Every river tells a story: the Don River (Toronto) and the Los Angeles River (Los Angeles) as articulating landscapes

Case studies of the Don River in Toronto, and the Los Angeles River in Los Angeles, inform a discussion of governance of urban landscapes in North America. The analysis and discussion in the paper centres on the way urban environments are part of the governance of a complexity of globalized urban areas. The empirical base of the paper is a set of interviews conducted between 1995 and 1997 with government officials, environmental and social activists, and business people. The stories of the two rivers indicate that urban ecological politics may be hegemonic or anti-hegemonic, supportive of existing regulatory structures or counter-regulatory. We suggest that in Toronto, urban ecological politics is civic, whereas in Los Angeles, it is socio-economic. More than in Toronto, urban natures in Los Angeles have been linked with contentious social struggles around justice, culture and democracy.