Service's NYC Urban Field Station. Sustainability plan PlaNYC 2030, which began in 2007 with great fanfare under the mayorship of NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, included a $400 million commitment to plant one million trees in NYC. This colossal project, under the direction of the NY Department of Parks and Recreation, inspired tree planting campaigns around the world.
In contrast, "urban greening practices such as urban agriculture, community gardens, and other interventions into local food systems received no mention in the 2007 version of PlaNYC." This omission occurred despite the fact that New York is home to "one of the largest networks of urban community gardens in the world."
Campbell asks, "why were urban forestry and agriculture treated so differently in the sustainability plan?"
While there are parts of the book that suggest Bloomberg was willing to leave the urban gardening movement high and dry, the real reasons and the politics at play in urban greening are more complicated. Certainly, from the onset, decision-makers involved in PlaNYC had a commodified view, describing the value of trees from an investment standpoint, while there was a perceived gap in any metrics regarding the value of urban farms and community gardens. Campbell was able to document how, over a number of tense seasons and against considerable odds, activists, researchers and everyday citizens replaced that gap with the measurable science and data that was missing.
Because of the "sales pitch" approach by advocates of PlaNYC 2030, the stakeholders in this form of "green growth" were very distinct, and the process of deciding who gets to set the agenda was considerably influenced by NYC's business elite. In the context of this difficult onset, grassroots activists, urban farmers and community gardeners throughout NYC organized and prepared a successful challenge to the forestry-led agenda by 2011. Campbell's journalistic book shines an intense light on various developments in PlaNYC2030 from 2007 to its more urban agriculture-friendly revisal PlaNYC 2.0 in 2011 to its continuing implementation up until 2015.
Urban agriculture while "entirely absent" from the first PlaNYC, was not at rest, and until there were serious and ratified goals set regarding the production of local food, activists were agitating for change.
Campbell found this touchpoint interesting enough to carry the book, and I think it does. The book is a very thorough biopsy of a time period in which a gargantuan effort was undertaken to transform a city. Without a strong challenge from social justice and grassroots urban agriculturalists, the Bloomberg legacy might have resulted in a very different picture.
The book supplies excellent charts in this book before even the close of chapter one, extensively comparing the urban forestry network in chart-form with that of the urban agriculture network. "I pay particular attention to how ideologies of environmentalism, sustainability, and neoliberalism overlap or compete," the book"s author declares in the introduction, and I believe she bears this claim out.
In examining the absence of food policy and planning in the PlaNYC 2007 strategy, we learn that food policy in those days was seen as something too vast, complex and too controlled by the private sector for any city government to bring under their jurisdiction. At the time, small-scale community gardens were not the only ones who felt leery of Bloomberg's plan. By the time the revised plan PlaNYC 2.0 rolled around in 2011, it was however positively influenced by food policy goal-setting changes. However, it was a hard road to arrive at that juncture. As well, some of the more mainstream critiques of Bloomberg's "sustainable city" initiative during the establishment of PlaNYC 2.0 insisted that the sustainability planning did not consider "the hinterlands and global commodity food chains" on which the cities were dependent. Other critics felt that sustainability plans in their current form did not challenge the political-economic structures of cities sufficiently to create real change. While PlaNYC pandered to commercial interests and received a huge amount of funding from NYC's business elite, it was also a model of independent municipal problem-solving and in many ways ahead of its time by tackling climate change and urban heat issues head on.
Not surprisingly, PlaNYC 2030 began with an idealistic but uniformed leadership driven by Bloomberg's dream and the project's considerable funding. In the early days, "sites were viewed by decision-makers as just green spaces on the map that could receive hundreds of thousands of trees." As a result many advisors quickly "took issue with the numerical tree planting goal and correctly argued that emphasis should be placed on creating healthy, native, multistory forests" because many sites for these early tree planting proposals had "nothing to do with feasibility."
By chapter six, Campbell has led us through some interesting years and forward in time beyond the Bloomberg years and into the de Blasio mayoral era. The de Blasio era was a time when the emphasis on social programming became more central than the trees. However, by this point in time, NY's urban grassroot's gardening movement had gone into gear. Here Campbell describes in detail the establishment of vast and entrepreneurial rooftop garden operations in NY. The demographics of the gardeners, the backyard chicken program participants and the beekeeping programs in NY are well-chronicled and reassuring reading regarding how some of these sustainability initiatives are playing out.
However, the impression that poor neighbourhoods and the people who live in them can be upgraded en mass did take its toll on NYC. It is well-known that treeplanting can beget gentrification. A number of ground-level garden sites were negotiated sites, for instance planted in movable beds, with the understanding that the site was not able to be affordably developed at that time but in the future would be turned into housing. This discussion is to me the most interesting, because the idea that the urban poor are intended to improve and move, or to continually shift to make way for development as a sort of civic duty, is highly problematic.
Fortunately, over the years of the PlaNYC 2030 sustainability implementation, there was a lot of emphasis on research. As well as research groups, activist groups such as 596 Acres sprung up, assisting in the visualization of those hundreds of vacant urban acres that required farming. Rooftop farm entrepreneurs as well played a role in urban food agriculture and their gardens were also included in the 2011 PlaNYC 2.0 revision.
Ultimately the urban agriculturalist won their point, and urban agriculture became ensconced within the 2030 goals. These goals included the assessment of land availability and suitability for urban agriculture, the creation of citywide urban agriculture program, and the ensured permanence of community gardens. The development of rooftop agricultural greenhouses, a determination of the capacity of the regional foodshed, and the development of state strategy for farmland and food production were also included. Barriers to food composting in community gardens were eliminated and agreed-upon goals to expose all city students to farms and gardens were also established. By cultivating student and citizen access to agriculture and relationship with an urban farm, a generational literacy in food production is today fostered. These were only some of the changes and goals set out in the document, many of which have been implemented, and their positive impact is clear.
The final chapters including one titled "Constructing the "greener, greater city" describes how there is no longer a lack of data now but "a proliferation of academic research and citizen-led science on urban agriculture..." and examines how much the planning implemented under public health rather than competitiveness functioned as programs for the sake of social justice. Soil testing, contaminant-free healthy and fertile soil and other ensconced PlaNYC 2030 sustainability values are also discussed.
How have things fared post-Bloomberg? The millionth tree was inevitably planted with great volunteer engagement. Even though de Blasio moved away from tree planting and slated over a dozen garden sites for development, "urban agriculture is on an upswing" regardless of city governance.
In closing Campbell looks to the urban farm movement future with hope that this movement can achieve "the critical mass necessary to scale up and affect citywide policy and natural resource management." Her challenge lingers long after the last page of the book.





Campbell, LK. (2017).City of forests, city of farms: Sustainability planning for New York City's nature. Cornell University Press.

Globalization and Urbanization: The Global Urban Ecosystem

James H. Spencer has worked with numerous NGO's and has taught urban and regional planning and political science in Hawaii and California. Instead of discussing rapid urban transformation in the North, this book takes a look at the places in the South where changes are occuring at an unprecidented scale. This rapid urbanization is most evident in South-East Asia, China, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where fast-paced changes are creating interesting challenges for city planners. Remarks the first chapter, "today we can watch patches of five-hundred-hectare developments in China, Vietnam, India, and Abu Dhabi sprout up almost overnight out of what only months before were pristine wetlands, hillsides and deserts."

While his interest is urbanization in the Global South, Spencer includes writing about places like New York City, and I found his chapter on New York regarding the forces that formed that city to be particularly insightful.

The first chapter, The Global Urban Ecosystem, describes a fascinating history of human civilization as well as the "emerging discipline of ecosystem science." Spencer asks, "what is a city?" and how does it change our personal identities? How do we adapt our behaviours, and how do animals who are impacted by the detritus of cities change and adapt? Clearly cities shape a larger ecology. “Because humans build, occupy, and transform them, cities come alive and develop personalities that represent many people,” says Spencer, sharing collective history and relationships of residents into complex interacting forces. The science of cities is never entirely reliably or empirically measurable as there are so many “second-order categories” that make it difficult to study cities unless they include race gender, age, cultural and socio-physical factors that are difficult to standardize. Here Spencer vividly describes the evolution of human gathering places to actual settlements with markets and resulting economic roles. Spencer's writing is rich in references to other scholars of urban development, and his discussions of Jane Jacobs's ideas and frequent references to Jacobs's work are admiring and set an upbeat tone.

Chapter two offers a deeper historical context to the phenomenon of urban growth, including a "natural history of the city," and a section introducing Lewis Mumford, considered the patrirach of urban planning. Spencer compares Mumford's ideas to other scholars such as Jacobs and later introduces the ideas of planners such as Frank Loyd Wright and Ebenezer Howard, founder of the garden city movement. Here it becomes clear utopian ideas in compassionate, human-centered city design and the garden city concept are important ideals to Spencer. “Utopian planners have long dreamed of an ideal society in which cities and settlements achieve human-scale interactions, social equity, and connections to the environment.”

The book then begins a multi-city tour of those places that Spencer has chosen as interesting comparisons in the urban realm. Here Spencer introduces the concept of "Do-Your-Timers" for people working in cities where rewards hover as potential and in the future. The first city Spencer has chosen is Saigon. Saigon is a city growing very rapidly yet there are still people who cook on open fires inside the house and do other things that identify them as rural people new to urban living. Only China is growing more quickly than Vietnam in terms of GDP. Vietnam signed a trade agreement with the US in 2000 that radically changed markets. As a result entrepreneurs have also flooded into Saigon from China as well as places as far away as North America and Africa to try their entrepreneurial luck. At the same time, Saigon is a textbook example of rural migration, with people coming in from rural places such as the Mekong Delta creating a population of new "Do-Your-Timers" whose numbers swell the labour force but also thwart city planners. Saigon has drawn people from many walks and has a surprising level ofnewcomer diversity. It is not just farmers who have become urban factory workers, as rural people have created an extensive economy including quasi-legal businesses on the fringes offering services such as haircuts and massage for new urban consumers.

In chapter four, Spencer turns his attention to the city of Addis Adaba, titling his chapter: "Do-Your-Timers" African style: Addis Ababa, the Unlikely Capital of Africa. This chapter has some excellent history about a very distinct city that is growing quickly, including through the migration of thousands of Chinese workers into Africa. The chapter describes how Addis Ababa came to be, its unique qualities and unusual aspects that make it an interesting point of study. In particular, the history of the region is unique. Ethiopia has never really been colonized by a major European power. Italian intervention in Ethopia ended after a decisive battle, and emperor Haile Selassie remained monarch from 1930 to 1975. During emperor Haile Selassie's reign his image was elevated with the establishment of Rastafarianism and the granting to hundreds of Jamaican families of Ethiopian land in an area just south of Addis Ababa.

With the overthrow of the royal lineage in 1975, a development strategy built on the model of the Soviet Union was attempted. There was a period of rapid growth both in terms of population and infrastructure, before a civil war put everything on pause. Once stability was restored, a modern airport arrived in Addis and it was made the home of the African Union, a designation which radically changed the character of the city as global investors could suddenly access the city. Interestingly, Addis Ababa still runs on a precolonial time clock and a unique calendar that would normally limit its ability to do busness. Added to this, Ethiopians speak a variety of local dialects, none of which are common in other parts of the African continent. However, the strong role the area has played historically make it a preferred choice by many international business people, including those who have flocked there to escape war or plan business in other parts of Africa, such as Kenya. Although China is investing highly in South East Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa is receiving a massive foreign investment growth rates as well through Chinese investors. Africa is also poised to be a massive market for China not only for things such as phone and technology services, but for many goods and commodities as well. At the moment, 64% of oil is shipped to China from Africa, but these arrangements appear "poised to expand" to mutual benefit.

Chapter five, The Indigenous City? Reconcycling an Old-Timers' Honolulu with a Global Society begins with a description of the lush beaches and beautiful Pacific mountains. The writer then remarks that to drive around Honolulu is to also discover that "the city and county of Honolulu-is a city of pack rats...its residents are accumlating and storing both material goods and garbage, as well as experiences, ideas and aspirations, faster than the pristine and isolated island can cope with them." The author describes it as a city "stranded in an ocean five thousand miles from the nearest major landmass," with a special series of challenges as a result. Spencer quotes Mumford in his assertion that for the residents of Honolulu, living among "lush tropical trees, plants, flowers and bushes," may have given them "license to neglect its insufficient physical infrastructure." Spencer describes the significant diversity of cultural infuences that define modern-dsy Honolulu, including the enduring legacy of the original and contemporary Polynesian culture on the place, as well Japanese and Chinese cultures, and a massive influx of tourists from the mainland United States, many in the form of sunbirds who stayed, bringing considerable wealth and an entire tourist and service economy with them. Recently the idea of "Ahupu'a" has been touted by Honolulu as a way to attract investors as well as convince international interests that Hawai'i is conforming to environmental practices. Spencer explains the concept of "Ahupu'a" is an ancient Haiwaiian land governance concept that creates a structure for a limited area of "complex socio-ecological regions" as a single place. The author also expresses doubt that, given the level of neglect some communities receive including that of basic sanitation services, "Ahupu'a" as more than a marketing ploy is not truly at work in Honolulu. The chapter examines a series of trends, including challenges with waste management, NIMBYism, the plight of poor and "minority" neighbourhoods, and underlying political crisis in in its identity as an "Old-Timer's" city.

The author suggests that Honolulu must not assume that much-needed change will develop naturally, but that great planning will be required to protect the poor and allow them the ability to escape slum-dwelling and participate in the economy of Honolulu, which is propped-up powerfully at the moment by tourism and service industries for the wealthy.he comments that just like the Hawaiian tourist industry was developed with the importation of sand from beaches as far away as LA., growth in Honolulu, if it is to avoid slums, must be planned to prevent urban sprawl by deliberately creating opportunities. a range of opportunities and services that support the poor of Honolulu are as essential as those that cater to newcomers, while efforts to equitably integrate the labour force with the tourist industy that sustains the city rather than allow tensions to remain unresolved will be the road to a more peaceful and equal city longterm. Whether this will deliver "ahupua'a" or simply provide a stronger footing for improving the lot of Honolulu's poor, the sudden differences created by tourist colonialism are a long way from a dream of a "new communalism" and must be addressed.

Chapter six, For All-Timer's New York City's Empire State of Mind was my favourite chapter, despite the fact that the author was not writing on a city in the South. Spencer found New York important to include because, in part, we think of New York as the quintessential city when it is actually much smaller than many cities and has many unique features about it that make it worth considering as both a typical and atypical representation of a city.

Spencer's New York chapter begins by discussing the “ecosystem” behind Jay-Z and Alicia Keys's iconic New York song, Empire State of Mind remarking that a “tense mix of survivalist bravado and creative inspiration that defines a place both celebrated and reviled.” It describes how New York for a time became synonymous with decay and violence. New York is also the city that “comes to mind in the context of globalization and urbanization.” However, the author points out that other cities long ago exceeded the growth of New York, and it is the "culture of urbanity,” more than anything else that keeps new York at the fore. “What today looks like a dynamic, exciting and timeless city has not always been so.” It remarks “digging deeper down into the mechanics of how this urban culture and identity function will reveal that a more universal set of characteristics underlies each of the unique cities in the global ecosystem, making them edgy and familiar, exciting, yet safe.”

New York is a city to which other are compared, when it is in fact, quite young. It has changed rapidly, and in the years following 9/11, “global and domestic shocks literally changed the face” of cities such as New York, where “concrete barricades, security gates, and bulletproof glass” popped up throughout the city, something that became refered to as fortress architecture,” while “smart city” tech allowed for remote monitoring of public spaces. Spencer poses that this created a “physically and psychologically damaged” city but also a “softer, more understanding one.”

Despite this daunting architectural shift, New York City continues to attract people and jobs with the "cultural attributes made possible by demographic and economic growth.” Spencer posits that the “secret to this ongoing vibrancy is a unique and attractive identity that permeates deeper than any physical attribute.” Yet New York is a city that is sweltering in the summer while bitterly cold and overcast in the winter months. It has other disadvantages. Spencer points out it is not as attractive as Boston or Washington. However, Spencer comments it is a city which somehow “resolves its own very material problems compared to other large megacities.” A very interesting example of this are the transit strikes in New York, which resolved in only a few days, while in cities like LA transit strikes were rocked by transit strikes that failed to be resolved for weeks. The author neatly surmises the difference: “Wall street executives take the bus from time to time...Hollywood executives don't.”

In the way that New York residents often bump shoulders with various social classes and find themselves crowded together with a range of talents, skills and economic backgrounds, it is also distinctly filled with people familiar with urban politics. These "shared infrastructures and spaces" have pressed together "diverse residents to confront and negotiate with one another on an hourly basis.” In other words, having to “hash out” their difference has made New Yorkers distictly resilient in living together “socially and politically” in a way that more spawling locations such as LA have not. This chapter also describes in detail the challenges of New Yorkers, in particular the history of the epic debates between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. It describes the damages and the benefits reaped by "Moses-built environments" something the city still copes with to this day. The last section of the chapter, "Immortality Through Reinvention," describes how Alicia Keys reinvented the song "Empire State of Mind" with her own lyrics, less explicitly celebratory, but more real than the first. Spencer describes recent examples of communities that were considered high-poverty and high-crime that have positively reversed their fortunes. He remarks that New York remains a city for all time, surviving, even thriving, against all odds, a strength derived from the cultural richness of diverse peoples dwelling together for many generations, which has allowed for the unique capacity of New Yorkers to address their political problems with original and compellingly human solutions.

The last chapter, The Global Ecosystem: A Globally Integrated Ecology of Everyday Lifereviews how ecosystem science has been a valuable tool in helping us better see the complex physical environments that create each setting in which gobalization is unfolding. Spencer's book reminds us that no city is truly "the global city" but each one has deeply-rooted and distinct characters and challenges, and that economics is only one function of many functions in a city. Contemporary relationships which strwngthen the unique character and the health of the poor in any city are the measure of worth in globalization, and those that impose are not. Urban planning "best practices" may do well to reframe their thinking as "informative practices," or "suggestive practices," as standardization wastes public resources and is not a path forward for any city. Much more powerful is the ecosystem lens, which helps us coherently understand the building blocks of cities, and how the fundamental differences allows each place to flourish in its own way. Leadership that is "creative, inspired by the human condition, but anchored to earth by realism" allows for the building of cities that thrive without interference, cities, concludes Spencer, that are "about both poetry and engineering.”

Spencer, J. H. (2015). Globalization and urbanization: The Global Urban Ecosystem. Rowman & Littlefield.