Sustainable Metropolitan Communities

Sustainable Metropolitan Communities and Regional Equity

Edited by Paloma Pavel
Introduction by Carl Anthony

Forthcoming, MIT Press

Sustainable Metropolitan Communities and Regional Equity brings together the leading organizers, researchers and policy analysts, who tell the stories and provide the analysis about the growing movement for regional equity and sustainability.
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Just Sustainabilities

Just Sustainabilities:
Development in an Unequal World

Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans (Eds.)

March 2003, MIT Press

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises.

Just Sustainabilities argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses many aspects of the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice more generally. The topics discussed include anthropocentrism; biotechnology; bioprospecting; biocultural assimilation; deep and radical ecology; ecological debt; ecological democracy; ecological footprints; ecological modernization; feminism and gender; globalization; participatory research; place, identity, and legal rights; precaution; risk society; selective victimization; and valuation.
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Growing Smarter

Growing Smarter:
Achieving Livable Communities, Environmental Justice, and Regional Equity

Robert D. Bullard (Ed.)

February 2007, MIT Press

The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and mixed land use. But, as this book documents, smart growth has largely failed to address issues of social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. Growing Smarter is one of the few books to view smart growth from an environmental justice perspective, examining the effect of the built environment on access to economic opportunity and quality of life in American cities and metropolitan regions.

Reinventing Los Angeles

Reinventing Los Angeles:
Nature and Community in the Global City

Robert Gottlieb

November 2007, MIT Press

Los Angeles–the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways–might seem inhospitable to efforts to connect with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city.

Gottlieb traces the emergence of Los Angeles as a global city in the twentieth century and describes its continuing evolution today. He examines the powerful influences of immigration and economic globalization as they intersect with changes in the politics of water, transportation, and land use, and illustrates each of these core concerns with an account of grass roots and activist responses: efforts to reenvision the concrete-bound, fenced-off Los Angeles River as a natural resource; “Arroyofest,” the closing of the Pasadena Freeway for a Sunday of walking and bike riding; and immigrants’ initiatives to create urban gardens and connect with their countries of origin.Reinventing Los Angeles is a unique blend of personal narrative (Gottlieb himself participated in several of the grass roots actions described in the book) and historical and theoretical discussion. It provides a road map for a new environmentalism of everyday life, demonstrating the opportunities for renewal in a global city.
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