Michael Dudley, editor of Public Libraries and Resilient Cities, is an urban planning librarian and researcher at the University of Winnipeg’s Institute of Urban Studies; he also teaches in the university’s environmental studies program. He has edited this collection of fourteen contributed essays, including his own introductory “The Library and the City,” with the stated intention of exploring “the roles that public libraries can play in the promotion of ecologically, economically, and socially resilient cities in challenging times” (ix). Dudley has done a commendable job of identifying diverse contributors from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Africa, while primarily maintaining a reference context of the U.S.

Dudley’s introduction reviews the growth of libraries since the first Carnegie libraries. He correlates the development and resilience of towns with their libraries’ development and identifies ways for libraries to be key players in sustainable and ambitious downtown redevelopment through high design standards in architecture and landscaping. Biographies of the other thirteen contributors show a wide variety of expertise—library administration, library public services, urban planning, and nonprofit management are all represented. One might expect high-profile libraries, such as Seattle Public Library, to appear in this collection—and it does, along with numerous lesser-known examples in cities including St. Louis, Baltimore, Queens, Winnipeg, Peabody (Massachusetts), Houston, Edmonton, and Harare (Zimbabwe). The resulting case studies document the involvement of public libraries in literacy, job-seeking, technology training, services for homeless and immigrant populations, food programs, disaster response, and even organic gardening projects. In sum, this collection offers useful examples of partnerships between community libraries and local governments.

Community library administrators will find inspiration in these stories. And urban planners looking for guidance on the role of libraries could use this collection to help them envision libraries’ “placemaking” function in nurturing socially sustainable communities.