Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development
From a stalwart progressive perspective, Fitzgerald surveys contemporary initiatives in American cities to create green jobs. Organizing urban projects into renewable energy, energy efficiency, building renovation and construction, the waste and recycling streams, and transportation, the author enumerates their goals, financing schemes, and measures of success. In Fitzgerald’s book, the measures tend to be numbers of green jobs created and the project’s reduction of carbon emissions, not those of free-enterprise profitability. Thus in her discussions of projects, a slew of government taxes, subsidies, and regulations, plus foundation grants, numerically defines the projects that she presents. If green projects in big cities such as New York and Los Angeles are prominent in Fitzgerald’s inventory, midsize burgs such as Toledo, Ohio, a site of solar-technology manufacturing, or Portland, Oregon, a bastion of bicycling promotion, signal that progressives’ approaches to the green future are widespread and active around the country. Commenting approvingly about the Obama administration’s support for some local organizations, Fitzgerald, an urban planner, delivers informative accounts of contemporary trends, closing with an exhortation for national planning to mature green technologies. --Gilbert Taylor