(Re)Generating Inclusive Cities

As suburban expansion declines, cities have become essential economic, cultural and social hubs of global connectivity. This book is about urban revitalization across North America, in cities including San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Vancouver, New York and Seattle. Infrastructure projects including the High Line and Big Dig are explored alongside urban neighborhood creation and regeneration projects such as Hunters Point in San Francisco and Regent Park in Toronto. Today, these urban regeneration projects have evolved in the context of unprecedented neoliberal public policy and soaring real estate prices. Consequently, they make a complex contribution to urban inequality and poverty trends in many of these cities, including the suburbanization of immigrant settlement and rising inequality. (Re)Generating Inclusive Cities wrestles with challenging but important questions of urban planning, including who benefits and who loses with these urban regeneration schemes, and what policy tools can be used to mitigate harm? We propose a new way forward for understanding and promoting better urban design practices in order to build more socially just and inclusive cities and to ultimately improve the quality of urban life for all.

"If the post-World War II period was the era of the suburbs, the current historical moment belongs to the city. In Canada and the US, young people and empty nesters are flocking to the great urban centers, which are growing in both affluence and inequality. The poor are pushed out to decaying inner ring suburbs or corralled in city neighborhoods that are coming under increasing pressure to gentrify as the cost of living in New York, Montreal, San Francisco and Vancouver skyrockets. (Re)Generating Inclusive Cities draws our attention to all of the complexities and contradictions that come with this package. From Zuberi and Taylor, we learn about the power (and problems) of mega projects like the High Line, the difficulties of brownfield reclamation, and the social and political challenges of mixed income housing. They challenge received wisdom about hyper-urbanization, force our attention to social policy differences that separate Canada and the US and hence inflect the unfolding of common pressures of globalization and neo-liberal policy making. It is a forceful, intelligent, empirically grounded work that all urban scholars will appreciate."Katherine Newman, Torrey Little Professor of Sociology and Provost University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Dan Zuberi is RBC Chair and Associate Professor of Social Policy at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on urban poverty, health, education, employment and social welfare. Ariel Taylor is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research focuses on democratization, civil society, neoliberalism and private governance. She holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Fellowship.