By John Matthew Barlow.

Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles
By Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly
US: Overlook Press, 2008. 384pp., $26.95
UK: Overlook Press, 2008. 384pp., £16.96

Hudson Elementary School in Long Beach, California, lies along the busy Terminal Island Freeway, which carries trucks from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.  Across the highway there’s a rail yard where diesel locomotives, like the trucks barrelling past, carry cargo containers from the twin-port complex.  Emissions from the trucks and trains, not to mention from nearby ships, oil refineries, and other industrial facilities clustered around the port, have made the location of the elementary school one of the most polluted points in sprawling Los Angeles.  On a daily basis, diesel soot creeps into the lungs of young students, increasing their rate of asthma and respiratory infections and laying the groundwork for long-term health risks like cancer and heart disease before they get even to high school. [p. 313].

This vignette opens chapter 12 of Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly’s exploration of the history of smog in Los Angeles, and the long and arduous battle against it since the Second World War.  Los Angeles and smog are pretty much synonymous in our culture. 

The story of Hudson Elementary School comes towards the end of Smogtown, as the authors shift their focus from the global battle against smog and air pollution in the City of Angels to the plight of minority and poor communities in the industrialised sprawl of the city.  Not surprisingly, despite all the advances made in L.A. in the fight against smog and air pollution, low-lying industrial neighbourhoods are still buried under toxic clouds.  And it is also not surprising to find that the residential areas around these industrial neighbourhoods are ones populated by the working classes and immigrants (oftentimes one and the same). 

Historically, the fight against smog and air pollution in Los Angeles, at least as demonstrated by Jacobs and Kelly, is one that united Angelenos, as they were all affected by it, to varying degrees.  The Rodney King riots form a virtual watershed moment in Los Angeles history, and not just in terms of culture and racial relations in the US’ second largest city.  The fight against smog was also caught up in the fallout from the riots in 1992.  In discussing the backlash against L.A.’s smog tsar, Jim Lents, whose heavy-handed solutions rubbed some the wrong way, Jacobs and Kelly argue that:

[t]he backlash against carpooling [which Lents advocated] became part of a larger resistance to Lents and his air pollution program.  Opposition businesses, labor, and politicians grew after a recession gripped the nation following he first Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush.  Unemployment began to climb amid a downturn in defense spending after the war and a seeming onslaught of foreign imports and outsourcing by U.S. companies.  Amid the weakening economy and a growing divide between the haves and have-nots, in 1992, an all-white suburban jury acquitted four white police officers in the case of the Rodney King beating.  In an eruption of rage, thousands of L.A.’s poorest residents participated in what was variously called a riot, a rebellion, or a civil disturbance…

As political leaders tried to understand what was happening to the economy and what was fueling the racial tensions revealed by the Rodney King incident, many pointed their finger at the [South Coast Air Quality Management District’s – which had jurisdiction over smog in the L.A. region] tough rules on business.  They claimed that companies had been leaving the area to escape the cost of complying with the smog rules, stranding workers in the process and creating animosities along class and racial lines. [p. 281].

In other words, smog and air pollution are so embedded in Angeleno culture, it’s impossible to escape them.

Smogtown is an eye-opener, in part for the story of Los Angeles, and in part because this is a universal story, that of smog.  Other cities have dealt with smog as bad, if not worse, than Los Angeles: London had a horrible outbreak in the 1880s.  Seventy years later, in 1952, London had a four-day smog attack that left 4,000 more people dead than under normal circumstances (which is a euphemism for saying the smog did it, but there was no hard evidence to link smog to the deaths in 1952 because this isn’t what the scientists looked for).  Circumstances repeated themselves in London in 1956 and 1962.  New York City lost nearly 700 people in smog attacks in 1953, 1963, and 1966.  Chicago, Pittsburgh, Hamilton, Ontario, all these places had toxic air either periodically or perpetually.  But what made Los Angeles the grand-daddy of all smog cities was an unfortunate confluence of natural weather patterns plus industrialisation and the attendant pollution.

Los Angeles was a late-blooming city in North American terms.  Metropolitan L.A. grew from 250,000 people at the turn of the 20^th century to 3.25 million by 1940.  The story of Hollywood’s rise, which took place during the first half of the 20^th century, is a familiar one.  But less familiar is the story of industrialisation in L.A., as the region became home to massive coal-fired power plants, oil refineries, as well as the Los Angeles-Long Beach port system, one of the largest in the world.  Unregulated industrial expansion, plus the natural weather system of the region means smog.  Indeed, the Chumash aboriginals, the original inhabitants of the L.A. region called it “the valley of smoke” because their fires caused smog.  The L.A. region and the San Fernando Valley are susceptible to atmospheric inversion, which means that all of the pollutants in the air from cars, trucks, planes, trains, manufacturing, the ports, etc., are held in the air above the city.  Moreover, because Los Angeles gets so little rain, the smog builds up day after day.  Finally, prevailing wind patterns from the Pacific blow air in, but then it gets caught up against the mountains, creating a toxic soup over the city.  In hindsight, it seems that maybe Los Angeles wasn’t the best place to build a sprawling, massive metropolis that today is home to some 17 million people.

L.A.’s battle with the smog monster began on 8 July 1943, when the city was inundated with a gray mist that descended over the city, leading to chaos on the streets, as people ran for shelter and cover.  After all, America was at war.  It was not even 2 years since the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, and only 16 months since the Japanese Imperial Navy had tried to shell an oil refinery in Santa Barbara, less than 100 miles up the coast from L.A..  Was this another Japanese attack, this time on the metropolis of L.A. itself?  It soon became apparent that this was not the work of the Japanese, but of nature.  L.A. was being attacked by smog.

Tough-talking bureaucrats attempted to tackle the smog monster almost immediately, but to little avail.  This was largely because industry in the L.A. region refused to take the threat of smog seriously, arguing variously that 1) smog wasn’t dangerous; 2) it wasn’t their fault; 3) if they moved, shut down, or even put in place pollution reducing technology it would hurt L.A.’s economy in general.  Even after as a whole academic infrastructure grew to join the bureaucrats, the battle raged.  In 1949, Arie “Haggy” Haagen-Smit, a bio-chemist at The California Institute of Technology (CalTech), stepped outside for a breath of fresh air and a break from his work of trying to extract the fragrance from pineapple:

yet when the hawk-nosed scientist inhaled that day, what he drew in did not seem pure, and it definitely wasn’t invigorating.  It was harsh and bleach-tinged, a bronchial sucker punch.  Haggy, forty-nine, coughed hard.  As history would have it, it was the hack heard around the world. [p. 70]

Haagen-Smit went to work in his CalTech lab; he took a sample of the air outside his lab, distilled some frozen vapour, extracted a few drops of liquid from that, extracted their acids, and then converted them into derivatives.  And from there, he figured out that something was causing oxidisation in the Los Angeles air.  He had found the smoking gun to prove that L.A.’s smog was caused by both the oil refineries that ringed Long Beach and the automobile.  In those days, cars and trucks didn’t have all the smog-reducing equipment they do today, like catalytic converters (which were put in American cars in the early 1970s as a means of assuaging L.A.’s smog cops) and car engines were not as efficient in burning gas as they are today (another innovation caused by L.A.’s fight against pollution).

For the next several decades, L.A.’s smog cops, with ambivalent support from the state government in Sacramento, were engaged in pitched battles with the car and oil industries in Detroit and California in order to clean up Los Angeles’ skies.  Jacobs and Kelly detail this fight in detail, taking time to discuss the citizen-activists who also took up the cause, from the wives of movie producers to a used car salesman, Ed Koupal.  Jacobs and Kelly deftly weave a narrative of the battles of these community activists both with and against the smog cops and other bureaucrats in charge of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), and its various predecessor organisations. 

Well-regarded journalists, both, Jacobs and Kelly tell a lively, and evocative story.  Who knew reading about the history of smog in Los Angeles could be so entertaining?

However, Jacobs and Kelly miss the major tension in Angelino and American culture regarding the fight over smog in their book.  One of the greatest opponents of the L.A. smog cops and their attempts to clean up the air in the city was none other than Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California from 1967-75.  Reagan was a conservative, a small-government Republican (ironic, of course); he fought to keep government out of the smog battle, thinking industry was best left to regulate itself.  For him, the battle was one between public good versus private rights.  And for a man like Reagan, private rights would almost always prevail.  Reagan, however, was emblematic of a very deep strain of American, and Californian, culture.  Despite California’s reputation as a wacky place, with a long, colourful history, it is also a state that has a very deep conservative streak to it, as evidenced by Reagan’s successful two-term run as governor.  This battle between public good and private rights, especially when the were the private rights of large corporations, lies at the heart of the battle over the air of Los Angeles.  And whilst Jacobs and Kelly come back to this theme repeatedly in the book, they never seem to make the explicit connection between small-government, private rights supporters and an unwillingness to work for the public good in taming smog in California’s largest city, especially during Reagan’s gubernatorial reign and presidential term in the 1980s. 

Even before the rise of Reagan in the late 1960s (a man who seems to be at odds with pop culture in California during that period, I might add, given the student sit-ins at Berkeley and the anti-Vietnam demonstrators, to say nothing of the rise of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the same year Reagan became governor, 1967), this tension was apparent in the fight over L.A.’s skies.  Whilst a municipal bureaucracy, and then a county-based, and then a regionally-based one, sought to regulate and enforce smog reduction policies, corporations, and their supporters in business, sought to enforce their freedom.  Thus a fundamental tension of American culture was laid bare in California: individual v. societal freedoms.  What is good for everyone isn’t necessarily good for the individual, argue the Reaganites.  And government intervention is cast, in many ways, as anti-American.  This libertarianism existed in the 40s when smog first reared its ugly head in California, reflected through a frontier mentality, and it exists well into the 21^st century.

Given this tension, it is rather impressive that L.A.’s smog busters were so successful.  As Jacobs and Kelly point out, smog alerts were almost ubiquitous in the 60s and 70s in Los Angeles; more than half of the year, the air in L.A. was dangerous.  Today, stage 1 smog alerts (the worst kind) are rare in L.A..  At the same time, California’s pollution controls and emissions requirements for cars are the most stringent in the world, and are being emulated throughout North America.  Car companies in Detroit, Japan, and Germany are being forced to build cars that are responsive to California’s demands, which can only be beneficial for the rest of us.  California’s power is based on its size, as the most populous American state.  Its 2008 population of 36.8 million people makes it larger than most Western nations, including Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, and so on.  Los Angeles County by itself is more populous than 42 US states.  Its economy, measured by GDP, is greater than all but the G8 nations, minus Canada, plus Russia and China.  In this case, size does matter.  But we are all healthier for it.

This tension between individual rights and the common good is also obvious in the behaviour of average Angelinos, something which Jacobs and Kelly are quick to point out.  But again, they miss the opportunity to make the connection.  Jim Lents was forced out as head of the AMQD in 1997,

his call for lifestyle changes and personal sacrifice was largely rejected, even by his own staff.  Today, the parking lot at AQMD headquarters in Diamond Bar is full of large sport utility vehicles that guzzle gas, emit pollution, and contribute to global warming.  Where the AQMD [once] stood in El Monte when Lents arrived there is now a fast food court full of the drive-through restaurants he once envisioned banning.  Both are a rebuke to his unfinished agenda.  They demonstrate that as much as Angelenos profess environmentalism, their commitment stops short of personal sacrifice. [p. 291].

They continue the assault:

Los Angeles could have turned toward a different lifestyle and become like a Mediterranean city after the first smog siege, with rich urban neighborhoods where people walk the promenade at night.  Instead Angelenos bought into the idea that suburban living – with two cars in every garage – marked progress, as General Electric and Ronald Reagan insisted. [p. 291].

Why this surprises Jacobs and Kelly is beyond me: this is pretty basic human behaviour.  We live in an era where politicians and business people, as well as economists and other academics baldly lie when they tell us that to cut emissions, to accord to Kyoto, would be economic suicide.  This is especially true in North America.  Meanwhile, we live in a culture that encourages us to buy bigger, to have more stuff.  We are products of a culture that has encouraged us to be (post-)modern, to acquire more goods.  Indeed, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, then-President George W. Bush advised Americans that the best thing they could do to show their resilience against the terrorists was to go shopping! 

On the one hand, it is easy to see why the AQMD parking lot is full of SUVs and the organisation’s former headquarters is now littered with drive-thrus; on the other, however, it is just as easy to see that behaviour such as this is destroying the environment whilst we are trying to save it.  Los Angeles is far from the only location where this tension is clear.  In Canada, we have a Prime Minister who, despite all evidence to the contrary, continues to tell us that to cut our emissions drastically would be to kill our economy, and has even used the current recession as an excuse to ignore the emissions problems emanating from the Alberta oil sands. 

Moreover, Los Angeles would never have turned into a Mediterranean city for one simple reason: it is not in the cultural DNA of North Americans to replicate life on the French Riviera.  Certainly, other options could have been explored, but they all would’ve fallen short of Athens or Rome (both, I might add, are cities with fiercesome smog problems of their own). 

At any rate, Jacobs and Kelly remain cynical, despite all the work that has been done in Los Angeles, despite the countless sacrifices of various Angelenos at all levels of society, to ensure a better future.  Certainly, as they note, of the 9,600 people who die per year from smog in California, the majority are in Los Angeles.  But even that is a massive improvement over the mid-20^th century.  Moreover, it simply is not the case that the masses have tuned out and refused personal sacrifice.  As Janine Schipper points out in her study of urban sprawl in the Sonora Desert around Phoenix, in the 2000 national elections in the US, there were 209 ballot initiatives supporting land preservation around the nation.  Most of them were initiatives that called for taxation, and 83 per cent of them were successful.

Rather than criticism, given the fundamental nature of the problem of people not willing to make personal sacrifices to clean up the environment, one would expect Jacobs and Kelly to offer constructive discussion as to how to engage with people, how to convince people that they must take action.  However, they make no such effort to engage with the fiction of economic suicide that emissions cuts will bring, other than to mention it briefly.

Indeed, ultimately, this is my biggest concern with Smogtown: it is all glitz and glamour and lacks substance.  Jacobs and Kelly tell a wonderful, lively story.  They point out the ins and outs of the fight for clean air in Los Angeles.  But there is no deeper analysis in their critique of opponents of the smog fighters.  It’s less a case that I am calling for an objective history here; what I would’ve liked to have seen is a deeper discussion as to why the fight against smog in L.A. has been so difficult, why business, politicians, and average Angelenos have been so resistant to the smog fighting programme.  Having said that, Smogtown, despite being largely sizzle, is highly entertaining and well worth the read.

By John Matthew Barlow.

Cities: A Groundwork Guide. 
by John Lorinc
US: Groundwood Books, 2009. 140pp., $10.00.
UK: Groundwood Books, 2009. 140pp., £5.46.

Last year was a watershed for humanity.  It was the first time that a majority of people, worldwide, lived in urban areas.  This was fuelled by a process of urbanisation in the developing world; in western Europe and Canada, the majority of people lived in cities by the First World War.  The United States reached this milestone shortly thereafter.  But in the developing world, people remained primarily rural until the past couple of decades when industrialisation occurred, in large part because North American and European companies began to outsource and move production off-shore.  This, in turn, had massive consequences for cities in this part of the world, as jobs dried up and industrial areas were abandoned.  This has led to a paradoxical situation in terms of urbanism in the world.  For example, Manila has grown by some 10.5 million people since 1951 to its present population of 12 million.  Meanwhile, Detroit and other cities in the North American rustbelt have experienced depopulation in the past few decades.

Throughout all of this, cities, especially in the industrialised world, gain more power and influence, not just on the national scale (such as London, the British metropole), but on the global scale (London remains the financial capital of the world, a position it has held for centuries).  And in the process, cities, worldwide, continue to grow, becoming larger than some nations.  For example, there are more people in Tokyo than in all of Canada.  That is a mind-boggling thought, given the size of Canada’s geographic footprint (the 2^nd largest nation in terms of landmass in the world) compared to that of Tokyo.

It is in this context that Canadian journalist John Lorinc has written a primer on cities for the 21^st century, the appropriately titled Cities.  Lorinc is a specialist on urban affairs, his work having appeared in several Canadian publications; he also currently contributes to the New York Times’ eco-business blog, Green Inc.: Energy, the Environment, and the Bottom Line.  His last book, 2006’ The New City: How the Crisis in Canada’s Large Urban Centres is Re-Shaping the Nation (Penguin) was especially well-received and serves as somewhat of a basis for his argument in Cities, insofar as he notes the power of cities.  In Canada, a full one-third of the nation’s population lives in the three largest cities: Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver.  In this sense, then, Lorinc is very well-positioned to ponder the plight, role, and impact of global cities in the 21^st century.

Cities is the latest edition to a series from revered Canadian independent publisher, House of Anansi Press, the Groundwork Guides.  Previous volumes have examined topics as diverse as oil, empire, genocide, slavery, and sex.  The series is meant to provide an overview of cultural and political issues, offering “both a lively introduction and a strong point of view.” [back cover].  Lorinc accomplishes both, this volume is a lively discussion of the role and plight of cities, and though his “strong point of view” is somewhat muted in his prose, it is very clear.  Lorinc argues that we must be conscious and aware of the impact of cities on our wider culture, their economic, cultural, and political power, to say nothing of their environmental impact, and the plight of the poor in the megacities of the developing world.  In making this argument, though, Lorinc isn’t really saying anything new, nor anything controversial.  He covers the expected, and says the expected.

Rather than focus on the positives of city life and urbanism, like other urbanists like Jane Jacobs and Richard Florida, Lorinc is more interested in problematising the city.  And this is beneficial tact to take.  Whereas as Jacobs and Florida focus on how the city is a creative force, a site of community, and so on, this is limiting argument and only deals with a minority of cities and a minority of people in cities worldwide.  Lorinc’s more comprehensive approach to the city allows for a wider analysis, both in the developed and developing worlds.  Indeed, the problem with Florida, in particular, is that he is not all that interested in slums and the poor in North American’s cities, which is troubling.

Nevertheless, while Lorinc travels down a road already well-travelled in Cities, his gift lies in the quick and coherent synthesis of the urban condition in the new century.  Broken up into 7 simple chapters, he gives us an overview of the issues facing cities the world over today.  He also moves easily from the developed to the developing worlds, between the historical and the contemporary.  Each chapter covers a central concept of urbanism: the city in the 21^st century, urban forms and functions, sprawl, the environment and energy, transportation, poverty, and crimes, epidemics, and terrorism.  In addition to this division, the book is unofficially split so that the first half more or less focuses on the developed world, whilst the second half deals with the developing world.  The division isn’t absolute, of course, as both halves of the globe fit into the discussion throughout. 

Central to the analysis is the environment, and the city’s impact upon it, in both the developed and developing world.  Each chapter serves as an introduction to the topic and hand, and whilst it is impossible for Lorinc to be comprehensive and exhaustive in the roughly 20 pages devoted to each chapter, he excels in introducing the problems and challenges facing cities to his readers.

Cities are incredibly complex and complicated socio-political structures.  They require careful- and micro- management; problems arise from dense population structures, complicated landscapes, environmental degradation, communications and transportation, amongst other things.  And Lorinc is best at pointing out that the problems that the megacities of the developing world face are problems that cities in the developed world are perpetually struggling with.

Most obvious here is the question of the environment.  Cities are cesspools of pollution and toxicity.  As noted, Lorinc’s discussion of the environmental impact of cities dominates this book; no fewer than 3 chapters (3: Sprawl Happens; 4: Environment and Energy; 5: Cities and Transportation) are dominated by environmental questions.  Chapter 3 examines the environmental (and socio-cultural) consequences of urban sprawl, primarily in Europe and North America.  Here, Lorinc touts cities that have managed to tout responsible development, vertical rather than horizontal.  Manhattan and the west end of Vancouver are two such examples, as they provide high-density urban settlement of high-rise condo development.  His argument is hurt, however, in a table that accompanies this discussion, a “selected” listing of the population density of the worlds 250 largest cities.  The table, however, is ultimately meaningless, in part because we don’t know the overall population of the cities, and the neighbourhoods/boroughs that he points to in his text aren’t in the table.  Manhattan is grouped in with the rest of New York City, which sees its density rating fall to 16^th on the table (though whether that is 16^th in the world or not is another matter entirely) and Vancouver isn’t listed at all.  In short, this table is rendered ultimately useless, as it offers us no real basis of comparison.  For example, while it is clear that Atlanta is much less dense than, say, London, this nugget means nothing to me without information on overall population size and geographic footprint of the two cities.

Lorinc also focuses on the degradation of the air we breathe in urban centres, offering a quick discussion of air-borne pollution in western cities during the industrial revolution.  Here he notes that by the 1880s, London’s air was close to being a toxic soup.  Oddly, though, he doesn’t mention the most obvious and famous example of air-borne toxicity in the developed world: Los Angeles.  That being said, he notes the lack of political will in battling air-borne pollution, politicians were not all that keen on dealing with the problem because of the damage it would to do the local economy and business.  Whilst London is his example, nearly every industrial city in Western Europe and North America has faced this problem.  Indeed, this seems to still be the crux of the question of global warming and environmental degradation today, as politicians remain unwilling to show leadership and make hard decisions, out of fear of upsetting the populace and damaging the economy (despite the fact that many studies note that implementing the Kyoto Accord would not harm the economy in the way that its alarmist opponents suggest), to say nothing of their chances at re-election.

Lorinc then nicely segues into a discussion of “Environmental Degradation in the South’s Megacities.”  Here, he deftly explores the problems facing these cities.  For example, he points to Lagos, the largest city and capital of Nigeria, which is a bustling metropolis of 7.9 million (Lorinc incorrectly states the population of Lagos is 15 million).  He cites journalist George Packer, who has noted that the inner-city urban slums of Lagos are, in part, built on and around a heavily-polluted lagoon.  (As an aside, it is interesting to note that Lagos’ entry on Wikipedia makes no mention of the city’s slums). The polluted water of Lagos Lagoon is where the poor draw their water from, and where fishermen catch food.  The consequences of this for the health of these slum residences are obvious.  In discussing Lagos’ problems, however, it is interesting to note that Lorinc doesn’t point to the obvious source of the problem of pollution and a lack of regulation: there is no central urban government for the Lagos metropolitan area, the municipal government that does exist only serves a small core at the centre of the city.

Emissions are also a problem in these megacities of the developing world.  Even smaller cities are moving towards an environmental apocalypse.  Recently, China eclipsed the United States as the world’s emissions leader; of the top 20 cities in terms of emissions worldwide, 16 are Chinese.  The problem, in part, is due to the fact that the Chinese tend to incinerate their garbage, which causes serious emissions problems.  But Lorinc misses the other side of the equation here: automobiles.  And China’s streets and roads teem with automobiles belching emissions into the environment.  Indeed, the picture of China Lorinc paints in Cities reminds me of Dr. Seuss’ iconic Lorax, who speaks for the trees.  But the Chinese experience also points to another question of emissions and global warming, as the developing world is unwilling to be held to standards designed to ease the problems, arguing that such regulations would be handicaps to their own development.  They quickly point to the fact that North American and European nations were not subjected to such regulation during their period of industrialisation.

The discussion about trash is important because garbage dumps are quickly emerging not just as environmental disasters waiting to happen, but because slums are developing in and around them in various cities, such as Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Manila, amongst others.  In these cities, garbage is just piled up on top of itself in dumps (not that the developed world has a great record here, New York City has garbage barges floating in its harbour, and Toronto is engaged in an on-going battle with Michigan about where to put its garbage).  Dumps in these developing world cities have become the site of labour-intensive recycling businesses.  Scavengers, many of them children, dig through the dumps earning their keep, usually a few dollars a day, which they earn by selling what they find to scrap companies.  The scrap companies themselves turn around and make a handsome profit by selling the goods to recycling companies.  Not surprisingly, work conditions are brutal and dangerous, not to mention unsanitary.  It doesn’t take much of imagination to visualise these scrap-pickers climbing over the mountains of garbage, trying to avoid cesspools of toxic runoff, lethal smoke, bulldozers, garbage trucks, birds of prey, and insects.  Accidents can be fatal, Lorinc reports, such as in 2000 when the 20-hectare Pyatas dump in Manila capsized.  The garbage has been piled up to 13-storeys high when it fell over, smothering several hundred trash-pickers who lived in shanties at the foot of the garbage. 

But it’s not just these megacities in the global South that are leading us to environmental danger, writes Lorinc.  Cities in the developed world are also intimately connected to our long-term survival in terms of climate change: “The reason is that wealthy nations are heavily urbanized, so the way these cities grow has a direct bearing on the pace of global warming, which in turn is already causing havoc in populous low-lying cities.” [p. 56].  Here, he points to Tokyo as a model.  Tokyo’s housing requires less energy than is the case in Europe and North America; the city is more tightly-packed and the transit system is both cost-effective and efficient, making the city easier to navigate.

Lorinc spends some time discussing environmentally-responsible architecture, as well as the reclamation of brownfields for housing and other purposes.  Brownfields are former industrial areas, located all over cities in the developed world, the consequence of the de-industrialisation of the developed world in the mid-20^th century.  Lorinc correctly points to the redevelopment of brownfields in city cores as a means of increasing density, as well as developing better transit systems.  But he misses a prime opportunity to discuss the legacy of industrialisation in North American and Western European cities.  For example, I live in a former industrial neighbourhood in Montréal, surrounded by former factories and other sorts of industrial concerns.  My neighbourhood is like many around Europe and North America; cities like Pittsburgh have been left with massive brownfields that they have tried to redevelop to recover from deindustrialisation.  Some of the factories in my neighbourhood have been reclaimed as condos and office space.  Others, like the former metalshop that forms the backwall of my back garden, stand derelict and abandoned.  Nearby is the Lachine Canal, on the banks of which the Canadian industrial revolution began back in the 1840s.  In other words, I live in a neighbourhood that has been the site of almost continual industrial activity for the past 160 years (a few factories and railyards still exist).  To this day, the leisure craft that ply the canal today (it has been reclaimed as a recreation site) cannot travel at speeds in excess of 15 km/h, otherwise they run the risk of stirring up the toxic silt on the floor of the canal.  Redevelopment in my neighbourhood usually means cleaning the soil, but either way, there are serious environmental issues in neighbourhoods such as mine, one that Lorinc doesn’t explore.

One way in which North American cities, in particular, can contribute to reversing climate change is through the implementation of viable public transit systems.  Most of the major cities in Canada and the US have good public transit: New York City, Chicago, Boston, Montréal, Toronto, for example.  Others, however, do not, such as Houston, or Calgary, or Atlanta.  These three cities are also home to considerable urban sprawl.   And Lorinc notes that this sprawl isn’t conducive to public transit:

there’s a powerful economic relationship between transit, population density and land-use planning.  Transit agencies must make substantial investments in vehicles and other equipment, like signalling systems.  They have hefty operating expenses, such as drivers’ salaries, vehicle maintenance and fuel costs…without a critical mass of riders, transit service becomes unaffordable and inefficient.  In general, transit riders want convenience, reliable and efficient service, and value for their money.  When a transit service doesn’t generate enough revenue, it often cuts back on service – for example, by reducing the number of vehicles running on any given route.  And when that happens, commuters…are much more likely to rely on their vehicles. [pp. 72-3]

And whilst this is certainly true, what Lorinc overlooks is that two of his examples of sprawl cities, Houston and Calgary, are the centres of the oil industry in the United States and Canada.  Another city with a shoddy public transportation system is Detroit, home of the domestic car industry in the United States.  In the case of Detroit, the car companies made sure that the city didn’t have a viable and efficient public transit system; what would it say if the home of the car companies had efficient transit?  It would hurt their bottom lines.  Certainly, the fact that public transit in Calgary and Houston is a dodgy proposition is not all that surprising.

The discussion of epidemics and the city in the final chapter is quite timely, given the worldwide paranoia about H1N1.  Our concentration in cities will make the transmission of H1N1 faster and more intense (though, of course, H1N1 remains less potent than common influenza, at least in Canada and the United States).  Indeed, cities in the industrialised world used to be cesspools of disease and epidemics, even as recently as the late 19^th century.  Montréal was the site of the last smallpox epidemic in the industrialised west, in 1885.  Epidemiology in 1885 was only starting to develop, but its successive advancement throughout the 20^th century has meant that epidemics like the Spanish influenza in the wake of World War I have become increasingly a thing of the past.  Governments, at all levels, have recognised their responsibility to protect the health and lives of their citizens. To that end, massive public health bureaucracies have grown in the industrialised north to protect us from disease.  However, this doesn’t mean that we are no longer vulnerable.  Lorinc reminds us of this when he points to the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto.  SARS originated in the Guangdong region of China before spreading, primarily to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto.  Why an outbreak occurred in Toronto, rather than Vancouver, itself a major city of the Chinese diaspora, is instructive.  In Ontario, the province of which Toronto is the capital, a right-wing, anti-big government administration came to power 8 years earlier, and proceeded to radically slash government spending in all areas, including public health.  The consequences were disastrous, as hundreds were infected and quarantined, and 43 people died in Toronto from SARS, as hospitals lacked the resources to deal with the infection (in Walkerton, Ontario, a small city, government cutbacks led to a fatal outbreak of eColi in the water supply in 2000 that led to half the city getting ill and at least 7 deaths).  Meanwhile, in Vancouver, writes Lorinc,

provincial labor officials had trained health care workers in the proper use of special masks and other safety systems designed to protect them from catching contagious diseases while administering emergency procedures to ill patients.[p. 121].

All in all, Lorinc provides us with an instructive and lively introduction to the problems facing cities and, as a result, humanity in the urban century.  That being said, however, his conclusion remains rather trite and does a disservice to the discussion throughout the book:

The twenty-first metropolis will be a concentrated place of nearly unfathomable diversity – ethnic, social, economic, environmental, religious.  Large cities have become a microcosm of everything that’s taking place in this complex world.  For good or ill, they are our future. [p. 128].