Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles.

Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles

Desfor, Gene and Roger Keil. 2004. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 274 pp., ISBN 0-8165-2373-8, $54.00 ($45.00 U.S.) cloth.

In Nature and the City, Desfor and Keil trace the discourses that connect policymaking processes, the forces of globalization, and the relationship between humans and their local environment. They accomplish this by analyzing the narratives and discourses surrounding four 1990's policy cases in two cities: the Don River restoration and a soil remediation project in Toronto and, in Los Angeles, air quality management and the restoration of the Los Angeles River. Through a comparison of these cases, they evaluate how the contests between the dominant discourse of ecological modernization and other discourses provided by subaltern environmental groups get written into policy. Furthermore, Desfor and Keil analyze the role of the local state in such contests and examine how the written policies that emerge from such contests work to socially construct the future relationship of society and nature.

In the opening chapters Desfor and Keil lay the theoretical groundwork for their study by combining ideas from the literatures on discourse analysis, urban political economy, globalization, social movements, and the environment. They argue that the local state is now the primary space in which the issues of globalization and the environment meet the public, and that policy making is a discourse contest that is both constituted by, and constitutive of, political economic conditions. These theoretical conclusions are not path breaking for their respective literatures, however the authors make a major contribution by weaving the various theories into a compelling theory about the creation of policy in the post-Fordist local state. Desfor and Keil have done an excellent job of drawing on multiple literatures to coherently describe a complex political contest that includes the historical conditions of the particular space in which the contest occurs, the historical context of the resource(s) in question, as well as the differing contexts of the sets of actors and the resulting differences in the discourses used to advance their ideas.

In the later chapters, Desfor and Keil present the evidence for their arguments, and therefore focus on the policy documents, news stories and interview transcripts that make up the majority of their data. Their analysis of the four cases is quite detailed and succeeds in providing concrete connections to their earlier theoretical arguments as well as making the book as a whole quite compelling. In each of the four cases the authors point out how different subaltern groups created discourses using their local environmental resources, and how those discourses were used to exert influence over policy creation. The chapter on the Los Angeles River is particularly interesting in its ability to show how the discourses of subaltern civic populations are constrained by the political economic circumstances of their specific time and place. For example, the mainly poor and minority groups who reside at the lower end of the river live there as a result of previous policy making that made this end of the walled river a low rent and industrial community. The result is that these groups have a specific relationship with the river and forward a particular discourse in the debate about the future of river policy.

Desfor and Keil's ability to draw on so many theoretical positions while still maintaining methodological clarity is impressive and results in a text that makes a valuable contribution to a wide array of literatures. Additionally, their analysis of the social construction of urban policy and urban ecological discourses should provide both academics and activists with information that can lead to new understandings of urban policy making and to new strategies for winning the discourse contests. My only criticism of the book is that it is written for a narrow audience. I would not suggest assigning the book for anything lower than a senior level undergraduate course, or to anyone who is not already familiar with discourse analysis, urban ecology, and theories of the state in globalization. As a result, the insights that the book could provide to urban activists and policy strategists will likely be overshadowed by its highly theoretical nature.

Reviewed by: Joel Schoening, University of Oregon, 1291 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1291, USA.