Canada is often thought of as a country defined by its towering mountains, rolling plains, and shimmering lakes, but the fact is we’re an intensely urban nation – some 80% of Canucks currently reside in urban areas with populations of over 100,000. Lucky for us, then, that these urban areas are in such decent shape.

Avoiding many of the problems that have plagued American metropolises, like suburban flight and heavy crime, Canada’s urban centres have repeatedly garnered high spots in recent rankings of the world’s most livable cities. But as John Lorinc argues in his brilliantly reported (if occasionally exhausting) new book, this isn’t a time for smugness. If our cities are to continue to thrive, we need both to tackle current problems and come up with proactive plans for the future.

The book’s first section, “The City Under Stress,” lays out, in sometimes-discouraging detail, the most pressing problems currently facing Canadian cities, from native poverty and urban sprawl to strains on the public education system. This is followed by “Healthy Neighbourhoods, Strong Cities,” which offers suggestions for dealing with several of these issues. In the area of jobs for immigrants, for instance, Lorinc makes a powerful case that we need major reforms in order to give skilled immigrants the chance to use their skills. Finally, “Toward the New City” shifts the focus toward broader, more abstract subjects, like the argument that cities need more taxation powers, or the claim that they need to attract workers from the “creative class.”

As one of Canada’s most successful freelance journalists, Lorinc is able to draw on a career of tackling these issues in publications like The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life (he’s the longtime urban affairs columnist at the latter). His experience shows – indeed, it’s hard to think of a single important urban issue that isn’t broached here. Neither a propagandist for cities nor a Cassandra, Lorinc is particularly to be commended for his measured discussions of tricky problems like the plight of urban native Canadians. His claims are always backed up by reams of illuminating facts (it’s interesting to note, for instance, that at the time Canada’s political structure was formed, only 10% of our population was urban – hence early politicians’ failure to bother granting any real power to cities). Reading Lorinc is like mainlining information – anyone who does so is sure to come away with a vastly improved sense of the subject.

Lorinc’s prose, though has always exhibited a certain roughness, a quality that can be distracting, especially in a book-length work. There’s a fair bit of repetition between the different chapters, and the three-part structure is rather casual. (You never know what you’re going to get in a given chapter – “Waterfront Cities,” for instance, is not about waterfronts in general but about Vancouver’s recent waterfront revitalization.)

The individual sentences, too, aren’t always pretty: “Besides their core educational function, the public school system remains the only institution in our society where children, teens, and adults from vastly different cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds can come together in a non-commercial environment for extended periods, during which they’ll learn at least as much from one another as they will from their teachers.” For all of his strengths, Lorinc lacks the elegance of a Mark Kingwell in mixing information and argument, content and style.

Of course, Lorinc is a different sort of writer than Kingwell – a freelance reporter/researcher, not a tenured philosopher. And within his field, Lorinc has carved out a special, and uniquely intellectual, niche. The New City is a major work by a top-notch urban affairs journalist, published at a moment in Canadian history during which cities are learning to deal with their newly gained centrality to our national life. While the book is clearly aimed at a general readership of people who care about cities, one hopes that politicians in particular will read it – and then get to work.