Routledge Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities: Economy, Environment and Community in Baltimore: 02 (Routledge Studies in Public Administration and Environmental Sustainability)

Baltimore, like many other cities around the globe, is redesigning local government policy and programs in order to become a more sustainable city. Sustainability, as a concept guiding public action, encourages city officials to integrate policy and programs addressing the economic, environmental, and social health of the community. City governments, including Baltimore, have adopted plans to integrate this new priority into local policy and program management. Reorienting city policy and programs to address an emergent concern like sustainability requires collaboration between city government and various actors and organizations in the community. Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities examines how cities define sustainability and form policy implementation networks to integrate sustainability into city programs. Using the city of Baltimore to describe and analyze the involvement of the participants in local sustainability efforts in rich detail, Eric S. Zeemering argues that when we think about the sustainable city, the city government is not the best unit of analysis for our investigations or policy planning. Instead, policy networks within cities carve out slices of a sustainability agenda, define sustainability in their own ways, and form implementation networks with city government officials, neighborhood and community organizations, funders, and state and federal agencies in order to achieve specific goals. When cities begin to integrate sustainability into policies and programs, surveying and understanding competing definitions of sustainability within the community may be central to their success. The book’s rich array of data, including qualitative data from elite interviews and public documents, Q-methodology and social network analysis will make for an engaging read to scholars of political science or public affairs as well as the interested citizen or policy advocate. Review "In Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities, Zeemering uses Baltimore as his backdrop to produce a careful and nuanced analysis of how sustainability is defined and implemented at the city level, and how it matters. Ideal for the classroom as well as the scholar’s bookshelf."― Richard C. Feiock, Florida State University "Zeemering unpacks how sustainability is defined and sustainability policy is implemented by local policymakers, community leaders, environmental advocates, and the business community. Utilizing extensive interview data, he weaves together a compelling tale of how one city with numerous challenges and limited resources grappled with this issue." ―Abigail York, Arizona State University "This detailed case study of urban sustainability provides further justification for scholars to include Baltimore in their research... this book is highly recommended for readers interested in emerging sustainability programs and in conducting case study research. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections."--M. L. Godwin, University of La Verne, CHOICE February 2015 "A political scientist, Zeemering uses analytic tools that are not often seen outside of political science literature. I will definitely have my doctoral students read this book as an example of urban fieldwork research that can address urban problems. Students will benefit greatly from the careful descriptions of methodology and the insights Zeemering extracts to better understand the process of change in cities." ― Carla Chifos, University of Cincinnati, Journal of Urban Affaris About the Author Eric S. Zeemering is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration in the School of Public and Global Affairs at Northern Illinois University, and a faculty associate with the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability and Energy.  His research investigates collaborative public management, intergovernmental relations, and local govern