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Introduction: The Shifting Ambitions and Positions of City Governments

This introductory chapter discusses the shifting ambitions and positions of city governments. Once considered the purveyors of street repairs and sewer mains, city governments are now being heralded as innovative, entrepreneurial, and dynamic actors ready to take on societal challenges that other levels of government seem unprepared or unwilling to address. Indeed, city governments are viewed, and are viewing themselves, as able to effectively pursue major policy agendas once considered the sole purview of national governments. From labor to immigration to climate change, there has been a shift in both practice and rhetoric to cities. In the United States, city governments from Bangor, Maine, to Los Angeles, California, are raising the minimum wage for their residents, even as many state governments scramble to prevent them from doing so. The chapter explains that the book focuses on local efforts to address global climate change. It explores the means by which city governments—particularly those of New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto—pursue climate change mitigation, or reducing the greenhouse gas emissions produced by urban systems, and to what ends.