532 Journal of Planning Education and Research 35(4) Portney draws the reader’s attention to how cities that have a relatively large creative class are cities where there is likely to be a greater push for sustainability initiatives. He also notes that local public officials are responsive to orga- nized voices that advocate for environmental or sustainabil- ity initiatives; in reverse, if grassroots advocacy groups can be organized and contact public officials, those public offi- cials are likely to push for sustainability programs. Throughout the text, Portney points out that the goal of his book is not to ascertain whether cities are actually achiev- ing sustainability—whether the policies and programs in place are having an effect in creating more environmentally, economically, or socially just cities. He states repeatedly that such a goal would be premature. Rather, his text—and pre- sumably, his Index of Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously— are a necessary foundation in setting up future work that may be able to answer that question. As a prelude to being able to ask whether sustainability programs are working, Portney’s book asks what cities are doing to try to become more sus- tainable places. Overall, Portney’s Index, his qualitative case studies, and his quantitative models are all of value to researchers in envi- ronmental policy and land use—as well as to would-be deci- sion makers in policy. His Index in particular is a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on sustainability by providing a means of evaluating how seriously a city is tak- ing sustainability and allowing a comparison among multiple cities. Relph, Edward. 2014. Toronto: Transformations in a City and Its Region. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 206 pp. $45.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-8122-4542-4 Reviewed by: Abigail Friendly, University of Toronto DOI: 10.1177/0739456X15603150 As the title suggests, Edward Relph’s book, Toronto: Transformations in a City and Its Region, is about the trans- formations of Toronto as a city region. The reality behind the name “Toronto” has changed frequently with shifting political boundaries. For Relph, tracing these transforma- tions relates to the way Toronto is defined. The way Toronto’s urban area expanded over the past two centuries “determines what is considered good and bad about that development” while informing urban and regional politics, planning, and policies regarding Toronto in relation to North America and globally (5). Toronto has experienced profound and intense transformations over the past half century, what Lefebvre (2003) called an “urban revolu- tion,” causing urban needs and values to take precedence. Relph’s goal is to create a broad portrait of the metropolitan region, uniting many aspects to understand how its urban forms and landscapes have shifted and their distinctive qualities, including their transformations over the past fifty years. Although these transformations taking Toronto from an old-fashioned Victorian city to a modern, multicultural conurbation are locally specific, viewed from a North American context, such shifts are extraordinary for their intensity, making the book interesting for an audience beyond Toronto. One interesting feature of Relph’s examination is his use of both Toronto’s walkable old center and the new suburbs as the units of analysis, often a source of division among Torontonians. The concern with the entire region resulted from the author’s own experience in the older parts of Toronto and in the newer suburbs. Relph’s approach embraces both views of Toronto as an urban region: “It is, I think, fair to claim that my experience of the Toronto metro- politan region is based neither from the center looking out nor from the outside looking in. Instead I occupy a liminal position somewhere between the two” (10). To highlight these two facets of Toronto’s urban form, Relph uses two well-known Torontonians—Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan—as a framework to inform the portrait of the Toronto metropolitan region. Relph draws extensively on Jacobs’s (1961) critique of modern urban planning as a champion of walkable neighborhoods and on McLuhan’s (1964) work on shifts in communications technologies, sug- gesting “that every city would become a suburb of every other city” (Relph 2014, 10). These postwar suburban parts of Toronto are linked by networks of roads, electronic mes- sages, and social connections. While neither Jacobs nor McLuhan were born in Toronto, both influenced the city at the level of discourse in different ways. Nevertheless, Relph and others have been critical of Jacobs’s remarks about the suburban parts of Toronto (Lemon 1996). Although Relph notes that both Jacobs and McLuhan resonate through- out his book, Jane Jacobs’s ideas seem to take precedence to McLuhan’s. Relph’s method for understanding Toronto’s transforma- tions is a combination of “going out and looking around” (Bruegmann 2005, 9) by foot and by car, as well as the Canadian census, planning reports, websites, and various other sources. As Relph notes, driving serves to broaden the expanse across the geographical scope of the city while walking reveals the details of particular places. This book is a detailed account about a city based on years of living and working in Toronto, providing a comprehensive account of the transformations that have made Toronto what it is—a dynamic, diverse, and rapidly growing city. This analysis is interlaced with illustrations and maps by the author, repre- senting the fabric of the urban region of Toronto. Following on from the introduction (“Urban Transformations”), chapter 2 (“Confused Identities”) captures the many identities and ways of viewing Toronto, including the old City of Toronto, Metro Toronto, the Greater Toronto Area or City of Toronto after amalgamation, the Greater at UNIV TORONTO on January 4, 2016 jpe.sagepub.com Downloaded from