A publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries
A division of the American Library Association
Editorial Offices: 575 Main Street, Suite 300, Middletown, CT 06457-3445
Phone: (860) 347-6933
Fax: (860) 704-0465

FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY

Please do not link to this page.

July 2015 Vol. 52 No. 11

Turning from her American studies base (Noxious New York, 2007) to China, where she has family connections, Sze (Univ. of California, Davis) again explores the interplay of culture, politics, and materiality in environmentalism.  Twenty-first-century China's well-publicized drive to create green islands of imagination and practice makes it a significant player in future environmental change, as well as a comparative venue to analyze "eco-desire," technofixes, branding, and policy outcomes.  Sze scrutinizes relatively representative but often ineffectual eco-projects around Shanghai, including development of Chongming Island as a "special ecological place," the Arup engineering firm's eco-city of Dongtan, themed suburbs, and the motifs and some pavilions of the Shanghai World Expo.  The author combines short visits with close readings of planning documents, websites, and periodicals.  She offers analyses that feel lively and journalistic rather than probing broader urban political economic questions across China that so closely intertwine opinion and ecology, such as resettlement, environmentally oriented production (the solar panel industry), the complexities of current and future urbanization and planning, or the multilayered global relations of China and world markets.  Nonetheless, the book accessibly introduces paradoxes of greening China's future—and that of the world.

--G. W. McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College

Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries.