Harold A. Perkins

Turning feral spaces into trendy places: a coffee house in every park?

Dynamic modes of political economic regulation impact provision for the parks system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Green spaces during Milwaukees first liberal era consisted mostly of private properties accessible only to the citys elite and/or to those willing to pay a fee to drink in its boisterous bier gartens. Collective open space investment at the turn of the 19th century signaled the beginning of a second, decades-long era of Keynesian state provision for parks. A steady decline in that investment for Milwaukees parks since the 1980s has provided the context for a set of new, yet seemingly liberalized governance experiments to emerge from the now defunct managerialist system. In this paper I employ regulation and regime theories in conjunction with thirty-six in-depth interviews to argue that these new parks experiments hail the beginning of a third era in parks provision. The new era is marked by an apparently neoliberal shift in regulation for open space on the basis of state actions to market public parks provision to a multiplicity of private actors. It is different from the first liberal era because the state withdraws its fiscal commitment to parks but still employs them to continue its active role in environmental and—by extension—social regulation. A multiplicity of local parks governances are promoted in the name of environmental citizenship but are problematic because they form new and localized geographies of social reproductive discipline in the benevolent rhetoric of responsibility, choice, and empowerment.

Environmental justice in Appalachia Ohio? An expanded consideration of privilege and the role it plays in defending the contaminated status quo in a white, working-class community

ABSTRACT Environmental justice addresses inequitable distributions of health risks from exposure to pollution and other hazards. Appalachian residents of southeastern Ohio who live along the Ohio River are disproportionately subject to industrial pollution. Of particular concern is the DuPont Washington Works plant where perfluorooctanoic acid, or C8, was used to make consumer products. Although company officials became aware in 1984 that the water supply of Little Hocking, Ohio, was tainted with C8 coming from its plant, residents were not notified until 2002. Subsequent studies determined a number of health problems, including cancer, are linked to residents’ exposure. This qualitative study asked Little Hocking residents and environmental regulators if they consider C8 contamination in Little Hocking an injustice. Results indicate a lack of consensus – even among affected residents – concerning DuPonts® actions as constituting an injustice. This finding, among others, is used to argue that many residents in Little Hocking, through their association with DuPont®, benefit from class-based forms of privilege and seek to maintain them in the context of immobility and economic uncertainty. This explains why some communities may be considered an environmental justice community from an academic standpoint, but not self-identify as such. However, maintaining privilege at the local scale in the context of weak regulation enhances exploitation in Little Hocking while contributing to power at extra-local scales. Thus, environmental justice activists in white, working-class communities must overcome the challenge posed by privilege that defends the contaminated status quo.

Book Review: The rise and fall of neoliberal capitalism

identify strategies that reconfigure (or merely stall) the “zero-sum” dynamics of uneven development. To accomplish this, the text surveys the theories and dynamics that inform local growth: workforce development, economic clusters, amenities/cultural assets, place-branding, globalization, innovation, venture capital, and the functional as well as relational dynamics of the elusive “triple helix.” The book’s structure is familiar and effectively organized into four parts: Orientation & Concepts (chapters 1 and 2); Processes Impacting Economic Development (chapters 3-6); Relationships, Partnerships & Collaboration: The “Triple Helix” for Economic Development (chapters 7-9); and The Future of Economic Development (chapters 10-12). In addition, Johnson includes a glossary (particularly useful when deciphering acronyms), detailed notes, and comprehensive index, as well as a brief introduction and conclusion. Although the book is structured as an academic work, the tone and style is intentionally accessible to unfamiliar readers and peppered with useful anecdotes of successful and some less successful attempts to apply general theories in place. Although the tool kit analogy is useful, Johnson’s most interesting contribution is to provide academics with realworld insights into how local leaders adopt, distill, transform, and contort the more conceptual contributions of prominent “pop” scholars such as Porter and Florida—as well as less visible folks like Saxenian and Etzkowitz in situ. Needless to say, the works of these colleagues and others have and arguably will continue to drive the local logic and bandwagon of economic development—clusters, knowledge economies, and creative classes. To be honest and from the perspective of a researcher who has investigated clusters (high-tech and no-tech), economic development in peripheral regions, and the dynamics of uneven development, I was reminded once again that the realities of uneven development on the ground can be brutal. The good news is that this book underscores that leaders (or at least most leaders) have a sincere interest to not only serve their communities but also to improve them. To accomplish these deceptively simple objectives, practitioners have culled a vast academic literature and endeavored to make sense of it to conclude that it is necessary to (a) embed firms in place (firm retention) and (b) recruit/retain talent (workforce). To embed firms in place and recruit talent, the primary strategies that have gained policy traction focus on “specialization” (clusters) rooted in sustained innovation (triple helix) and “differentiation” (place branding). If successful, this basic and familiar strategy yields economic growth, new start-ups, and recruits new external capital; yet, as Johnson notes, the Gordian knot facing leaders is the reality of hyper-competition within and between places that occurs at multiple scales and is informed by macrolevel processes situated well beyond the grasp of local leaders. Whereas it would be easy to abandon comprehensive, sustained, and expensive strategic investments and opt for a responsive (not necessarily reactive) approach informed by politics, the strength of Johnson’s book is its optimism and the importance placed on leadership—not policy, mechanics, or bidding wars. To that end, leaders must see economic development “. . . from the vantage point of where it is heading rather than where it has been” (pp. 15-16) while being mindful that it is a process driven by the timetable of industry—not election cycles or 5-year contracts. This message is the book’s most important contribution to the broader community of civic and elected leaders—look beyond the horizon and identify a sustainable local investment strategy (i.e., critical infrastructures and local amenities) that creates a coherent “place” with a comparative and competitive advantage for an industry or collection of allied industries. It is not easy, but this book clarifies the complex and moves beyond the basic politics of “jobs” in an effort to encourage a more intentional discussion of economic development across all sectors and spaces.

Book Review: Imbroscio, D. (2010). Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

have made the book very readable. Any informed general reader would certainly find the book very accessible. As for the likely audience of this book, there are at least three possibilities. First, economic development practitioners, especially those new to the field, will find the book useful. Perhaps it will inspire them to take a broad perspective of their field. Second, people who hire economic development practitioners should read this book. Seasoned practitioners who pay attention to developments in their profession will have probably been exposed to most of the ideas in this book. However, even if they agree with the ideas expressed they may be limited by the orders they receive from above. With more enlightened bosses they might find themselves in a better position to expand their approaches to development. Finally, the book could be used to give shape to a class in local economic development by providing the outline and overview while the instructor fleshes out details. In all, the book is informative and enjoyable to read.

A Review of: “Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life”

book’s overall theoretical contribution. For instance, what do these patterns say about Asians as the “model minority”? Li argues in the introduction that “ethnic suburbs offer minority people the opportunity to resist complete assimilation into the white cultural and social norms of the host society” (p. 17), but it would have been useful to come back to and engage this idea more in a concluding chapter. There is also much evidence in the book that tensions are often racialized and that they escalate into intergroup conflicts around economic development, social behavior, cultural practices, and political participation, but this is only discussed tacitly in individual chapters rather than argued explicitly at the end of the book. At the same time, even a brief mention of the future implications of these new Asian communities, especially with regard to the second and later generations, would have added to the overall usefulness of the book. Still, From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb is an original, innovative, and thus very important volume because it provides readers with more than a set of descriptive case studies. It demonstrates the complexity of contemporary Asian migrant groups and the richness of the communities in eight large metropolitan areas in four countries across the Pacific Rim. As a result, the book contributes to an emerging body of scholarship in ethnic and migration studies that is engaged in vociferous and passionate debate about today’s new and ever-changing models of ethnic community formation in cities around the world. Thus, the book is not only timely; it also provides scholars and students with a deepened understanding of the experiences of Asian immigrants, whose communities vary from no identifiable residential clusters, to multiple residential and business clusters in both inner cities and suburbs, to large and significant suburban residential and business concentrations. Certainly, sociology and anthropology are rife with books on Asian migrants that examine issues of identity and community in a psychological and emotional sense, but these books tend to be quite ungrounded in real places and lack discussion regarding the role of space and place in the incorporation process. From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburbs, then, is the first effort to focus exclusively on ethnic community formation among Asian immigrants. In sum, the book’s plethora of new data (and the new models used to explain and analyze these data) is a much needed and welcome addition to the growing literature on Asian migration in ethnic and migration studies.

City and Environment. Christopher G. Boone and Ali Modares

Arguably, few concerns are as pressing as connecting urban poverty to uneven and profitoriented environmental transformations. A relatively few people within global cities like New York, London, and Tokyo have long orchestrated environmental transformations for untold billions of people living locally and across the farthest reaches of the Earth. Much local/global environmental degradation can be attributed to the proliferation of concerted financial and political power emanating from these three locations. But alternative urban realities are emerging in conjunction with the global diffusion of neoliberal political and economic restructuring. Cities like Shanghai, Mumbai, and São Paulo now produce enormous wealth as part of the new global economy, but requisite to their economic growth are the most squalid social and environmental conditions the world has ever witnessed. David Harvey’s (1996) oft cited socio-ecological view of cities is highly prescient if we desire to better understand why fully one-sixth of humanity is forced to live in these degrading and seemingly “unnatural” urban environments. City and Environment is therefore a potentially welcome addition to the literature concerned with relations between resource allocation, urban environments, and the distribution of poverty. Boone and Modarres promise at the beginning of their tome “... not only to illuminate the socialecological systems of cities... but ultimately to help in the search for pathways that can turn cities into ecologically sustainable places” (p. xii). The authors attempt to fulfill their promise to readers by providing an extensive overview of urban environmental problems, particularly as they relate to rapidly growing populations of cities in the global South and the disproportionate consumption of resources in slower-growing cities in the North. Achieving urban sustainability is thus the central concept around which the authors organize their book. The chapters feature six themes, the first being the history of urban design from Mesopotamia to the modern Western industrial metropolis. Subsequent chapters cover urban population, urban encroachment on farmlands, the automobile legacy, environmental (in)justice, and green urban planning. The first chapter on the history of urbanism seems somewhat outside the context of the remaining chapters as it diverges from the text’s larger goals of examining current urban environmental problems and future sustainable alternatives. Its disjuncture at the beginning of the book is, however, mitigated by the fact that the historical chapter is well-written and interesting to read. Sustainability is addressed in the second chapter via perspectives of both the Malthusian “population bomb” with its doomsday prognosis of resource depletion and Marxist/socialist accounts of uneven resource distribution. In the third chapter, the authors examine the loss of productive land to urban sprawl and the potential in urban agriculture as an alternative means to food production and security. Chapter four informs readers that urban infrastructures are concrete examples of often shortsighted political and planning decisions made in the past-particularly in regard to the spatial impact of the automobile culture. The fifth chapter links ill health to negative externality effects not factored into the costs of production and consumption while the sixth and final chapter discusses the merits and problems of planning for urban green infrastructure in a sustainable and equitable context. A primary strength of this text is that it makes readers think about cities as environmental entities constituted in the relationships between social, economic, and political processes. This is important, as Boone and Modarres suggest in their writing, because many people tend to uncritically consider cities as anti-environmental (p. 134). Following this, the book’s title is perhaps a misnomer and should be renamed “City Is Environment” because it criticizes the damaging dualisms of country/city and rural/urban that deny the ecological character of urban development and transformation. Thus, the book implicitly suggests that cities are the environmental products of