2015 Speaker's Book Award — ShortlistedCity planning in the GTHA has been mired in political grandstanding for the past decade, The New Urban Agenda offers a plain language solution to the issues plaguing the GTHA.Politics in the Greater Toronto, Hamilton Area (GTHA) have become increasingly divisive over the past decade, and solutions to the city’s problems have become hot-topic issues debated in council and the press, but never finding r...

The Hill Times: Best Books of 2017What are the limits of Canadian democracy and how are they being expanded by a revolution in participatory democracy?The Brexit vote in Britain and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States illustrate that our system of representative democracy is in deep trouble.There are signs of political alienation everywhere. Most believe that government is run by a few big interests. Wealthy corpo...

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at.Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exac...

The rivalry of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, a struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, thought neighborhoods like Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal...

Following widespread news that Toronto Police are in possession of the alleged Rob Ford crack cocaine video, there has never been a better time to read the essential backgrounder to Rob Ford's increasingly wild and erratic mayoralty.When people talk about recalling politicians, it's usually because the politician delivered something other than what they advertised, and the voters voted for--lies, frauds and infidelities. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, however, is exactly what the voters e...

**Dear Reader,In February 2013 I gave a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Standing a few feet from President Obama, I warned my fellow citizens of the dangers facing our country and called for a return to the principles that made America great.**Many Americans heard and responded, but our nation’s decline has continued. Today the danger is greater than ever before, and I have never shared a more urgent message than I do now.Our growing debt and deteriorating ...

Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is dominated by water. Like most cities, though, Toronto has mismanaged its water, from the decades-long transformation of the citys creeks into sewersheds to the alteration of Torontos waterfront. Recently, the trend of fettering Torontos water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the citys surface water. In H...

Witty, acerbic, hard-hitting, and timely, Keith Olbermann's Donald Trump commentaries come adapted from his hit GQ series The Resistance.Since Donald Trump's presidential nomination, Keith Olbermann has emerged as one of the web's most popular anti-Trump screedists—each installment of his GQ web series The Resistance receives nearly four million views, and his fiercely progressive monologues have garnered a new generation of fans and foll...

From bestselling author of Stop the Coming Civil War, Michael Savage reveals the massive dangers currently leading to the demise of our government.Michael Savage has been warning Americans for decades and now it's here. In GOVERNMENT ZERO: No Borders, No Language, No Culture, Savage sounds the alarm about how progressives and radical Islamists are each unwittingly working towards similar ends: to destroy Western Civilization and remake it in their own respe...

An unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail—and how that affects cities.In From Boom to Bubble, Rachel Weber debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so. Focusing on the m...

An activist and an actor reflect on Edward Snowden and the surveillance state in this collection that "reads like a whistleblower's travel diary" ( Disorient).In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The result was a series of essays and dialogues in which Roy and Cusack reflect on their conversations with Snowden. In these provocative and penetrating discussions, Roy an...

If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, the role chefs can and should play in society - how a city nourishes itself makes a statement about the kind of city it is.With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how...