Over the last four years the United States has witnessed what can only be described as a direct political assault on the environment. Researchers estimate that some 100 federal rules governing clean air, water, parks, wetlands, emissions, and energy were removed, reversed, or eased. Cities, which sit on the frontlines of these challenges, are under attack from rising sea levels, polluted groundwater, toxic air, drought, extreme weather, the pressures of demographic change, and the dynamics of growth. We are experiencing what Carmen Sirianni refers to in his new book as a period in which the environmental field is being “unsettled.” And though the forecast may appear daunting, this book would suggest that with a “robust civic infrastructure” (p. 238), firmly anchored governance institutions, deeply embedded relational networks, and astute interlocutors, there may be a path forward. This is a long-range look at civic collaboration and pragmatism in the field of sustainability. There are no quick fixes here, but with attention to shared risks, resiliency, capacity, and trust building, there may well be hope for the future.

Sustainable Cities in American Democracy: From Postwar Urbanism to a Civic Green New Deal, is a fine-grained exploration of “sustainable cities” and the lessons one might learn from them for the development of a Green New Deal. This book is centered on the “generative power of cities” (p. 24) in environmental fields of action and the central role that civic engagement can play in shaping these fields.

Sirianni’s work is heavily informed by three schools of thought found within political sociology: field theory as articulated in the work of Bourdieu, new institutionalism as expressed by theorists such as DiMaggio and Powell, and strategic action field theory as conveyed by Fligstein and McAdam. Fields are understood to be policy spheres composed of actors (individual, organizational, social movement, market based, or states). Actors vie for strategic advantage over field construction using resources, capacities, and positioning to control the norms, rules, meanings, and actions within the field. Thus, fields are places of struggle. They develop over time, often through isomorphic processes of replication, networking among actors within and across, and the layering of complementary policy arenas. Field building occurs through a variety of pathways: coercion, competition, dependencies, and knowledge sharing. States are composed of diverse policy fields, each socially constructed over time, bringing moments of stability, fluxuation, and transformation. Fields are constantly being remade.

Importantly, Sirianni ties these sociological theoretical frames to many important themes to be found in the urban politics literature. Urban regimes, growth machines, and multilevel-governance theories are incorporated into the discussions of coalition formations within fields.

Urban planning theories are discussed in relationship to the ways knowledge is constructed, values are transmitted, and capacity is built (participatory, community development, asset-based analysis, transit-oriented development, and the just city). American political development is used as a vehicle through which to explore the history of the environmental policy field’s development and the emergence of sustainable cities. Organizational theory (organizational behavior, field theory, historic institutionalism, and isomorphism), public policy (systems theory, social construction theory, policy feedback, and discourse analysis), democratic theory (social capital, social movements, and social networks), environmental sciences (civic ecology, sustainability, and resilience), and economics (political economy and radical economic theories) all have a place in Sirianni’s analysis. There are also a bevy of democratic theorists referenced throughout the book—Jürgen Habermas, Sherry Arnstein, Carole Patemen, Jane Mansbridge, and Archon Fung, among others—feeding into the larger goal of building a “systematic approach to deliberative democracy” (p. 26).

Sirianni asks us to consider what lessons can be learned from a history of democratic action within the institutional fields of environment, land use, and transportation (which together shape the sustainability field). He does this through a sweeping analysis of the successes and failures of sustainable city initiatives, as linked to their positioning within vertical scales of power. He highlights the ways in which policy is influenced by the interactions among vast networks of professional, civic, state, and market actors.

What makes this opus especially impressive are the ways in which Sirianni endeavors to situate sustainable cities within a vertical set of organizational action fields (proximate and distant) at global, federal, regional, state, and local levels. In doing so, he does not lose sight of the ways in which democratic and civic action has shaped (and been shaped by) these emerging fields. Cities are not relegated to the margins of policy formation but rather are central in his rendering of the sustainability field. The terrain is vast—Sirianni moves the reader from water, air, and land use fields that emerge from the postwar period and then travels through the subsequent decades by analyses of transportation and mobility initiatives (highways, bicycles, and pedestrian), energy, real estate, green buildings, economic and community development, urban agriculture (farms and gardens), technology, health, and food systems.

The scope of the book can also be seen as a weakness. There is so much terrain to cover here that some themes are inevitably given short shrift. For example, although equity and justice are highlighted throughout this book, there is little real attention to the implications of the larger structural challenges posed by the legacies of institutional racism around environmental justice in the United States. There is far more attention paid to roles of the professional and larger civic groups and to federal agencies and regulations than to the ways in which immigrants and BIPOC groups have in some cases been incorporated into and in other instances been left at the margins of these dynamics. It is not, however, a complete case of omission. Sirianni does discuss the difficulties of promoting sustainability in cities like Baltimore and Chicago due to legacies of racial segregation and inequity. And he uses the cases of San Francisco and Phoenix to highlight the implications of immigration on these fields. But although they are mentioned, these topics lack the same detailed attention that he gives to other aspects of his analysis. The book could also do with a bit more streamlining. This may simply be the inevitable outcome of this herculean attempt to weave together what seems to be a thousand different strands of this complex field of action over a long time frame.

The book is organized into eight chapters plus a postscript dealing with contemporary efforts to construct a Green New Deal. Chapter 1 provides the reader with the theoretical frameworks used in the book. Here Sirianni poses the core questions and discusses all the underlying theories. What is the relationship between civic action, urban environmentalism, and sustainable cities? How have actors and institutions strategically interacted with one another within and across policy fields? How can democracy become institutionalized as a practical component of field development and policy framing? And finally, how can we more effectively “align institutional logics to serve public purposes” (p. 9)?

Chapter 2 explores field development around urban water and air. Starting in the early postwar period we see the ways in which networks of civic groups formed in response to pollution infiltrating the groundwater and causing highly visible impacts on urban, suburban, and rural communities. Sirianni provides us with a long-range look at the ways that organized civic action in the early postwar period generated critical local knowledge, which informed subsequent federal legislation (Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, as well as the Clean Air and Water Acts that came later), and institutionalized important democratic feedback mechanisms (i.e., environmental impact assessment regulations). Regulatory framing professionalizes the field and shapes subsequent openings for influence. These elements continue to shape and structure these fields today.

In chapter 3, attention turns to urban land-use conflicts, specifically those emerging during the 1960s and 1970s. It starts with attention to programs such as model cities, community action, community development, and urban renewal. Here we encounter a terrain in which there is far greater conflict among field actors. Not surprisingly in the case of air and water, federal framing policies emerged over time and helped settle the field. In the case of land use, there was no equivalent. In turn, we see a field that Sirianni describes as “poorly integrated” because of the conflicting values and norms of key stakeholders (p. 99). Growth is pitted against equity, and localities adopt more parochial visions, creating challenges around the integration of land-use concerns into the sustainability field. Thus, we see a more localized set of actors engaging in framing contests, and a less settled field emerges. Although air and water generated openings, Sirianni suggests that in the realm of land use the lack of a national law led to an unevenness in growth.

The book then drills down into subsidiary areas of urban sustainability. In chapter 4, urban “biking, walking, and farming” are the focus. Chapter 6 concentrates on “urban rivers and watersheds.” In these two chapters we begin to see some of the important nuances of field settlement processes and the layering that occurs over time. What is also revealed is the tendency for fields to become more centrist in their normative framing over time, pushing the values of more radical social movement groups to the margins. Thus, we also see how “right to the city” groups often remain on the periphery of field construction, pushing from the outside, yet rarely able to garner control of the narrative within dominant frames of action.

In chapter 6, Sirianni explores the ways in which the environmental field has taken shape in cities. This chapter presents core case studies of sustainable cities arrayed according to their degree of success. Portland is presented as the success story, followed by San Francisco and then Chicago. Baltimore and Phoenix are at the other end of the continuum. Along the way, he provides examples from New York and Philadelphia. Sirianni uses these case studies as “windows” into the unique, complex and distinctive pathways taken by cities.

Chapter 7 is used to pull the case analysis together, pointing to how the sustainable cities framework came together and highlighting what each of the component parts added along the way. Chapter 8 focuses more directly on the critical role that democratic engagement and professional associations played in the formation of urban sustainability. Sirianni concludes with a postscript on the challenges we face in the next phase of field construction, the development of a Green New Deal.

In the end we have an important analysis, one that is timely and offers important lessons about the challenges of the climate crisis. Collaborative democratic governance in a polarized world is no easy task, but Sirianni certainly provides us with food for thought and some important guidance on how we might build a “more robust civic Green New Deal” (p. 306).