The island of Sanzu is in unknown turmoil. When humans begin forgetting how to respect nature, the spirits of the land begin to wither and die. From the sorrow and suffering of the spirits a deep hatred is born, seeking to destroy everything in its path. Only the birth of a special being spoken of by the ancient keepers can restore balance. But what happens when that one has no recollection of who she is or where she's from? Cheza has lived her life in Sacama village since she was five years old. Her life has been quiet and peaceful until someone precious to her is taken away. From that moment her life begins to fall apart as one thing after another shakes the foundation of her life. Now she must reunite herself with the only blood family she has left and travel the lands of Sanzu, collecting a precious item from the spirits to unite the lands against the evil that threatens them. But will she be able to when it means losing everything she knows and loves?

These twelve original essays by geographers and anthropologists offer a deep critical understanding of Allan Pred's pathbreaking and eclectic cultural Marxist approach, with a focus on his concept of "situated ignorance": the production and reproduction of power and inequality by regimes of truth through strategically deployedmisinformation, diversions, and silences. As the essays expose the cultural and material circumstances in which situated ignorance persists, they also add a previously underexplored spatial dimension to Walter Benjamin's idea of "moments of danger." The volume invokes the aftermath of the July 2011 attacks by far-right activistAnders Breivik in Norway, who ambushed a Labor Party youth gathering and bombed a government building, killing and injuring many. Breivik had publicly and forthrightly declared war against an array of liberal attitudes he saw threatening Western civilization. However, as politicians and journalists interpreted these events for mass consumption, a narrative quickly emerged that painted Breivik as a lone madman and steered the discourse away from analysis of theresurgent right-wing racisms and nationalisms in which he was immersed. The Breivik case is merely one of the most visible recent examples, say editors Heather Merrill and Lisa Hoffman, of the unchallenged production of knowledge in the public sphere. In essays that range widely in topic and setting-for example, brownfield development in China, a Holocaust memorial in Germany, an art gallery exhibit in South Africa-this volume peels back layers of "situated practices and their associated meaning and power relations." Spaces of Danger offers analytical and conceptual tools of a Predian approach to interrogate the taken-for-granted and make visible and legible that which is silenced.

Tacoma’s vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds. As the city’s Nisei grew up attending the secular Japanese Language School, they absorbed the Meiji-era cultural practices and ethics of the previous generation. At the same time, they positioned themselves in new and dynamic ways, including resisting their parents and pursuing lives that diverged from traditional expectations. Becoming Nisei, based on more than forty interviews, shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II. Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman underscore both the agency of Nisei in these processes as well as their negotiations of prevailing social and power relations.

Tacoma's vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds. As the city's Nisei grew up attending the secular Japanese Language School, they absorbed the Meiji-era cultural practices and ethics of the previous generation. At the same time, they positioned themselves in new and dynamic ways, including resisting their parents and pursuing lives that diverged from traditional expectations. Becoming Nisei, based on more than forty interviews, shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II. Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman underscore both the agency of Nisei in these processes as well as their negotiations of prevailing social and power relations.

The island of Sanzu is in unknown turmoil. When humans begin forgetting how to respect nature, the spirits of the land begin to wither and die. From the sorrow and suffering of the spirits a deep hatred is born, seeking to destroy everything in its path. Only the birth of a special being spoken of by the ancient keepers can restore balance. But what happens when that one has no recollection of who she is or where she's from? Cheza has lived her life in Sacama village since she was five years old. Her life has been quiet and peaceful until someone precious to her is taken away. From that moment her life begins to fall apart as one thing after another shakes the foundation of her life. Now she must reunite herself with the only blood family she has left and travel the lands of Sanzu, collecting a precious item from the spirits to unite the lands against the evil that threatens them. But will she be able to when it means losing everything she knows and loves?

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as "smart cities," "eco-cities," and "resilience," and proposing a "science of cities" based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of-and are shaped by-cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese "eco-city" Yixing. Contributors Martin Avila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Soerlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker