Nature and the city: making environmental policy in Toronto and Los Angeles

Abstract

In Nature and the City, Gene Desfor and Roger Keil set out to critically examine the ways political actors use environmental narratives to formulate urban environmental policy.The empirical scope of their study is limited to Los Angeles and Toronto in the 1990s, with attention paid to four case studies: the restoration of an urban wetland in Toronto's Don River Valley; efforts to renaturalize the Los Angeles River; soil contamination in a Toronto brownfield redevelopment site; and the political struggle over air quality in the Los Angeles Air Basin.Yet the applicability of their arguments and method lie well beyond the urban ecologies of these two cities.Nature and the City is not solely an empirical work, but also a sophisticated theoretical engagement that draws together social ecology, local-state theory, narrative interpretation, and urban-centric approaches to the social production of nature.The overall thrust of their argument is that ecology itself represents a core ontological site over which political actors struggle to reshape the political economies of the post-Fordist urban form.The text is significant, not simply because it adds new depth of analysis to the growing urban political ecology literature, but also because its case studies allow the authors to combine an impressive array of theoretical positions and methodologies.Their focus is on ecological modernization theory (developed in the mid-1990s by Maarten Hajer), which the authors insist offers a useful lens through which to observe shifting nature-society relations in industrial societies.Ecological modernization is a social response to environmentalist critique, but one in which the institutions of modern capitalism are not fundamentally altered in the design of ecologically "benign" futures.Instead, ecology and economy are seen to be fully compatible, harmonized through policy choices that produce synergistic benefits.The authors distinguish between "weak" and "strong" ecological modernization: the former is synonymous with the neoliberal idea that market-friendly policy instruments can overcome environmental problems; the latter focuses on open, transparent policy debates about desirable futures along with strong state and communicative intervention.In each case study, Desfor and Keil demonstrate the clear hegemony of weak ecological modernization in municipal policy discourse.The Toronto brownfield case study is illustrative.Over the course of much of the 1990s, environmental activists struggled with development interests over soil remediation in a former industrial site that contained high levels of contamination.In the ensuing policy debate, Desfor and Keil track

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 124 citations exist upstream.