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Boudreau, Julie-Anne, Roger Keil and Douglas Young. Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 247 pp. ISBN: 9781442600935.
The authors of this book are far from shy about stating where they stand on efforts to elevate Toronto's prominence in the global city movement. In their words, "cities have become the political place where the dirty work of globalization is being done" (p. 23). Within the pages of Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism, readers will find well-researched, wide-ranging accounts of how ideologically-driven policies, and altered structures of governance, affected the development and character of the city. Although the term neoliberalism is generally used to denote the period that began around 1980 with the governments of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, the authors focus primarily on describing the implications and impacts of political shifts and events that occurred between the mid-1990s and the present.
The authors contribute to the literature in two notable ways. First, their informative and compelling narrative underscores the extent to which the fortunes of a global city such as Toronto are dependent on, and potentially vulnerable to, shifting political ideologies and regimes at the provincial and national levels. Second, they demonstrate how public policy formation and public investment decisions can be dramatically re-shaped by "ideas in good currency" propagated in the popular literature.
The fact that Toronto has functioned as a principal laboratory for applying economic development theories popularized by Richard Florida in his bestselling 2003 book, The Rise of Creative Class, makes Changing Toronto particularly timely, and potentially of interest to a broad readership. Indeed, given...