Here are 90 books that Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice fans have personally recommended if you like
Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
In this book, Patsy Healey develops an approach to understanding and evaluating governance processes of urban space by investigating ‘actors’ who are involved in these processes and their power relations.
On the one hand, she emphasizes the importance of context, such as economic, social, and environmental contexts, which impact how the physicality of space and its governance process is shaped. Using a social constructivist and relational approach, she investigates urban space, its dynamics, and governance processes and shows the multiplicity of social worlds, rationalities, and practices that co-exist in the urban context.
Healey also explores and demonstrates the complexity of the power relations between actors of urban space governance. She finds out that particular forms of the collaborative process of spaces (especially socially inclusive and just collaborative ones) can be more effective in transforming practices, cultures, and outcomes.
...a major, carefully argued contribution, which should raise the discourse among planning theorists to a new level - a level reserved for a book that succeeds in the ambitious task of weaving together, into one fabric, theories of planning and theories in planning'. - Rachelle Alterman and Tamy Stav, Town Planning Review
'...[A] visionary and important work...' - A.McArthur, Planning and Design
'A brilliant exposition of the development of theoretical concepts of planning in the second half of the Twentieth century.' - A. Gilg, Perspectives in Rural Policy and Planning
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
I think this book is very illuminating in learning the social aspect of sustainability.
She particularly focuses on urban regeneration projects in European cities. It shows how social sustainability can be assessed, measured, and monitored by using various regeneration projects in five European cities (Sant Adria de Besos in Spain, Turin in Italy, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Leipzig in Germany, and Cardiff in the UK).
I like this book because of its comprehensive assessment of the social sustainability of these projects by examining the institutional arrangements, financial products and tools, stakeholders’ involvement, and their contribution, monitoring, and measurement systems. In this way, it provides us with a new framework for assessing social sustainability.
Urban regeneration is a key focus for public policy throughout Europe. This book examines social sustainability and analyses its meaning and significance - an area of research which has, until now, been comparatively neglected. The authors offer a comprehensive European perspective to identify best practice in sustainable urban regeneration in five major cities in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. Urban Regeneration & Social Sustainability: best practice from European cities examines the extent to which social sustainability is incorporated within urban regeneration projects in the EU, but also investigates how local authorities, developers, investors and other key stakeholders approach…
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
This is a landmark book that provides an interdisciplinary and global analysis of the 20th-century cities.
Graham and Marvin conceive the city as a flow process, and they examine the networked infrastructure of cities such as transport, communication, energy, water, and street networks.
What I like about this book is that it helps readers to understand the complexity and the sociotechnical processes of modern cities by using urban network infrastructure and providing examples across scales from local to global examples. This book also shows us how to approach modern cities with an interdisciplinary approach by using social theories such as actor-network theory, political economy, and relational theories.
Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about: *globalization and the city *technology and society *urban space and urban networks *infrastructure and the built environment *developed, developing and post-communist worlds. With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
This is one of my favourite books, as it provides a rigorous analysis of the environmental policy in the US from the 1970s and 2010.
It pinpoints the successes and failures of these policies at the subnational, regional, and state levels by using several case studies such as air and water pollution control, state and local climate change policy, open space preservation, urban growth, and regional ecosystem management.
What I also really like about this book is that readers can see various meanings of sustainability and understand that the concept can serve as a roadmap, which helps settlement systems evolve in a sustainable way.
This analysis of U.S. environmental policy offers a conceptual framework that serves as a valuable roadmap to the array of laws, programs, and approaches developed over the last four decades. Combining case studies and theoretical discussion, the book views environmental policy in the context of three epochs: the rise of command-and-control federal regulation in the 1970s, the period of efficiency-based reform efforts that followed, and the more recent trend toward sustainable development and integrated approaches at local and regional levels. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the new approaches and places these experiments within the larger framework of an…
My name is Susan Perrow. I am an Australian whose ‘work’ passion is stories and storytelling. I am an author, storyteller, teacher trainer, and parent educator. For the last 30 years, I have been documenting stories from other cultures, writing stories, and telling stories to groups of children and adults – all this woven in with a career in teaching, lecturing, and consulting in Australia, Africa, Asia, China, Europe, and North America. I currently have four published story collections, in a total of 14 languages. Three of my collections are Healing Stories for Challenging Behaviour, An A-Z Collection of Behaviour Tales, and Stories to Light the Night: A Grief and Loss Collection for Children, Families and Communities.
I have chosen my fourth collection to introduce to you below.
Mother Nature must be very grateful this handbook exists. Within its 368 pages is a treasury of time-tested stories, creative activities, and methods that environmental educators and storytellers can use to affect people’s pro-environmental behaviour. Its collection of 21 chapters share a myriad of ways to use storytelling for a greener world. Each chapter has a different author(s), bringing their perspective on environment, community, and learning through stories. They explore the links between storytelling and emotional literacy, place, environmental justice, connecting with alienated youngsters, how to encourage children and adults’ curiosity about nature, building community, sustainability, and indigenous peoples, local legends, human-animal communication, and how to co-create a sustainable future together.
Storytelling for a Greener World is a treasury of forty-three stories, creative activities, techniques, tips, and descriptions of inspiring practice to both empower newcomers and seasoned storytellers. The book provides a handy, unique, and authoritative resource for developing innovative story-work and will be a key sourcebook of lasting usefulness.
This handbook offers time-tested stories, creative activities, and methods that environmental educators and storytellers can use to encourage sound environmental behavior. Whether it is a brief mention of seeing a skein of geese flying in an evening sky or children from a rough area being inspired by kittiwakes, both adults and…
I’ve been writing comics and graphic novels for over twenty years. Many of my stories feature superheroes you probably know: in 2000, for example, I became the first woman to launch and write a Batman comic series. Lately, though, I’ve been worrying that the framework of superhero stories—the idea that someone with uncommon power or skills will come to save us from a threat not of our own making—is inadequate in the face of global warming. The climate crisis is a problem we created, and can only address, together. I wrote Rewild to explore those concerns, and to call forth a new kind of hero: you.
I was fortunate enough to see Joanna Macy speak at Spirit Rock with my mom back in 2015. She warned us away from the “ditches of paralysis and panic,” which were the exact things I found myself stuck in after completing my book in 2021. Macy is so many things—an activist, a translator of Rilke, a Buddhist scholar, a moving speaker, a mother, a teacher—and this book, created in celebration of her ninetieth birthday, is a lovely introduction to her writing and that of those she’s inspired. I felt so grateful to discover it and be reminded of something else Macy told us that day: that by tapping into our deeper “ecological selves” we can feel supported by this planet we belong to even as we work to save it.
Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology whose decades of writing, teaching, and activism have inspired people around the world. In this collection of writings, leading spiritual teachers, deep ecologists, and diverse writers and activists explore the major facets of Macy’s lifework. Combined with eleven pieces from Macy herself, the result is a rich chorus of wisdom and compassion to support the work of our time.
“Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
History is my passion as well as my profession. I love a good story! When I was teaching courses in environmental history and women’s history, I kept noticing the intriguing intersections, which inspired me to write Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers. Most of my work focuses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1920) and includes two award-winning biographies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Belle La Follette Progressive Era Reformer. I’m also the co-editor of A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and have written dozens of op-eds and give public talks (some of which can be found in the C-SPAN online library and on YouTube).
The environmental justice movement grew out of recognition of the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by low-income communities, including many communities of color. Zimring provides a detailed and compelling analysis of the long history of environmental racism that the environmental justice movement seeks to remedy. He reveals how ideas about race, hygiene, and waste have shaped where and how people (including Native Americans, immigrant groups, and African Americans) have lived and worked.
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene
When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him "clean and articulate," he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people…
I’m a scholar of environmental history with a focus on human-animal relationships. I’ve also studied the histories of slavery and the African Diaspora, and in my book I’ve fused approaches from these two fields to look at how human-animal relations and networks shaped the expansion of slavery and slave trading from West Africa to the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My scholarship is also an outgrowth of my teaching, and I regularly teach American environmental and cultural history at California State University, Northridge. I finished my PhD in history at Rutgers University, and my research has recently been funded by the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William & Mary.
Pests like cockroaches, rats, ants, and fleas are social constructions, meaning they are only pests to humans because they often outcompete humans for space, food, and shelter.
Dawn Day Biehler’s book further shows that pests and urban infestations of animals categorized as pests reinforced racist ideas about “dirty” communities in cities like New York and Chicago.
From tenements to alleyways to latrines, twentieth-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Dawn Day Biehler argues that the urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space.
Community activists and social reformers strived to control pests in cities such as Washington, DC, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Milwaukee, but such efforts fell short when authorities blamed families and neighborhood culture for infestations rather than attacking racial segregation or…
Some years ago, my eyes were opened to the severity of our climate crisis and it changed me forever. Since that pivotal time, I’ve turned my therapeutic training and clinical experience toward addressing the existential threat of our time. I recognize how we must unmask our deep psychological biases, many of which unconsciously bring harm to our lives and social structures. I pair this with emotional resiliency practices for these deep and sustained efforts. As a Climate Psychology educator and consultant, I enjoy interdisciplinary strategies where I can contribute transformative methods that help us reclaim dormant human capacities that equip us to usher in a more just and safer world.
Ray is a colleague and an environmental studies professor at Humboldt State University. After witnessing firsthand the rising emotional distress in her students, she was compelled to respond with empathy and supportive resources. She began to recognize that teaching about climate impacts was not enough, and perhaps it even contributes to the problems if the emotional responses are not addressed in tandem. Written primarily with Gen Z in mind, I find the perspectives and resources are useful for anyone experiencing eco-anxiety, and she incorporates strong and insightful social justice perspectives.
Gen Z's first "existential toolkit" for combating eco-guilt and burnout while advocating for climate justice.
A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The "climate generation"-late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z-is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet's environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when they confront this seemingly intractable situation.
Drawing on a decade of experience leading and teaching in college environmental studies…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
I’m deeply concerned about the health of the planet and am puzzled by our failure to act. As someone who thinks a lot about museums and heritage (aka the stories we tell about ourselves), I’m intrigued by how we think about places of environmental harm as heritage and how we pay attention to the environmental impact of heritage sites like WWI battlefields, English ironworks, and Appalachian coal mines. Interrogating what we remember and what we forget illuminates the systems of power that benefit from ignoring environmental and social costs. My hope is that understanding the history of toxic harm points us to a more sustainable, just future.
This book changed my thinking not just about pollution and its impact, but how scientific (and I would include historical) research itself often perpetuates colonial power dynamics. Its centering of Indigenous perspectives shifts thinking about plastic pollution by aligning it with Indigenous concepts of land, ethics, and relations.
In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)-an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada-to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of…
