Cities, Nature and Development

This volume theorizes vulnerability in relation to the North American city and its economic, cultural, and environmental components. Editors Dooling (U. of Texas) and Simon (U. of Colorado) present ten papers that build upon previous research in urban vulnerability studies, but with a greater emphasis on the political and ecological production of vulnerabilities, as they examine such topics as the contributions of wealth accumulation and instrumentalist land use policy to the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California; the ways in which economically powerful communities and regions externalize risk onto poorer and less powerful populations; neoliberal budgetary priorities and the production of risk in public parks; the race and class lines embedded in the local organic food market movement; cases of ecological gentrification in Seattle, Washington, and Austin, Texas; vulnerability experiences of radical climate change activists that establish protest camps in metropolitan areas; population decline and the urban economic and ecological revitalization strategies of Utica, New York; and the racial dynamics of land valuation based on vulnerability to flooding in Austin, Texas. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Dr Sarah Dooling, University of Texas Austin, USA and Dr Gregory Simon, University of Colorado Denver, USA.