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Hern, Matt. Common ground in a liquid city: essays in defense of an urban future. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010. 230p ISBN 9781849350105 paper $17.95
Common Ground in a Liquid City is an impassioned, radical set of musings by Matt Hern, an activist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Though he holds a Ph.D. in urban studies, his previous three books and his primary job are related to the deschooling movement, a progressive and unstructured form of home schooling. It seems, from the book and from Hern's bio on www.mightmatthern.com, that he relates to cities primarily as an activist; indeed, the book reads more like it was written by an activist than a scholar.
The author critiques his home city of Vancouver in order to help describe his vision of an ideal urban space. At the same time that he uses Vancouver to explicate his broader vision, Hern uses the wide world to shed light on Vancouver. Picking a different city in each chapter, he tells how a distinctive feature of each city got him thinking about what he likes or doesn't like about that city, and how those principles should be applied to Vancouver. For instance, Las Vegas makes Hern think about reliance on cars and how the design of a city can prevent even a determined pedestrian like him from walking to the store. The book describes some cities that most Americans know nothing about, like Diyarbakir in Kurdistan, but he does not describe them in great detail. The international cities are only a jumping-off point for Hern...