Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City, by Robert Gottlieb. The MIT Press, 2007, 340 pp. $24.95 (paperback).

When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, there was an entertainment industry adage: “If you could make it in New York or Los Angeles, you could make it anywhere.” That rings true for Robert Gottlieb’s new book, Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City. If positive social and economic changes can occur in the unlikely climate of highly diverse L.A., a city synonymous with concrete freeways, dams, and the attempt to dominate nature—a place wrestling with growing economic and social inequality and stratification—there’s hope for the rest of us.

Robert Gottlieb is a long-time activist, professor of urban and environmental policy, and director of an environmental-policy institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He combines an audacious mix of strategies to suggest that community activism can succeed in working across social, racial, and economic divides. Despite increased globalization pressures that more often divide than unite, Gottlieb paints a picture of how immigrants, citizens, activists, organizations, and networks have coalesced to improve the quality and sustainability of the Los Angeles River; develop alternative transportation strategies; create farmers markets and urban gardens; and broaden economic opportunities. He posits that this combination of environment, community development, and social-change initiatives will lead to a more sustainable and livable environment.

One of Gottlieb’s more interesting concepts is “globalization from below,” which blends urban nature, community, and the right to the city for all occupants. He offers the example of the Thai Community Development Corporation (CDC), located in the East Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The CDC uses a fair-trade and community framework that imports and distributes jasmine rice grown by small farmers and collectives in northeast Thailand to Thai restaurants and stores in Los Angeles. Built upon the idea that social and economic change can be effected across borders, this arrangement not only provides income to the Thai farmers, but also creates income and jobs in L.A. Readers of Bill McKibben’s recent book Deep Economy (see “In It Together,” by Bob Van Meter, Shelterforce, Winter 2007), will recognize that Gottlieb’s idea of urban community sustainability is at odds with McKibben’s stress on localism. Gottlieb acknowledges this tension, but argues that the strong cultural connections around food transcend borders and point the way to a more nuanced view about the complexities of the globalization debate.

Nevertheless, the book would have benefited from additional examples and strategies that community-based organizations, local leaders, and business enterprises are using in L.A. to pursue globalization from below.

Gottlieb reminds us that building sustainable initiatives in the current Los Angeles environment of economic, social, ethnic, and racial divisions is daunting work, but that over the past two decades new leaders, organizations, and communities have emerged, offering a more unified vision for promoting social and economic equity that emphasizes the need for livable wages, greater local control of the production process, and access to alternative transportation and greater public spaces.

For many years, Los Angeles has been a trend-setter for the rest of the country in both negative (low-wage jobs, sprawl, franchises, shopping malls) as well as positive (immigration, small-business formation, community coalitions) social and economic trends. Gottlieb draws an intriguing picture of a city grappling with diversity and sustainable community in the global era in ways that could be a harbinger of things to come throughout the country. It behooves community-development practitioners and stakeholders in community vitality to learn from L.A.’s challenges and successes.