Benjamin Heim Shepard's new book Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action, is about New York City and some of the people who love it and protect it, largely by engaging in things that look like play, which Shepard reminds us, "is not a rejection of activism but rather a unique amplification of it" (172). The case studies that comprise this book can also be read as interlocking narratives—there's the story of the Church Ladies for Choice performing outside of the Ambulatory Center in South Brooklyn singing "pro-choice anthems" to an audience of angry pro-lifers (174); there's the story about the activists from the Lower East Side Collective who released 10,000 crickets and introduce chaos into a city land auction to sell off community gardens and a local community center (64); there's the story about Critical Mass activists who organized in a naked bike ride ("more ass, less gas") from the United Nations down to Washington Square Park (196); and there are characters like Judith Malina, of the Living Theater, who insist that if you stay in character the police can't stop a performance but instead become an unwitting part of it, changing the stakes and tone and boundaries of play (129). Shepard points to the spectacle as a protest method with a unique capacity to illustrate the absurdity of injustice and disrupt normative social and political power dynamics. The case studies demonstrate that the power of performative direct action is that it is simultaneously real and not-real. As an interventionist method, it has the potential to connect people, reach new audiences, and reconstitute (however temporarily) contested public spaces as prefigurative and liberatory commons (195).

Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action uses interviews, ethnography, theory, and storytelling to describe methods for reclaiming and redefining cities, methods that have evolved and which contemporary organizers can look to and lean on. Shepard embraces play but also acknowledges the processes involved in real transformation, which are fraught and slow: "in our ecosocial transition," he writes in the book's conclusion, "I don't want to miss a crop cycle" (219). The book tackles issues including: reproductive rights, alternative transportation, urban ecology, and housing justice. It isn't linear but it begins somewhere in the late 1970s and ends up somewhere near the present. Using a dialectical theoretical frame, Shepard attempts to disrupt ideological and temporal boundaries that often define (and delimit) movement organizing, and rethink the staid frame of the academic monograph by mingling the theories of Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Emma Goldman with the voices of New York City activists and artists. Shepard's own experiences as an oft-arrested subversive actor, theorist, performer, social worker, and self-proclaimed "Teenage Ritalin Junkie" are woven into the book as a kind of through-line.

The book is not neatly ideologically or geographically bound. The movements and causes and groups and people involved in the work of transforming public spaces into liberatory stages slide into and rub against each other and illustrate that social movements are like cities themselves—full of intersections, collisions, recursion, celebrations, and losses. The book invokes, particularly in the afterward which Shepard wrote during the pandemic that we are still living through, current struggles over space and autonomy that urban activists are waging in New York City right now.

As I write this, environmental activists are holding vigil down at East River Park where the city is destroying an important green artery and cutting down almost 1000 mature trees in the name of climate resilience. Community organizers are demonstrating, dancing, and yelling. They have a different vision and they don't need to describe it to us because they are showing us what it looks like. They are in costumes and holding hand-painted banners. They are cold but they are chanting, taking turns with the megaphone. They are reading poems outside of the fenced off area where the now inaccessible amphitheater is surrounded by newly felled trees. They are arguing and laughing. They are biking down the parts of a bike-lane that the city is actively erasing. They are documenting it while it happens. They are making new friends and finding old ones. And they are asserting something important about the reason places like this exist in the first place: to watch the tidal movement of the East River while surrounded by plants and animals, to gather with neighbors, to share food and ideas, to weather the next storm and the one after that, and to look out for one another and the spaces we love.




     — Reviewed by Nora Almeida, New York City College of Technnology (CUNY)