This article was downloaded by: [University of Massachusetts, Amherst]On: 04 October 2014, At: 15:01Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

The Professional GeographerPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpg20

A Review of “Urban ClimateChange Crossroads”Stephanie Buechler aa School of Geography and Development , Universityof Arizona , Tucson, AZPublished online: 03 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Stephanie Buechler (2011) A Review of “Urban ClimateChange Crossroads”, The Professional Geographer, 63:2, 295-297, DOI:10.1080/00330124.2011.553151

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2011.553151

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BOOK REVIEWSBimal K. Paul, Book Review Editor

Urban Climate Change Crossroads. RichardPlunz and Maria Paola Sutto, eds. Burling-ton, VT, and Surrey, UK: Ashgate,Columbia University, 2010. vii and 169 pp.,notes, maps, diagrams, appendices, and in-dex. $24.99 paper (ISBN 978-1-4094-0078-3); $114.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-7546-7999-8); Ebook (ISBN 978-0-7546-9980-4).

Reviewed by Stephanie Buechler, School ofGeography and Development, University ofArizona, Tucson, AZ.

Urban Climate Change Crossroads, edited byRichard Plunz and Maria Paola Sutto, is acollection of eighteen short essays originatingfrom a forum entitled “Urban Climate Changeat the Crossroads” in 2008. The authors takea stand that urban climate change is at a cross-roads ecologically, in the sense that ecologicalcollapse is inevitable if society does not changecourse, and intellectually, in the sense that mul-tidisciplinary teams are now necessary to tacklethe multifaceted challenges that climate changeconfronts us with. The authors aim to con-tribute to a new scholarly field of urban sus-tainable development. The multidisciplinaritythat the authors recommend is reflected in thewide array of expertise they bring to their ex-ploration of urban climate change issues. Thevolume includes both European and U.S. au-thors and case study examples, thus expand-ing the sustainability debate and also revealingthe global linkages so critical in elucidating theglobal scale of the urban climate change crisisand necessary action. Each chapter also con-tains, at the bottom of the page or chapter’s end,relevant quotes from well-known theorists andpractitioners on urban climate change issues.

In the first essay, Plunz reveals that the natu-ral sciences are, by necessity, “urbanizing” andthat design of the built environment is globaliz-ing. Science, design, and business practice andresearch are now beginning to be intertwinedand this is particularly evident, Plunz contends,with respect to global warming. Sze argues con-vincingly that urban climate change policy such

as urban design or transportation and planningmust be based on the interests of the power-less such as those without cars in New Orleanswho could not leave the city when HurricaneKatrina struck. Menne discusses urban climatechange and policy initiatives to combat delete-rious human health effects of energy and trans-portation use in European cities but falls shortof providing examples from particular cities toillustrate her points. Menne’s and Sze’s essaysdo not address the gender dimensions of vul-nerability to climate change; this omission isnotable in the rest of the essays as well, eventhough all topics addressed in the volume haveimportant gender dimensions.

Several of the chapters address urbangovernance issues. Bulkeley’s essay on urbangovernance drives home the important pointthat the equation of urban vulnerability (phys-ical, social, economic, and institutional) withthe Global South has translated into inactionin terms of adaptation measures within climatechange agendas of cities in the North. Menneargues for the integration of climate changepolicy with, for example, economic growthpolicies to better reflect the complex rela-tionship that climate change has with urbanheat island and other urbanization processes.She also argues for the linking of municipalwith regional, national, and internationalpolicy. Rosenzweig’s essay addresses urbangovernance related to climate change mainlywith respect to New York City, and Connell’sessay examines governance with respect mainlyto cities and businesses in Europe. Rosenzweigprovides excellent examples and statistics toassess the multistakeholder processes thatcreated city-wide plans to cut emissions, greenneighborhoods and buildings, and so on. Con-nell’s essay includes an assessment of how citiesin Europe can be greened to cut emissions andincrease adaptive capacity, but the diagramthat was ostensibly included to show howcities could reduce flooding surprisingly doesnot make any mention of passive rainwaterharvesting or retention basins. However,

The Professional Geographer, 63(2) 2011, pages 295–304 C© Copyright 2011 by Association of American Geographers.Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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296 Volume 63, Number 2, May 2011

Connell brings to the volume a discussionof how businesses can be harmed by climatechange (neglecting any mention that by theirvery location in cities they might be vulnerable)and a brief discussion of what businesses can doto take climate risks into account in planning.

Caroli contends that more sustainable urbanareas are also more competitive, but this essaylacked examples; this was only partially offset bythe quotes at the bottom of the pages. Burney’sinformative discussion of different postdisasterhousing designs and strategies for New YorkCity brings to life the challenges that urban cli-mate change will bring to coastal cities. Thearchitectural design and relief work challengesare better addressed than the social challenges,and the human health dimension is largely ab-sent. However, Burney’s main argument thatemergency housing might become more per-manent than is initially believed postdisasterand that therefore careful attention should beplaced on design is convincingly argued. Can-ciullo’s essay is an important contribution tothe understudied area of communication abouturban climate change risks to the public. Can-ciullo contends that an inundation of poorlyfiltered news or news paid for by big businessinterests leads to the public’s feelings of be-ing overwhelmed and consequently fatalistic.How news about climate change could be im-proved is left unanswered, although a call foraction-oriented alarmism is made by Canci-ullo as well as De Cauter in the quotes andreveals the bias in the way in which the termalarmist has been used by antienvironmental-ist interests. Nisbet’s essay also addresses theissue of communication, arguing that if miti-gation and adaptation-oriented policy is gearedtoward tangible programs such as green-collarjobs or clean energy, public support will in-crease and innovative policies in one city canbe spread to other cities. However, the few ex-amples he provides are too sketchy to supporthis arguments. His and most of the other es-says do not mention water resource variability(e.g., drought) as a contending factor in urbanclimate change and urban sustainability.

The article by Sclavi on consensus-buildingstrategies would have benefited from a dis-cussion of how these strategies might act asa catalyst for more equitable decision makingsurrounding the particular disputes and deci-sion making likely to arise with climate change

in urban areas. DeCauter examines climateimpacts spatially across the globe in his analysisof consumption, globalization, and disastercapitalism; he foresees an increasingly dividedworld where the privileged are protectedand can thus be more ecological but existwithin a widening sea of environmental andsocial disaster. DeMarchi’s essay exploressociology’s treatment of disaster and arguesfor an acceptance of the uncertainty of theeffects of climate change; she also argues thatadaptation should be seen in a positive lightas a form of resiliency that, together withmitigation efforts, better prepares humans toface this uncertainty. Above all, she arguesfor dialogue and collaboration. Orta uses adiscussion of the Antarctica Project to ask thisprovocative question: “Facing the increasingpressure of people obliged to go into exile, canwe the privileged, return to ourselves, behindthe frontiers and boundaries?” Orta, however,fails to describe the project in sufficient depthto shed light on the connection of the projectwith the issue of the displacement of peoplesdue to climate change. Abbate calls for a new,multivoice, urban risk-reduction-orientedplanning that includes a new, dynamic, globalcartography that reflects rapidly changinggeographies caused by melting ice sheets thatcan permanently inundate particular citiessuch as Shanghai and has poverty reduction asan important goal. Lanza’s overly brief essayargues that the environmental effects of climatechange are still unclear and require a long-termplanning horizon, but politics focus on short-term issues. Navarra’s essay closes the volumewith the important message that policy andpolicy change must be incorporated into cli-mate change assessments because any change inpolicy will influence climate change outcomes.

This innovative volume fills an importantneed by lending a special focus on climatechange to existing literature on urban sustain-ability and cities and the environment (such asSustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Na-ture [Farr 2007] and Environment and the City[Ravetz et al. 2009]), as well as global envi-ronmental change such as Global Environmen-tal Change and Human Security (Matthew et al.2010). This volume also adds a focus on ur-ban areas within the climate change literatureon the United States, such as Global ClimateChange Impacts in the United States (Karl et al.

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Book Reviews 297

2009), which includes only a brief section onurban climate change impacts for each regionin the United States, as well as providing a moreglobal analysis than volumes dedicated to onlyone region or nation. This volume should beviewed as a call for more in-depth studies on thevaried subtopics that the essays address relatedto climate change impacts on urban areas andhuman adaptation and mitigation responses.Key Words: cities, climate change, urban design,urban planning.

ReferencesFarr, D. 2007. Sustainable urbanism: Urban design with

nature. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Press.Karl, T. R., J. M. Melillo, and T. C. Peterson. 2009.

Global climate change impacts in the United States.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Matthew, R., J. Barnett, B. McDonald, and K. L.O’Brien. 2010. Global environmental change and hu-man security. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology.

Ravetz, J., P. Roberts, and C. George. 2009. Environ-ment and the City. London and New York: Rout-ledge.

Reconstructing Kobe: The Geography ofCrisis and Opportunity. David W. Edg-ington. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press,2010. xxii and 301 pp., 90 illustrations, 23 ta-bles. $95.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-7748-1756-1).

Reviewed by Roman Cybriwsky, Departmentof Geography and Urban Studies, TempleUniversity, Philadelphia, PA.

David Edgington and his family were liv-ing in Kyoto and felt the ground shake whenthe Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake (alterna-tively, the Kobe earthquake) struck the nearbycity of Kobe on the morning of 17 January1995. He came to the devastated metropolistwo weeks later to survey the damage in per-son and then returned many times in the ensu-ing years to study the progress of putting thecity’s life together again. Reconstructing Kobe ishis report. It is based on extensive fieldwork; in-terviews of public officials, planners, and otheractors in the reconstruction; and careful studyof planning documents, real estate records, de-tailed maps, census data, and other information,and it is truly authoritative. The fact that theearthquake took place in a time in Japan’s his-tory when the economy was weak and there

were barely enough funds to cover even thenormal functioning of government, much lessa wholesale rebuilding of a large city, makesthe subject of this book all the more interest-ing for what it reveals about national priorities,the weak voice of ordinary citizens in Japan,and the workings of government in Japan, bothnational and local.

The book takes a cue from the ancient Zenproverb that major setbacks give rise to newopportunities, and it is organized around dis-cussions of, first, what is called the “geographyof crisis” and, then, “the geography of opportu-nity.” The former considers the spatial distribu-tion of property damage and human casualtiesfrom the earthquake, as well as socioeconomiccorrelates such as the disproportionate impactof the temblor on lower income neighborhoodsand the elderly and the distribution withinKobe of emergency shelters and temporaryhousing in the days and months followingthe disaster. The latter focuses on planners’aspirations to make the postearthquake citybetter and safer than ever and to write for itan essentially new geography. There is tensionbetween the two, as what many citizens wantand need at a time of crisis does not correspondexactly to what planners had been envisioningfor the city since before the disaster suddenlypresented them a clean slate. Thus, we readin this volume about redevelopment plans forold neighborhoods that neighbors had littlesay about, and about protests from citizensthat they lost not just to the shaking and thefires of the earthquake but also to insensitivepostdisaster planning, municipal and nationalgovernment bureaucracy, and the ambitiouseconomic development goals of “Kobe Inc.”—the overarching restructuring of the city alongpostindustrial lines via large-scale, symbolicredevelopment projects. A prime example ofthe latter is the HAT Kobe project (HATstands for Happy Active Town) in which awaterfront industrial district was made into ashowy, mixed-use, high-rise and green spaceredevelopment zone, complete with the newHygo Prefectural Museum of Art and the GreatHanshin–Awaji Earthquake Memorial DisasterReduction and Human Renovation Institution.On the other hand, there are also inspiringexamples in Kobe of machizukuri (city building)planning that has flowed from the grassrootsup and examples of residential neighbor-hoods that were able to achieve substantial

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