Reviews for Leisure Enhancement

The average rating for Leisure Enhancement based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-26 00:00:00 Andrew Hanna V The theoretical essays at the beginning make this book a worthy read if you're interested in urban nature/environments. For the contributors, the nature of cities is not solely the trees in the parks or the river in need of "saving" but also the city's infrastructure (bridges, buildings, drinking water systems, etc) and the commodities that make cities run. Capitalism's trick (aka commodity fetishism) has separated the final product from human labor (ie the transformation of what Marx called "first nature"). Thus urban political ecology, by overcoming the dichotomous "culture" and "nature" ontology, opens up a world of possibilities for studying the ways in which "urbanized nature" (or socio-natural formations) constitutes and gets constituted by power relations of domination and consent, resistance, and broader political economy. This perspective politicizes more deeply the nature of cities and seeks to explain who benefits and who loses through certain socio-natural formations. Some of the essays are too short, and many are written with an atrocious social-scientific prose where everything causes everything and vice-versa. Also, except one or two essays, the compilation is history-phobic, as if the most important political ecologies started in the 1980s.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-26 00:00:00 Gordon Labatte we keep constructing cities under a false idea of capitalism as the solution to all. Through different case studies we are carried into see how many of the "post-modernist" ideas never worked and still don't work to achieve equity inside cities. If you don't have a clue on Marx...read first the Capital and come back.