Jason Spicer is an assistant professor of economic development and planning in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, which he joined after completing a master’s degree and PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018. His research interests include a focus on alternative economic-development models, and the role of politics, planning, and policy in enabling them.
The Just Transition, Economic Democracy, and the Green New Deal
Two recent books takeup the challenges of radical social and institutional transformation to make a GND maximally effective. One outlines the requirements for a maximally participatory democracy, but raises questions about its ideological valences; the other outlines a multilayered effort in one US city, leaving us with questions about organizational capacity to pull off the GND. Inasmuch as these works draw mainly on non-US examples, they magnify the challenges that remain here.
January 8, 2020