From the Back Cover
This book is about politics and planning outside of cities, where urban political economy and planning theories do not account for the resilience of places that are no longer rural and where local communities work hard to keep from ever becoming urban. By examining exurbia as a type of place that is no longer simply rural or only tied to the economies of global resources (e.g., mining, forestry, and agriculture), we explore how changing landscapes are planned and designed not to be urban, that is, to look, function, and feel different from cities and suburbs in spite of new home development and real estate speculation. The book's authors contend that exurbia is defined by the persistence of rural economies, the conservation of rural character, and protection of natural ecological systems, all of which are critical components of the contentious local politics that seek to limit growth.
Comparative political ecology is used as an organizing concept throughout the book to describe the nature of exurban areas in the U.S. and Australia, although exurbs are common to many countries. The essays each describe distinctive case studies, with each chapter using the key concepts of competing rural capitalisms and uneven environmental management to describe the politics of exurban change. This systematic analysis makes the processes of exurban change easier to see and understand. Based on these case studies, seven characteristics of exurban places are identified: rural character, access, local economic change, ideologies of nature, changes in land management, coalition-building, and land-use planning.
This book will be of interest to those who study planning, conservation, and land development issues, especially in areas of high natural amenity or environmental value. There is no political ecology book quite like this--neither one solely focused on cases from the developed world (in this case the United States and Australia), nor one that specifically harnesses different case studies from multiple areas to develop a central organizing perspective of landscape change.
Laura E. Taylor is an associate professor and planning program coordinator in York University's Faculty of Environmental Studies, with a PhD in cultural and historical geography from the University of Toronto. She is a member of the Government of Ontario's Greenbelt Council, the Urban Land Institute Women's Leadership Team, and Lambda Alpha International. She is a registered professional planning consultant. She has written many articles on exurbia and planning in both scholarly and professional journals and is co-editor with Kirsten Valentine Cadieux of the book Landscape and the Ideology of Nature: Green Sprawl.
Patrick Hurley is an associate professor of Environmental Studies at Ursinus College where he is an environmental social scientist interested in the politics of natural area conservation and plant foraging in city regions. He holds a PhD in Environmental Studies, Science and Policy from the University of Oregon, where his research on exurbia wonhim the Morris K. Udall Foundation's Environmental Public Policy and Conflict Resolution Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. With Peter A. Walker, he is coauthor of the book, Planning Paradise: Politics and Visioning of Land Use in Oregon, and written extensively on exurbia in the western and eastern United States.
