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Contesting Sustainability: ‘SMART Growth’ and the Redevelopment of Austin's Eastside
Abstract
The compatibility between an agenda for sustainable urban development and the neoliberal economic restructuring of urban space has been observed within cities in developed countries across the globe. From providing economic support to local ‘green’ industries to creating bike lanes, municipalities develop sustainability strategies that are designed to boost their competitive advantage. Moreover, municipalities are responding to demands from popular social movements and national governments that seek to reconfigure societal relationships with the natural environment in cities. Cities are increasingly understood not as part of the ecological crisis but as part of the solution, or as places where alternative patterns of sustainable consumption and new socially and ecologically responsible industries can be developed. Over the last decade in Austin, environmental sustainability has become an uncontested paradigm that has progressively shaped the city's urban space and policy. Two competing conceptualizations of the environment, so-called ‘environmental’ and ‘just’ sustainability groups, are explored in this article. I demonstrate how the notion of environmental sustainability has been selectively incorporated into the hegemonic vision of Austin's strategic growth plan. I argue that the dominance of this conceptualization is best understood by asking what counts as the ‘environment’ for environmentalists, and understanding the unstated assumptions about the environment shared by the business community and environmentalists.
... In the past 10 years, a number of studies have examined the ecological, social, political and economic dynamics and actors behind green gentrification -defined as new or intensified urban socio-spatial inequities produced by urban greening agendas and interventions, such as greenways, parks, community gardens, ecological corridors, or green infrastructure. Indeed, while many private investors, public officials, and planners couch greening projects in the language of sustainability planning (Gibbs and Krueger, 2007;Tretter, 2013), there has been an uneven response to existing inequities in the provision of parks or green space (Landry and Chakraborty, 2009;Heynen et al., 2006;Hastings, 2007;Park and Pellow, 2011;Dahmann et al., 2010) and little capacity to ensure the provision of benefits and access for all residents. These limits of urban greening initiatives are particularly pertinent if one considers that 55 percent of large US cities with urban sustainability plans referred to environmental justice (EJ) in 2010 but only 22.2 percent had clear action points on EJ (Pearsall and Pierce, 2010). ...
... 2 Emerging concerns and contestation over green gentrification Urban green inequalities are not only historical. Since the late 2000s, new studies have examined the social and racial impact over time of new or restored environmental amenities such as parks, greenways, or playgrounds (Dooling, 2009;Hagerman, 2007;Quastel et al., 2012;Quastel, 2009;Tretter, 2013) (Hagerman, 2007), or the clean-up and redevelopment of hazardous or contaminated sites into green and more livable neighborhoods (Gould and Lewis, 2017;Pearsall and Pierce, 2010;Pearsall, 2013;Curran and Hamilton, 2012;Dillon, 2014). Much of this scholarship has focused on exposing the relationship between the creation or restoration of urban environmental amenities, subsequent demographic changes, and real estate price increases. ...
... Studies of this resistance bring together scholarship in urban geography and urban sociology. Some of the resistance builds on the strategies and tactics of traditional environmental justice movements (Pearsall and Anguelovski, 2016), but also demonstrates classic dynamics of collective action at the neighborhood level (Schuetze and Chelleri, 2015;Pearsall, 2013;Tretter, 2013), the emerging politics of community organizing through an alliance between EJ groups and community development organizations (Scally, 2012), and the social movement impacts of direct action tactics (Anguelovski, 2015b;Rosol, 2013). In Seoul, for example, stakeholders involved in the planning of a Green Corridor to be part of the city's 'Urban Renaissance Master Plan' articulated a vocal opposition against the proposal's top-down approach and lack of concern for traditional small-scale urbanization patterns (Schuetze and Chelleri, 2015). ...
Scholars in urban political ecology, urban geography, and planning have suggested that urban greening interventions can create elite enclaves of environmental privilege and green gentrification, and exclude lower-income and minority residents from their benefits. Yet, much remains to be understood in regard to the magnitude, scope, and manifestations of green gentrification and the forms of contestation and resistance articulated against it. In this paper, we propose new questions, theoretical approaches, and research design approaches to examine the socio-spatial dynamics and ramifications of green gentrification and parse out why, how, where, and when green gentrification takes place.
... The area that borders the eastern edge of the city's central business district, colloquially known as East Austin, had dramatically transformed over a twenty year period. Driven by both public and private means of segregation, East Austin formed as a distinct enclave for African Americans and Hispanics in the first half of the twentieth century, and until recently, it had remained a largely isolated community settled by the majority of Austin's nonwhite, working-class, laboring-poor communities (Tretter and Adams 2012;Tretter 2013). Its labor market was segmented, its schools were not integrated, and in the early 1960s, the area was physically split from the rest of the city by the construction of an interstate highway that separated it from downtown (Busch 2013). ...
... The most recent efforts to revitalize East Austin through gentrification were very controversial. Longtime residents of East Austin were weary of the changes in their community, even if improvements followed (Tretter 2013). The tendency among these residents was to see these changes within the context of the history of discrimination and prejudice that drove the underdevelopment of the residential housing stock during much of the twentieth century and the disempowerment of communities of color. ...
... Private housing developers were quick to capitalize on the relatively cheap price of land in East Austin and its close proximity to the central business district, and more and more relatively wealthy people (many of whom were white) began to buy houses and renovate them, resulting in the rapid gentrification of some areas. Moreover, the city's plansits smart growth initiatives in particularactually encouraged these developments by calling for more growth in the "desired development zones," which turned out to be almost the entirety of East Austin close to downtown (Tretter 2013). ...
Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
... gentrification (Gould and Lewis 2012), characterized by the implementation of environmental or sustainability initiatives that leads to the exclusion, marginalization, and displacement of economically marginalized residents, has been documented in cities across North America, Europe, and Asia (Quastel 2009;Pearsall 2010;Gould and Lewis 2012;Tretter 2013;Checker 2011;Sandberg 2014;Schuetze and Chelleri 2015;Anguelovski 2015a). The 'environmental' rent gap is central to the process of EG (Bryson 2013). ...
... While not all environmental cleanups create gentrification (Eckerd 2011), gentrification may occur in parallel with cleanup activities, requiring planners to be attentive to socio-spatial impacts and land use conflicts (Abel and White 2011). Most recently, gentrification has also been linked to what Anguelovski ( 2015) has labeled 'green locally unwanted land uses' (LULUs), such as green space creation (Checker 2011), park restoration projects (Gould and Lewis 2012), bike lane infrastructure (Lugo 2015), smart growth development (Quastel 2009;Tretter 2013), and the opening of 'healthy' food stores (Anguelovski 2015a). ...
... During discussions of the Superfund designation of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY, many community groups and residents participated in extensive planning meetings to show their support for the designation, despite the potential for the stigma associated with living near one of the most contaminated sites in the U.S., because of the funding and institutional support that came with the remediation of the polluted waterway (Pearsall 2013). In Austin, Texas environmental justice activists opposed the city's Smart Growth plan, successfully, by reframing the plan as creating environmental inequalities (Tretter 2013). Meaningful community engagement has been highlighted as a key component of redevelopment measures (Lubitow et al. 2015). ...
This paper analyzes environmental gentrification (EG), or the exclusion, marginalization, and displacement of long-term residents associated with sustainability planning or green developments and amenities, such as smart growth, public park renovations, and healthy food stores. We consider how activists, communities, and urban planners address these unjust processes and outcomes associated with EG and how these strategies compare to those used by environmental justice (EJ) activists. Our evaluation of relevant literature indicates several similarities with EJ resistance tactics, including collective neighborhood action, community organizing, and direct tactics. We also identify several different strategies enabled by certain urban environmental conditions, such as leveraging environmental policies and taking an active role in neighborhood redevelopment planning processes, collaborating with 'gentrifiers,' and creating complementary policies to manage displacement and exclusion. Our analysis indicates a need for more research on how activists can better assert the social and political dimensions of sustainability and their right to the city, and how green and sustainable cities can achieve justice and equity.
... Urban green inequalities are not only historical. Since the late 2000s, new studies have examined the social and racial impact of new or restored environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, greenways, or playgrounds (Dooling, 2009;Hagerman, 2007;Quastel, 2009;Tretter, 2013) (Hagerman, 2007), or the clean-up and redevelopment of hazardous or contaminated sites into green and more livable neighborhoods (Gould & Lewis, 2017;Pearsall & Pierce, 2010;Pearsall, 2013;Curran & Hamilton, 2012;Dillon, 2014) -that is green gentrification. Most recently, green infrastructure built to address climate threats and impacts has also been shown to be providing greater security to more privileged, gentrifying and White residents rather than Latinos and Black residents, as exemplified in the case of Philadelphia (Shokry et al., 2020). ...
... In response to concerns over green gentrification, community activists are organizing at the neighborhood or city level to contest the uneven social impacts of urban greening interventions and to what Martínez-Alier and myself previously called "undeterred processes of development, growth, and speculation" (Anguelovski & Martínez-Alier, 2014, p. 172). While some of the resistance relies on the strategies and tactics of traditional environmental justice movements and illustrates ecological distribution conflicts (Pearsall & Anguelovski, 2016;, it also demonstrates classic dynamics of collective action at the neighborhood level (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015;Pearsall, 2013;Tretter, 2013); community organizing through an alliance between EJ groups and community development organizations (Scally, 2012), and direct action tactics (Anguelovski, 2015;Rosol, 2013). In Seoul, for example, stakeholders involved in the planning of a Green Corridor to be part of the city's "Urban Renaissance Master Plan" articulated a vocal opposition against the proposal's top-down approach and lack of concern for traditional small-scale urbanization patterns (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015). ...
In this open access book, ecological economics and political ecology traditions converge into a single academic school. The book constitutes a common ground where multiple and critical voices are expressed, covering a broad scope of urgent matters at the crossroad between society, economy and the natural environment. The manuscripts composing this compendium offer appealing material for both experienced and younger researchers interested in interdisciplinary exchanges in the field of the social environmental sciences. It combines historical accounts with recent theoretical and empirical developments revolving around the interaction between three foundational notions of the Barcelona School: social metabolism, environmental justice and self-reflective science.
... Urban green inequalities are not only historical. Since the late 2000s, new studies have examined the social and racial impact of new or restored environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, greenways, or playgrounds (Dooling, 2009;Hagerman, 2007;Quastel, 2009;Tretter, 2013) (Hagerman, 2007), or the clean-up and redevelopment of hazardous or contaminated sites into green and more livable neighborhoods (Gould & Lewis, 2017;Pearsall & Pierce, 2010;Pearsall, 2013;Curran & Hamilton, 2012;Dillon, 2014) -that is green gentrification. Most recently, green infrastructure built to address climate threats and impacts has also been shown to be providing greater security to more privileged, gentrifying and White residents rather than Latinos and Black residents, as exemplified in the case of Philadelphia (Shokry et al., 2020). ...
... In response to concerns over green gentrification, community activists are organizing at the neighborhood or city level to contest the uneven social impacts of urban greening interventions and to what Martínez-Alier and myself previously called "undeterred processes of development, growth, and speculation" (Anguelovski & Martínez-Alier, 2014, p. 172). While some of the resistance relies on the strategies and tactics of traditional environmental justice movements and illustrates ecological distribution conflicts (Pearsall & Anguelovski, 2016;, it also demonstrates classic dynamics of collective action at the neighborhood level (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015;Pearsall, 2013;Tretter, 2013); community organizing through an alliance between EJ groups and community development organizations (Scally, 2012), and direct action tactics (Anguelovski, 2015;Rosol, 2013). In Seoul, for example, stakeholders involved in the planning of a Green Corridor to be part of the city's "Urban Renaissance Master Plan" articulated a vocal opposition against the proposal's top-down approach and lack of concern for traditional small-scale urbanization patterns (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015). ...
Increases in social metabolism drive environmental conflicts . This proposition, frequently found in the literature on ecological distribution conflicts, has stimulated much research at the interface of ecological economics and political ecology. However, under which conditions is this proposition valid and useful? This chapter briefly reviews the theoretical foundations underlying this proposition and discusses further socio-metabolic properties that may shape the dynamics of environmental conflicts. Furthermore, the chapter relates the socio-metabolic perspective to other ‘grand explanations’ of environmental conflicts, particularly, to the expansion of capitalism under a neo-Marxist perspective. The chapter argues that a socio-metabolic perspective has much to offer to understand some of the structural drivers of environmental conflicts. A socio-metabolic perspective links local environmental conflicts to the resource use profiles of economies as well as to global production and consumption systems, no matter whether these are capitalist societies, resource-intensive planning economies, autocratic monarchies, or illicit resource extractions occurring in the shadow economy. The chapter closes by recalling the need to integrate biophysical and social dynamics in a balanced manner for the nuanced study of environmental conflicts.
... Urban green inequalities are not only historical. Since the late 2000s, new studies have examined the social and racial impact of new or restored environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, greenways, or playgrounds (Dooling, 2009;Hagerman, 2007;Quastel, 2009;Tretter, 2013) (Hagerman, 2007), or the clean-up and redevelopment of hazardous or contaminated sites into green and more livable neighborhoods (Gould & Lewis, 2017;Pearsall & Pierce, 2010;Pearsall, 2013;Curran & Hamilton, 2012;Dillon, 2014) -that is green gentrification. Most recently, green infrastructure built to address climate threats and impacts has also been shown to be providing greater security to more privileged, gentrifying and White residents rather than Latinos and Black residents, as exemplified in the case of Philadelphia (Shokry et al., 2020). ...
... In response to concerns over green gentrification, community activists are organizing at the neighborhood or city level to contest the uneven social impacts of urban greening interventions and to what Martínez-Alier and myself previously called "undeterred processes of development, growth, and speculation" (Anguelovski & Martínez-Alier, 2014, p. 172). While some of the resistance relies on the strategies and tactics of traditional environmental justice movements and illustrates ecological distribution conflicts (Pearsall & Anguelovski, 2016;, it also demonstrates classic dynamics of collective action at the neighborhood level (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015;Pearsall, 2013;Tretter, 2013); community organizing through an alliance between EJ groups and community development organizations (Scally, 2012), and direct action tactics (Anguelovski, 2015;Rosol, 2013). In Seoul, for example, stakeholders involved in the planning of a Green Corridor to be part of the city's "Urban Renaissance Master Plan" articulated a vocal opposition against the proposal's top-down approach and lack of concern for traditional small-scale urbanization patterns (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015). ...
Joan Martínez Alier has made relevant contributions to the agrarian question by treating the southwestern Spanish latifundio and Latin American hacienda systems as capitalist ways of exploiting land and labour, not as backward feudal remnants. He has also invoked the resistance of Latin American tenant-labourers and other smallholder peasants as an explanation for the limited extent of wage labour. To that end, he helped rescue Alexander Chayanov and the former Narodnik movement from oblivion. With José Manuel Naredo, he paid tribute to Sergei Podolinsky, another member of this peasant neo-populist current, for pioneering the first calculation of energy balances and returns from agricultural systems. As agricultural and environmental historians, we have followed both paths to develop new proposals for a form of agrarian metabolism that, while contributing to ecological economics, is also aligned with agroecology. We summarize our contributions to these topics, developed together with Eduardo Sevilla Guzmán, Victor Toledo and Gloria Guzmán, as well as some of the researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna and many other participants in the international project on Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS). Our teams have also started using these socio-metabolic accounts to take up the agrarian question of labour and gender exploitation through the unequal appropriation of natural resources from a historical point of view, as well as contribute to the next agroecology transition to a fairer food regime within planetary boundaries.
... Urban green inequalities are not only historical. Since the late 2000s, new studies have examined the social and racial impact of new or restored environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, greenways, or playgrounds (Dooling, 2009;Hagerman, 2007;Quastel, 2009;Tretter, 2013) (Hagerman, 2007), or the clean-up and redevelopment of hazardous or contaminated sites into green and more livable neighborhoods (Gould & Lewis, 2017;Pearsall & Pierce, 2010;Pearsall, 2013;Curran & Hamilton, 2012;Dillon, 2014) -that is green gentrification. Most recently, green infrastructure built to address climate threats and impacts has also been shown to be providing greater security to more privileged, gentrifying and White residents rather than Latinos and Black residents, as exemplified in the case of Philadelphia (Shokry et al., 2020). ...
... In response to concerns over green gentrification, community activists are organizing at the neighborhood or city level to contest the uneven social impacts of urban greening interventions and to what Martínez-Alier and myself previously called "undeterred processes of development, growth, and speculation" (Anguelovski & Martínez-Alier, 2014, p. 172). While some of the resistance relies on the strategies and tactics of traditional environmental justice movements and illustrates ecological distribution conflicts (Pearsall & Anguelovski, 2016;Anguelovski & Martínez-Alier, 2014), it also demonstrates classic dynamics of collective action at the neighborhood level (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015;Pearsall, 2013;Tretter, 2013); community organizing through an alliance between EJ groups and community development organizations (Scally, 2012), and direct action tactics (Anguelovski, 2015;Rosol, 2013). In Seoul, for example, stakeholders involved in the planning of a Green Corridor to be part of the city's "Urban Renaissance Master Plan" articulated a vocal opposition against the proposal's top-down approach and lack of concern for traditional small-scale urbanization patterns (Schuetze & Chelleri, 2015). ...
Large cities are increasingly using urban greening, nature-centered projects, and green infrastructure to address socio-environmental and health challenges and harness widespread benefits for citizens, industries, and investors, while protecting existing urban ecosystems, resources, environmentally-sensitive areas, and built infrastructure. This chapter starts with the argument that the alliance of urban redevelopment with greening creates a paradox and examines the production of inequalities as a result of greening projects. I argue that even while greening certainly provides economic, ecological, health, and social benefits to many, it may create new and deeper vulnerabilities and processes of green gentrification for historically marginalized residents – working-class groups, minorities, and immigrants – even in the many cases where interventions are meant to redress historic inequalities in the provision of parks or green spaces. Urban greening inequalities are thus particularly acute because of what can be defined as “green gaps” upon which municipalities, private investors, and privileged residents capture a “green rent” through new commercial and residential investments. As a result, as I show in this chapter, urban greening interventions targeting lower-income, minority, and immigrant neighborhoods risk being increasingly associated with a GreenLULU or green Locally Unwanted Land Use (Anguelovski, J Plan Lit, 1–14, 2016). Last, I examine civic responses to green inequalities and close this chapter with a broader discussion around the need to repoliticize urban greening practices.
... To this end, we adopt a scalar perspective that seeks to understand how the "circular" agenda chimes with longstanding urban development agendas. Evidence from Brussels and elsewhere has shown that sustainability fixes may produce new contradictions, evident in a deepening of socio-spatial polarization (Goodling et al. 2015), ecological or environmental gentrification of neighbourhoods symptomatic for neoliberal urbanism (Checker 2011;Tretter 2013), and the installation of technocratic governance structures evacuated from citizen participation. The CE's central focus on improving industrial efficiency and innovation may chime with prescribing profit-oriented, market-based "technofixes" (Klein, 2014) disembedded from citizen life-worlds and their potential for social innovation (Kampelmann 2016), bracketing urban inhabitants as economic and social actors. ...
... This relationship may be further strengthened by the CE, since it promises to resolve the tension between economic growth and ecological boundaries. As shown by scholars across urban contexts, the engagement with "green" policies allows for pro-growth agendas to be reaffirmed, leading to new forms of socio-spatial inequalities (Quastel 2009) articulated along ethnic or class lines (Checker 2011;Goodling et al. 2015;Tretter 2013), chiming with the discourses of social diversity (Van Criekingen 2013; Carpenter 2018) and sustainability (Anguelovski et al. 2018;, to play a central role in urban renewal programmes allegedly focused on socially redistributive goals. ...
The circular economy (CE) has become a matter of urban development. A literature review shows that the CE debate is biased toward technology-driven industrial change, while bracketing broader socio-political interests. We address this gap by exploring the political economy of scale of the CE. Looking into the case of Brussels (Belgium), a city that has recently adopted the CE a part of its socio-economic strategy, we explore how the anticipated transition to a “circular city” chimes with long-standing urban development agendas. While there is little evidence of stable growth coalitions between corporate and political elites, we argue that the CE provides an “urban sustainability fix” by selectively incorporating ecological goals in urban governance strategies. We further scrutinise the landscape of diverse and heterogenous CE practices in food and transport, highlighting how they are regulated and organised, what labour conditions they offer, and how they are anchored in urban space.
... Development thus shifted away from environmentally-sensitive areas and prompted questions about how development can lessen its ecological footprint. Austin's public energy utility promoted renewable energy sources in new construction (Tretter, 2013). Austin's city council was a prominent proponent of Smart Growth and provided incentives to projects like Mueller (McCann, 2003). ...
... Mueller's development community has thus far managed to realize this goal through several Trudeau Sustainable Cities and Society xxx (2018) xxx-xxx initiatives. In 2000, the City adopted a policy that incentivized the construction of affordable housing (Tretter, 2013), which contributes to Mueller's housing stock. The City selected the master developer partly because it fully endorsed the redevelopment plan and offered actionable strategies to realize the affordable housing goals. ...
Sustainable urban development is widely conceptualized as resulting from a balance of economic, environmental, and social equity concerns. Yet, critics argue that social equity is routinely left out in development practice. Aiming to help identify solutions that can address this problem, this paper examines sustainable development projects that have managed to incorporate social equity in substantive ways into development practice. Drawing on case study research of nine neighborhood-scale development projects distributed across three metropolitan areas in the United States – Austin, Denver, and Minneapolis-St. Paul – this article examines the contexts and processes that enable the incorporation of social equity into sustainable development practice. Using data from intensive interviews with actors that shaped the development of mixed-use and transit-oriented neighborhoods designed according to the New Urbanism planning movement, the article investigates three storylines that illustrate different ways that social equity concerns are left out, marginalized, or integrated into development practice. Comparison of the processes driving each storyline shows that integrating social equity in sustainable development can succeed when there is an institutional effort to champion social equity and where that effort brings patient capital and provides conceptual resources that help link social equity to concerns of livability.
... Fourth, we explicitly identify an underlying tension and tradeoffs between social justice and environmental justice for Smart City projects (Tretter, 2013). Achieving social justice goals does not necessarily accomplish environmental justice goals, and vice versa. ...
There is an increased role Information and Communications Technology (ICT) plays in the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper focuses specifically on SDG-11 “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” and how cities are increasingly incorporating ICT toward this goal. The public discourse on Smart Cities suggests economic, social and environmental benefits are possible through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, the increased deployment and use of digital infrastructure and processes in the name of sustainability and optimization itself is the focus of a growing body of critical literature on Smart Cities. This mini-review collates critical literature on digital infrastructures and processes related to SDG-11 and Smart Cities to identify areas of significance for further research. Although many Smart City projects discuss sustainability benefits, the distribution of benefits and risks across different communities is rarely examined. An increased use of ICT in Smart City projects can provide environmental benefits to some communities, while shifting the burden of risks to other communities. An increased use of ICT has its own energy and resource impacts that has implications for sustainability beyond the geography of individual cities to global impacts. The lifecycle and supply chain impacts of advanced ICT projects are being identified and documented. The end user of the Smart City projects may benefit significantly from the increased use of ICTs, while the environmental costs are often borne by disparate communities. In some cases, within the same city where a Smart City project is deployed, the inequities in distribution of environmental resources and services are exacerbated by layering new ICT implementations on top of existing socio-economic inequities. Therefore, this paper combines a broad view of Smart City environmental impacts, as well as a deep examination of the intersection of social justice and environmental justice issues to create more wholistic approaches for analysis of governance of Smart City projects. A more wholistic approach for governance of Smart City projects is required that includes combined social justice and environmental justice frameworks, toward achievement of SDG-11 goals.
... Community activists and researchers argue that urban greeningrail-to-trail parks, cleaned-up waterfronts with green promenades, canal remediation, greenways and green streets, or large-scale parkscontributes to build a green urban brand and acts as a pivot for urban green development Immergluck, 2009;Triguero-Mas et al., 2021). New environmental amenities become part of neighborhood marketing and renewal (Krueger and Gibbs, 2007;Tretter, 2013) as they elicit hopes of economic growth and deepened investment (Dooling, 2009;Quastel, 2009). In other words, urban greening often forms part of a new form of growth machine supported by planners and elected officials (DuPuis and Greenberg, 2019; Gould and Lewis, 2018;Loughran, 2014). ...
In the movement towards building greener and more sustainable cities, real estate developers are increasingly embracing not only green building construction but broader strategies and action related to urban greening. To date, their motivations and role in this broader urban greening dynamic remains underexplored, yet essential to dissect how greening is sustained and real estate development legitimized in revitalizing neighborhoods. With an eye to better understand green urban capitalist development processes underway amidst financialized nature and urban growth, and the equity impacts they entail, we explore residential real estate developers urban greening discourses and practices. Through a novel dataset of 42 interviews with private and non-profit residential real estate developers in 15 mid-sized American, Western European and Canadian cities, we uncover three differentiated but interconnected discourses around (i) financial benefits, (ii) consumer- or investor-driven demand and (iii) social dimensions behind developers’ interest in urban greening. We argue that developers embark on urban green grabbing through “green” discursive and material value appropriation and rent extraction strategies. Urban green grabbing is conceptually useful in depicting who benefits and how/when developers extract additional rent, surplus value, social capital and/or prestige from locating new residential projects adjacent to new or up-and-coming green amenities. Our work contributes to debates about urban greening's perceived position as a value-producing and rent-extracting good from both a political economy and political ecology perspective.
... EJ activists in many cases supported residents who opposed activities which may contribute to the environmental gentrification. This was the case of neighbourhood revitalisation and upgrading within the scope of smart growth policies in Austin, Texas (Tretter, 2013) or the initiative of street tree planting and other greening initiatives which could trigger green gentrification in Baltimore (Battaglia et al., 2014). However, there are successful stories where the 'just green enough' strategy of neighbourhood development can be implemented, such as in the case of Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, New York. ...
Environmental justice is a term that includes both exposure to environmental ‘bads’ as well as access to environmental ‘goods’ which might be unequally experienced by different socio‑economic groups. In other words, environmental justice scholars study whether everybody can have an equal right to a healthy, nurturing environment which supports their development and well‑being. The environmental justice movement arose in response to the so‑called ‘environmental racism’ in the USA which affected communities of blue‑collar workers, people with lower income and of Afro‑American, Asian, Latin or native origins. Although initially environmental (in)justice was rooted in racial discrimination in the USA, nowadays it encompasses a wider range of issues, including problems at the local and global level, from degradation and pollution of natural resources to aspects related to spatial planning. Unequal access to environmental amenities – such as green spaces – was not the main focus of the discourse, however, it is gaining attention nowadays, especially in the context of urban environment. Urban green spaces influence health and well‑being of urban residents, but access to them can be uneven in terms of socio‑spatial heterogeneity. Growing challenges of living in cities, related to, among others, climate change, densification or sprawling of developments, urban heat islands, and other nuisances, require sustainable management of green spaces and provision of equal (socially just) access to benefits provided by these areas. Moreover, another important aspect of the discussion is linked to potentially beneficial planning decisions (e.g. increasing availability of urban green spaces) and their long‑term consequences, which may eventually lead to gentrification and increased social inequalities (environmental injustice). Complexity of the problem related to availability of green spaces in cities needs an interdisciplinary approach which combines ecological, spatial and socio‑economic aspects. The article reviews the current state‑of‑the‑art literature in the field of environmental justice, with particular emphasis on green space availability in the context of urban environment.
... Neoliberalism is, as Castree (2008a) puts it, 'one possible 'shell' for the capitalist mode of production', which can offer a number of 'environmental fixes', 'to the endemic problem of sustained economic growth'. If the privatisation and de-collectivisation of water resources is one example (Swyngedouw, 2005), so is the 'smart growth' politics in cities like Austin (Tretter, 2013), and the marketisation of ecosystem services in the case of wetland mitigation banking (Robertson, 2004). In other words, unfettered capitalism, sustainability practice and technocratic planning have so far largely gone hand in hand (Gibbs et al., 2013;Hagerman, 2007;Krueger and Gibbs, 2007;Swyngedouw, 2007b), and thus the rise of neoliberalism is tightly connected to our shifting commitments to, representations of, and practices in nature (Castree, 2008a(Castree, , 2008bHeynen et al., 2007). ...
‘Nature-based solutions’ is the new jargon used to promote ideas of urban sustainability, which is gaining traction in both academic and policy circles, especially in the European Union. Through an analysis of the definitions and discourse around nature-based solutions, we discern a number of assumptions stemming from positivist science that are embedded in the term, and which we find create an inviting space for nature’s neoliberalisation processes. We provide empirical analysis of how these assumptions realise in two city-initiated projects in Barcelona, Spain, that have been identified as nature-based solutions: the green corridor of Passeig de Sant Joan and the community garden of Espai Germanetes supported under the municipal Pla Buits scheme. Both projects were born in a neoliberal political climate, but their outcomes in terms of neoliberalism and its contestation were very distinct – not least because of the different forms of governance and socio-natural interaction that these two projects foster. Urban nature can serve elite economic players at the expense of widespread socio-ecological benefits. But it can also serve as a ground for the articulation of demands for open and participatory green spaces that go beyond precarious and controlled stewardship for, or market-mediated interactions with, urban nature. We urge for future research and practice on nature-based solutions to be more critical of the term itself, and to guide its instrumentalisation in urban planning away from neoliberal agendas and towards more emancipatory and just socio-ecological futures.
... For example, the continual monitoring of pollution within the Smart Cities concept can help not only address but also prevent environmental problems [55]. At present, cities and their hinterlands are no longer seen as a part of the ecological crisis, but rather as an area where it is appropriate and possible to apply innovative patterns of sustainable consumption in terms of smart growth [56] and smart environment [57]. Smart environment is basically a classic physical environment which is enriched with monitoring, control, communication and computing capabilities throughout, from which knowledge of the environment is acquired and further used in order to reflect the needs and preferences of the local inhabitants [58]. ...
The aim of this article is to evaluate the impact of suburbanisation on the development of settlements with an emphasis on environmental aspects that need to be addressed in the process of extensive growth of municipalities in suburban regions. In the theoretical part, the article evaluates the processes of suburbanisation and their environmental impact. On a methodological level, municipalities in the suburban zone were first defined on the basis of driving distances. These municipalities were subjected to an analysis of the intensity of residential suburbanisation by calculating a multicriteria indicator from five selected criteria. In the second part of the analysis, a questionnaire survey of mayors was carried out in the particular municipalities. The responses were evaluated using the Likert scale method, and then statistically significant dependencies were sought among individual phenomena and environmental problems which need to be solved by the municipal management due to the growth of municipalities. It was found that the mayors consider changes in the landscape character to be among the most significant impacts of suburbanisation in the territory. A change in the rural character of municipalities because of the construction of urban-type houses is perceived as being very problematic. Another serious problem is the insufficient capacity of technical infrastructure such as sewerage and waste-water treatment. The costs of ensuring the quality of the environment and of public spaces, which are, in many cases, beyond the economic possibilities of municipalities, are also increasing significantly. The article also includes specifications of selected smart solutions and procedures that can help preserve the quality of the environment.
... Some argue that green growth is used as a cover to restart urban capital accumulation (Holgersen and Malm, 2015) and accumulation by green dispossession (Safransky, 2014), a form of 'green' value grabbing (Andreucci et al., 2017). At the extreme, experimental eco-cities are emerging as technological fixes or 'sustainability fixes' (Goodling et al., 2015;Long, 2016;Rosol et al., 2013;Tretter, 2013;While et al., 2004) that mostly ensure the continuation of business-as-usual rather than a transition to a new green economy (Caprotti, 2014) or to more transformational approaches to sustainability. Sustainability, in many of these cases, correlates solely with the economically lucrative dimension of ecological innovation, whereby notions of economic constraint are ultimately transcended and social considerations are relegated to the market (Cugurullo, 2013;Hodson and Marvin, 2010). ...
Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines the extent to which, and why, the degree of green branding – that is, urban green boosterism – predicts the variation in city affordability. We present the results of a mixed methods, macroscale analysis of the greening trajectories of 99 cities in Western Europe, the USA and Canada. Our regression analysis of green rhetoric shows a trend toward higher cost of living among cities with the longest duration and highest intensity green rhetoric. We then use qualitative findings from Nantes, France, and Austin, USA, as two cases to unpack why green boosterism correlates with lower affordability. Key factors determining the relation between urban greening and affordability include the extent of active municipal intervention, redistributional considerations and the historic importance of inclusion and equity in urban development. We conclude by considering what our results mean for the urban greening agenda in the context of an ongoing green growth imperative going forward.
... Like other new-economy Meccas such as San Francisco, Portland, and Boulder, the influx of high-tech industry and workers to Austin has exacerbated social inequalities (Kneebone 2014). The smart growth policies that structured much of Austin's growth over the past 25 years have emphasized density-oriented development in downtown and East Austin (for an overview of how these policies emerged in the 1990s as a truce between environmentalists and developers, see Swearinger 2010;Long 2010;Tretter 2013). Given the classed and racial East-West split that discriminatory housing and land-use policies in Austin established during the 20th century, the recent interest on the part of developers and white and middle-class home buyers in East Austin has made gentrification and minority displacement a significant issue (Auyero 2015;Tang and Ren 2014;Long 2016). ...
Scholars have recently begun to explore how social and politically liberal gentrifiers make sense of the classed and racial inequalities linked to gentrification. In this article I ask how residents of one new urbanist “bourgeois utopia”—the Mueller Development in Austin, Texas—experience and give meaning to their neighborhood in a context of gentrification. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews I explain how new urbanism has reimagined and marketed “diversity” and “community” to middle-class and wealthy consumers and provides these to affluent people as neighborhood amenities. I show how residents draw on diversity ideology and multicultural capital to neutralize what they see as their neighborhood’s role in gentrification. In doing so this article adds to our theoretical understanding of how contemporary urban development exploits pursuits for the social good as rhetorical tools to assuage privileged guilt while promoting profitable enterprises.
... In response, one of the largest opportunities for increasing participation lies in identifying local approaches to improve the level of education and training regarding the community benefits (both monetized and non-monetized) from sustainable development. Especially in areas of the country where LEED-ND projects have not yet gotten off the ground, research has highlighted the importance of not only following standard sustainability reporting design (Maclaren, 1996), but in local officials designing public processes where stakeholders can feel comfortable and respected in talking about diverse perspectives and identifying integrated solutions through seeking common ground and goals (McNeal et al., 2014;Tretter, 2013). ...
The adoption rate for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) projects has varied considerably across the United States. Local governments and developers face variation in the incentives and barriers while implementing LEED-ND projects across four key dimensions – economic, policy, public awareness, and organizational. This paper investigated the drivers of variation using a mixed-methods approach including a two-stage Heckman model, a survey of Texas subdivision developers and interviews with local planning officials. Results indicate that initial public funding may lead to more LEED-ND projects being completed, but with a diminishing return as these projects become established within the region. Support for local programs including tax abatement, public-private partnerships, and other incentives were also demonstrated to help facilitate LEED-ND project adoption. Overall this paper underscored the important role, especially early on, the public sector and local governments play in initiating local LEED-ND projects to inform and motivate the land development industry.
... The core of the city was laid in a grid pattern already in 1839, and most of the streets are still identified by numerals depending on their distance from the point of origin that is the Texas Capitol Building. The coherent structure is, however, broken up by the natural features of creek beds and parks, and a person driving along a road to outside the original settlement area will find a change in curvature and straying away from the other ordinal streets (Tretter 2012). In a style that borrows from Haussman's idea for Paris of connecting sites of power with lines of sight, there is an uninterrupted view from the state capital building to the tower of the University of Texas, setting in stone the prominent position of the city's two original centres of power. ...
This thesis explores how evangelical Protestants of two conservative churches in Austin, Texas make and experience intimate relationships, and how these relationships shape their ethical self-development. It focuses on interpersonal relations within their church communities, with people in need and relations with divine forces. Both the meetings of church small groups and organised occasions for evangelism reflect a local ideal of intimacy, as they aim at conversation that is spontaneous, non-instrumental and self-disclosing. Evangelical discourse about intimate interaction understands it as an ethical tool: It allows participants to discover moral faults in themselves and to enrol others for self-disciplinary support. Such an ethical tool depends on a model of personhood that in the thesis is called forensic. Evangelicals following this model understood themselves as autonomous individuals held accountable to biblical norms that are separate from them. Based on ethnographic material gathered from 15 months of fieldwork, the ethnography demonstrates that the performance of intimacy is often in contrast with the churches’ relational ideology. Rather than relations that aspire to mutual disclosure, they also include tacit or explicit acknowledgement of power relations, negotiated reciprocity and measured distance. Moreover, in additional to the forensic model, responses to intimate relationships were also understood with a contrasting logic of personhood, as indeterminate and contingent on powers that are distinct from both the acting ethical subject and social institutions. These statements connect with a growing anthropological literature on morality and relatedness that attempts to account for the richness and incongruity of ethical practice. Long-term participant observation makes it possible to understand personal striving for piety not only in terms of its ideals and inherent logic, but also its potentially contradictory outcomes. The ethnographic material suggests evangelical norms and means of self-formation are associated with frustration and ambiguity, particularly as they aspire to be the singular source for ethical direction for all life domains in a context such as Austin that is characterised by a diversity of life trajectories. The flexibility inherent to the relational approach to ethical life, including the potential to switch between forensic and indeterminate modes of action, is creatively used by participants to respond to this tension.
... With business support, city planners in several major North American cities have spurred the 'revitalization' of inner-city neighborhoods, the implementation of smart growth and smart urbanism and public-transit and bike-lane expansion--an economic development agenda that has slowly merged with a low-carbon politics (Harvey, 1989;2001;Hackworth, 2007;Tretter, 2012). Further, the aestheticization of the central city in the late 1990s and 2000s allowed a highly visible mobilization of capital at a time of heightened interurban competition, serving as an important mechanism for cities to distinguish themselves through branding and marketing (Brenner and Theodore, 2002;Scott, 2011). ...
As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low‐carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle‐ and upper‐income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike‐ and pedestrian‐friendly streets, and in higher‐density mixed‐use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower‐income, often non‐white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio‐environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low‐carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower‐income and non‐white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.
... However, scholars in urban political ecology, urban geography and urban planning have shown that injustices may be created or exacerbated by sustainability planning when interventions do not explicitly focus on social justice (Agyeman, 2013). Sustainability agendas that focus on compact growth often become attached to real-estate development and economic goals (Gibbs and Krueger, 2007;Tretter, 2013). Real-estate developers can benefit by building a high-end version of municipal visions of dense sustainable urbanism and command public resources to support these efforts (Bunce, 2009;Quastel, 2009). ...
... Although research has linked environmental hazards to the depression of property values (De Sousa, Wu, & Westphal, 2009;Longo & Alberini, 2006;Simons & Saginor, 2006) and to decreased academic achievement (Durán-Narucki, 2008;Evans et al., 2010;Mohai, Kweon, Lee, & Ard, 2011), recent scholarship around the notion of environmental gentrification has found that gentrification often leads to environmental interventions (and vice versa), which generally contributes to improved quality of life for neighborhood residents (Gamper-Rabindran & Timmins, 2011). For instance, gentrification has been linked to park restoration projects (Gould & Lewis, 2012), the creation of so-called green spaces (Checker, 2011), the expansion of health food outlets (Anguelovski, 2015), smart growth development (Quastel, 2009;Tretter, 2013), and the rehabilitation of old or abandoned buildings (Chang, 2016). Furthermore, research suggests that these sorts of favorable changes to environmental conditions are generally promotive of children's mental and physical health as well as their academic success. ...
Research in the neighborhood effects tradition has primarily concerned itself with understanding the consequences of growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods. In recent years, however, the in-migration of relatively affluent households into disinvested central city neighborhoods—commonly referred to as gentrification—has markedly risen, transforming the racial, socioeconomic, and institutional composition of many urban neighborhoods. This article examines what existing literature reveals about what these changes mean for children’s academic achievement, with particular attention paid to the impacts of gentrification-induced changes to the social ecology, institutional composition, residential stability, and environmental conditions of urban neighborhoods. The final section proposes a rigorous interdisciplinary research agenda for advancing this budding field of educational research.
... Many have developed sustainability plans as a demonstration of their commitment to this moral imperative for the provision or restoration of environmental amenities (Portney 2013). In this context, real estate developers and investors together with city planners and policy makers play a key role in producing a green city and, in return, helping to boost a city's image as liveable and desirable, making it more competitive in the global market (Gibbs and Krueger 2007;Tretter 2013). That this 'urban greening orthodoxy' overlooks or invisibilizes the tensions and contradictions (i.e. ...
Today, municipal decision-makers, planners, and investors rely on valuation studies of ecosystem services, public health assessments, and real estate projections to promote a consensual view of urban greening interventions such as new parks, greenways, or greenbelts as a public good with widespread benefits for all residents. However, as new green projects often anchor major investment and high-end development, we ask: Does the green city fulfil its promise for inclusive and far-reaching environmental, health, social, and economic benefits or does it create new environmental inequalities and green mirages? Through case examples of diverse urban greening interventions in cities reflecting different urban development trajectories and baseline environmental conditions and needs (Barcelona, Medellin, and New Orleans), we argue that urban greening interventions increasingly create new dynamics of exclusion, polarization, segregation, and invisibilization. Despite claims about the public good, these interventions take place to the detriment of the most socially and racially marginalized urban groups whose land and landscapes are appropriated through the creation of a ‘green gap’ in property markets. In that sense, green amenities become GreenLULUs (Locally Unwanted Land Uses) and socially vulnerable residents and community groups face a green space paradox, whereby they become excluded from new green amenities they long fought for as part of an environmental justice agenda. Thus, as urban greening consolidates urban sustainability and redevelopment strategies by bringing together private and public investors around a tool for marketing cities with global reach, it also negates a deeper reflection on urban segregation, social hierarchies, racial inequalities, and green privilege.
... Jonas andGibbs 2004, 2010;Krueger and Gibbs 2007;Rosol 2013;Tretter 2013). Increasingly the notion of growth as an overriding and uncontestable imperative is being challenged. ...
To examine the social evaluations of place-name variation, a matched-guise study was created by digitally manipulating audio clips from a map task with four bilingual and four monolingual Austinites, varying only in place-name pronunciation: English or Spanish phonology for Spanish place-names; established local or newcomer nonlocal for English place-names. Based on 126 Austinite/Austin-resident listeners, mixed effects linear regression models and qualitative comments found that listeners uniformly perceived English place-name variation only in terms of localness, while Spanish variation indexed several social meanings that varied by listener/speaker demographics, particularly listener ethnicity (i.e., non-Hispanic listeners evaluated Spanish phonology as nonlocal while Hispanic listeners considered both English and Spanish phonology local). I contend (i) not all listeners perceive the same indexical fields, but rather partially overlapping fields; (ii) differing perceptions of Spanish place-names reveal underlying monoglossic ideologies in the U.S.; (iii) place-name variation is a rich site of indexical information for the construction of place identity, particularly in bilingual regions.
In this paper, we examine the association between neighborhood change trajectories and the use of latent smart growth and sprawl words in real estate listings through a series of exploratory analyses. We address questions such as how, where, and to whom smart growth and sprawl type neighborhood characteristics have been advertised by neighborhood typologies, through time. In a case study on the Charlotte, North Carolina metropolitan area between 2001 and 2020, we find a positive association between the marketing of sprawl characteristics mentioned in property listings of a neighborhood and an increasing share of minority applicants and a positive relationship between the marketing of smart growth characteristics, income, and higher-end housing amenities. The spatial and temporal patterns of the marketing of smart growth in real estate listings correspond to broader trends that have occurred across metropolitan areas in the past few decades with the increasing suburbanization of lower-income and minority residents, and an increasing preference for urban, walkable areas among residents of higher socioeconomic status.
Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
This chapter starts by a literature-based overview of the geographical distribution of smart cities around the world and opens a discussion about the concerning North–South divide in the smart city discourse. Despite the complexity of urbanization and the fast pace of smart city development worldwide, smart cities of the South are vastly understudied. This chapter offers an overall analysis of all cities participating in the Smarter Cities Challenge based on their placement in the Global South versus the North and the smart dimension(s) prioritized. The overall analysis is followed by summary accounts of a few case study cities involved with the Challenge to offer tangible narrations of the ways in which the North–South divide plays out in the smart city approaches taken. The overall goal of this chapteris to clarify whether or how North–South divide matters in the ways in which cities around the world adopt smart solutions while accounting for the socio-economic variables.
A livable community, as a practical term, is a place-based vision focusing on land-use elements that promote residents of all ages and abilities to live, work, and play in their community. Livability through physical design expands across community elements of streets, commercial and residential uses, and public spaces. As a planning effort, livable communities advance decades of responses toward urban sprawl and community health. In this chapter, we present conceptual frameworks from key planning predecessors including growth management strategies, comprehensive planning approaches, smart growth movements, and sustainable development to community health. Furthermore, we review the research evidence on livable environments health and economic benefits to a community and contributions to the quality of life. Understanding that sustainability provides the framework for considering livable communities in terms of equity and access, we present illustrative case studies providing evidence of mobilization, government programs, and collaboration for improved services and conditions to humanize public space. We are of the view that existing injustices to livable communities in land use and zoning decisions create ongoing health disparities so much that in some jurisdictions, Zip codes are used as predictors of health outcomes. Livability is a place-making outcome predicated on the relationship of multiple community development theories in areas of supportive community characteristics. We review the need for research evidence to guide livability policies and indicators for sustainable livable communities.
Nature-based solutions have recently been embraced as one route towards simultaneously addressing urban environmental and social problems, but an emerging agenda has sought to ask whether and how the ‘greening’ of cities may actually reinforce inequalities or lead to new forms of social exclusion. Using comparative case-study analysis, this paper examines the extent to which nature-driven stewardship initiatives recognize and redress inequalities. We compare two urban contexts that have undergone significant societal transformations over the last two to three decades: Sofia and Cape Town. The comparison shows how nature-driven stewardship initiatives differentially address deeper roots of environmental, social and racial privilege shaped significantly by post-socialist and post-apartheid transition contexts. Instead of assuming a homogenous ideal of urban nature and focusing on questions of the distribution of urban nature and its access, this paper finds it is important to consider the kinds of social relations that are required to both shape decision-making processes and generate meaningful and diverse values and ways of relating to nature in the city. Furthermore, it finds that inclusive nature-based solution governance recognizes and redresses both inequalities in access and inequalities that perpetuate dominant views about what nature is and for whom nature is produced and maintained.
In recent years, “urban greening” has become a new keyword in urban policy and practice, used to describe a proliferation of urban quality of life and environmental sustainability initiatives including street trees, public parks, greenways, farmers' markets, green roofs, and LEED certification in design. The emerging critical literature on urban greening has highlighted important ways green's social and economic added value affects the political economy of contemporary greening and produces inequalities in access to real or perceived environmental goods. However, such research has only infrequently asked why and under what conditions naturalized understandings of green as “good” make it possible for such initiatives to add value in the first place. As a result, it offers only partial explanations of why green has the effects it has—for instance, increasing property values—and only very rarely questions the fundamental “good” of nature itself. I argue that integrating insights on green's naturalized social and economic value from a growing body of social‐theoretical work across geography and the social sciences can complement political economic explanations for greening and provide new vantage points for critique.
This article analyzes links between urban sprawl and labor union membership across 194 U.S. metro areas. It finds significant correlations between union density and sprawl, especially in right-to-work states, and especially for public sector workers. It substantiates arguments that smart growth policies, in addition to being beneficial for the sustainability, health, well-being, and opportunity of urban communities, can bring about an urban-spatial pattern of higher density and mixed use that is advantageous for union organizing. Greater union engagement in smart growth and climate justice coalitions in struggles over land use, infrastructure, and urban form, it argues, is thus important not only to directly further goals of social justice and sustainability, but for its potential value in strategies to revitalize the U.S. labor movement. Reviewing labor studies literature on urban spatiality and working class formation, the paper underlines the importance of the “integrative turn” toward comparative and systematic analysis in labor geography.
Austin, TX, was the site of a three-year debate between urban farmers and their supporters and local community activists about how to rewrite an outdated farm code. There was tremendous animosity between the two groups and, despite efforts at mediation, the two sides were unable to reach compromise. To understand more about how these two groups came into conflict, we interviewed 26 local stakeholders about their views and experiences during the farm code debate and found that issues of race and racial inequality were a key factor in the continuing mistrust. We found that farmers and their supporters attempted to frame the debate and its racial undertones by highlighting their racial–ethnic minority supporters, describing their businesses as reclaiming East Austin’s agricultural past, and arguing that the only issue that should matter in redrawing the farm ordinance should be how to best help farmers provide healthy food to the community. We argue that the farmers’ responses draw from a discourse of whiteness and color blindness that can be harmful to People of Color and link their views to larger critiques that the alternative food movement and individual alternative food projects can be exclusionary.
Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation addresses the question of how a human-centered conservation approach can and should change practice. For the most part, there are few answers to this question because professionals in the heritage conservation field do not use social science research methodologies to manage cultural landscapes, assess historical significance and inform the treatment of building and landscape fabric. With few exceptions, only academic theorists have explored these topics while failing to offer specific, usable guidance on how the social sciences can actually be used by heritage professionals.
In exploring the nature of a human-centered heritage conservation practice, we explicitly seek a middle ground between the academy and practice, theory and application, fabric and meanings, conventional and civil experts, and orthodox and heterodox ideas behind practice and research. We do this by positioning this book in a transdisciplinary space between these dichotomies as a way to give voice (and respect) to multiple perspectives without losing sight of our goal that heritage conservation practice should, fundamentally, benefit all people. We believe that this approach is essential for creating an emancipated built heritage conservation practice that must successfully engage very different ontological and epistemological perspectives.
Now that Jane Jacobs' ideas are seen as urban planning orthodoxy, it is unclear how her institutional goal of progressive change for the field will carry forward. In the 1960s, Jacobs created the conditions for institutional change by offering a thorough critique of the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” orthodoxy of urban planning and presenting a solution for the problems that she saw with this approach. She argued that the top-down, design-oriented planning of her time hurt the lives of individual residents and diminished society as a whole. Her solution was a new way of seeing the city: as a functional and efficient social system. Since the 1990s, a global planning orthodoxy – of which Jacobs' ideas are part – developed around the “Smart Sustainable Resilient City.” This orthodoxy has been subject to critique, but Susan Fainstein's Just City theory offers tools for comprehensively challenging the approach and a solution for addressing the problems. In order to demonstrate the need for institutional change within the Smart Sustainable Resilient City orthodoxy, I use the Just City theoretical perspective to interpret the results of an analysis of green gentrification in New York City between 1990 and 2014. I argue that the over-valuation of Jacobsian diversity within the current urban planning orthodoxy generates unjust outcomes. The just green city, then, requires de-emphasizing Jacobs' intellectual project in favor of her far more important institutional project.
Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
The ambivalence and skepticism about urban sustainability that run through the pages of this book reflect a commendably honest approach to the central dilemmas of our time. The editors confirm that an important aim of the collection is to “illustrate how myths of sustainability can come into conflict with – and sometimes conceal – concerns about social and environmental justice” (see Introduction). Some analysts in this collection show how policies and practices could be changed to reduce heavy environmental footprints and to incorporate social inclusion and rights within a framework of sustainable resource use. Partial steps, like the identification of planning blindness and pervasive structural injustices, ultimately bring us back to the central demands of sustainability as a larger social, economic, and ecological goal. In this concluding commentary, I shall argue that there are aspects of the recurrent contradiction between sustainability and justice that go beyond the many pertinent observations made in this volume and that remain invisible, even to the most critical critics of the practice of sustainability. While much mainstream discourse presents cities as “our best hope” for sustainability, as the editors observe, critics have long noted that un-sustainability nevertheless continues to be the conspicuous hallmark of urban life. A classic study of urban metabolism estimated that in 1971, Hong Kong daily consumed 6.3 thousand tons of food and 11.7 thousand tons of petroleum, while polluting 27 thousand tons of oxygen and 1,068 thousand tons of water (Boyden et al. 1981). William Rees, who developed Georg Borgström’s (1965) observations on “ghost acreages” into the influential concept of ecological footprints (Wackernagel and Rees 1996), already in 1997 concluded that the notion of a sustainable city is an oxymoron (Rees 1997:307).
Städer förändras av kriser och vi lever i en krisernas tid. Ekonomisk och social turbulens i stor skala och globala miljö-och klimatproblem kommer att påverka städernas manöverutrymme på både kort och långt sikt. I Malmö fortsätter man emellertid bygga som om också framtiden kommer att handla om shopping, turism, kongresser och oupphörligt stigande bostadspriser. Den nyliberala agendan ligger kort sagt fast. Tanken är att man genom att attrahera entrepenörer och kapital ska få pengar att sippra ner genom inkomstskikten och gynna alla stadens invånare. Men i själva verket har arbetslöshet och fattigdom bara fortsatt växa i skuggan av skrytbyggena Turning Torso och Malmö Live. Ståle Holgersens Staden och kapitalet stiger ned i Malmös sociala och ekonomiska historia sedan mitten på artonhundra-talet och närgranskar fenomen som tillväxt, segregation, polarisering och nyliberal politik i ett marxistiskt perspektiv. Vilken verklighet döljer sig under dessa? Och hur ekologiskt hållbar är egentligen staden trots alla vackra ord om hållbarhet? Boken gör ekonomisk teori lättillgänglig och tankeväckande och stadshistoria politiskt relevant. Men den pekar också framåt i det stora och det lilla och ställer den viktiga frågan hur våra städer bäst ska kunna hantera nuvarande och kommande kriser.
This chapter lays out the major themes and key debates associated with the now expansive scholarly literatures on urban sustainability and smart growth, respectively. The discussion highlights distinct interpretations of urban sustainability: state-progressive, radical-societal, and market-liberal. Smart growth is then discussed as a more concrete and largely state-progressive (rather than radical-societal or market-liberal) planning theory and policy doctrine that, in the US context at least, “spatializes” urban sustainability in ways that are legible in the institutional and discursive environment. Following Cooke’s (Theories of planning and spatial development, London, 1983) lead, I argue that we need to integrate the planning theory of smart growth with the wider pursuit of urban sustainability as an urban geopolitical project. Such a theoretical commitment, I suggest, might help us both to describe and to explain what I call in Chap. 3 the sustainable geographies of uneven smart growth in Greater Seattle—and perhaps beyond.
This book explores urban sustainability across Greater Seattle through a series of regulatory, discursive, and investment strategies and emerging forms of territorial governance associated with the smart growth regional planning doctrine. The smart growth movement has been and largely remains into the 2010s, “the most prominent planning approach for sustainable land use and urban development” (J Am Plann Assoc 78:87–103, 2012, p. 90) in many parts of the USA. This chapter outlines the focus, purposes, and main arguments of the book. The discussion establishes the rising importance of forging sustainability through reshaping metropolitan space. It then argues that actually existing smart growth is spatially variegated across metropolitan space—i.e., unevenly taken up and differentially embedded in the urban fabric—because of what Karen Orren and Steven Skowronek (Political order, New York, 1996) call “intercurrence,” a key theoretical concept in the book that refers to the coexistence of multiple political orders. The chapter justifies the case study focus on Greater Seattle and concludes with a brief summary of the themes and arguments of the remaining chapters.
The “Greater Seattle” area is built originally upon a process of land alienation from indigenous populations. Original dispossession led over time to new processes of (industrialized) urban-based accumulation, while ongoing modes of class, gender, and race segregation, concerted efforts in public organization (e.g., engineering, planning, services, war-making, institutional reforms), and continuing private innovations in product development (e.g., Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon) critically reshaped nature and society into an altered metropolitan space by the mid- to late- twentieth century. Now well into the twenty-first century, “Greater Seattle” is, following Alan Scott (A world in emergence: Cities and regions in the 21st century. Edward Elgar, Cheltonham, UK, 2012), an increasingly “digitized” and highly dynamic global city-regional economy of some four million people spread over four major counties, albeit still anchored around the core city of Seattle in King County. New efforts to build a new city-regional order around a more just resiliency, however, are shaped strongly by past orders constituted by both ideational and institutional forces.
Introduction What circumstances enable environmental arguments to gain social recognition? Who are the authorized spokespeople for silent nature? How can an eviction policy, a policy that stigmatizes the urban poor as “anti-ecological” and therefore not fully “human,” be narrated in such a way as to obtain legitimacy? This chapter examines the emergence of new environmental rhetorics in social conflicts regarding informal occupants and evictions, on the one hand, and in the stigmatization of the “counter-uses” of land by low-income sectors, on the other. Through the analysis of a case study - the villa Rodrigo Bueno adjacent to the Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve in Buenos Aires - I will contend that depriving the villa dwellers of their human condition enables the exercise of government violence upon them. I particularly address one of the key operations in achieving this deprivation of humanity: the assertion of the anti-ecological status of these “undesirable dwellers,” implying that the poor impact negatively on the ecosystem and on the life prospects of animals that live in the reserve. In the Eye of the Storm What happens when nearly two thousand people settle down just a few yards away from one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in a capital city and, to make matters worse, in a natural reserve? For about twenty years, villa Rodrigo Bueno has survived on public land reclaimed from the river while remaining almost invisible.
Many cities today face challenges related to urban growth. This is also the case in Oslo, currently one of the fastest growing capitals in Europe. In order to prepare for the population growth, a new municipal master plan has been prepared. In this, sustainable development is a prominent concept, and the urban district is going to be densified as part of the strategy. This paper examines some obstacles of turning planning theory into practice. There is a lack of coherence between municipal goals and the actual outcome. The analysis indicates that the official strategy is not able to cater for social sustainability partly due to institutional constraints. Moreover, there is no concise understanding of what sustainability means, which in turn hampers the ability to operationalise the concept in urban planning.
Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.
While many have recognized since the 1970s the strong relationship between culture and urban renewal, particularly as cities began to use cultural amenities to change their images and lure potential investors, little has been written about how and why cultural assets may be valued investments in their own right. There is at least one notable exception, in the work of David Harvey, and this approach takes as its starting point the importance of the monopoly aspects of culture, particularly for rents, competition and fixed capital. In part, I bring Harvey's theoretical insights on the political economy of culture to bear on the case of Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s, and particularly its nomination as the European City of Culture, with particular attention paid to how the economics of culture is related to local politics.
In this symposium convened to celebrate the tenth anniversary of David Harvey's Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference , it is fitting to re‐visit key themes in that seminal work, including: (1) the mutual reciprocity between social and environmental changes; and (2) the contradictions that emerge from a dialectical analysis of these changes in urban spaces. In challenging scholars to explore the spatial dialectics associated with environmental and social changes, Harvey's political and intellectual project included demonstrating the dialectical linkages between notions of justice and nature in urban environments. My work responds to Harvey's challenge by documenting how the ideological constructions of home , homeless and public green space produce and perpetuate injustices experienced materially and spatially in the daily lives of homeless people living in urban green spaces. Using Agamben's notion of bare life as my analytic framework, I explore two issues: (1) the disconnection between notions of home articulated by homeless people living in green spaces and the ideological constructions of homeless espoused by government and planning agencies; and (2) the tensions in urban green spaces resulting from homeless people who have opted to live there because all other options are not viable for them, and the ideological constructions of urban green spaces developed by the city parks department and housed citizens involved in planning for future green spaces in the city. I present the concept of ecological gentrification , which I define as the implementation of an environmental planning agenda related to public green spaces that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human population — homeless people — while espousing an environmental ethic. I conclude by advocating a robust pluralism of home and public green spaces as an initial movement towards renegotiating concepts of justice in urban areas. I present short‐ and long‐term strategies for resisting the displacement, exclusion and expulsion of homeless individuals from public urban green spaces with the goal of improving their material and spatial lives, and argue that such strategies require a re‐imagined practice of urban ecological planning that draws inspiration from Harvey's commitment to producing spaces of justice, nature and difference.
Résumé
Dans ce symposium à l’occasion du dixième anniversaire de l’ouvrage majeur de David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), il convient d’en revisiter les grands thèmes: la réciprocité mutuelle entre les changements sociaux et environnementaux, et les contradictions nées d’une analyse dialectique de ceux‐ci dans les espaces urbains. En proposant aux chercheurs d’explorer la dialectique spatiale associée aux changements environnementaux et sociaux, le projet intellectuel et politique de Harvey couvrait la démonstration des liens dialectiques entre les notions de justice et de nature dans les environnements urbains. Je réponds à la proposition de Harvey en montrant comment les constructions idéologiques de home , homeless et public green space (chez‐soi, sans‐abri et espace vert public) génèrent et perpétuent des injustices sur les plans matériel et spatial dans la vie quotidienne des sans‐abri vivant dans les espaces verts des villes. Empruntant à Agamben la notion de «vie nue» comme cadre analytique, j’explore deux aspects: d’une part, la déconnexion entre les notions de ‘chez‐soi’ déclinées par les sans‐abri vivant dans les espaces verts et les constructions idéologiques du ‘sans‐abri’ adoptées par les organismes gouvernementaux et d’urbanisme; d’autre part, les tensions dans les espaces verts urbains provenant des sans‐abri qui ont choisi d’y vivre en l’absence de toute autre option viable pour eux, et les constructions idéologiques des espaces verts urbains élaborées par le service des Parcs municipaux et les habitants logés impliqués dans l’aménagement des futurs espaces verts de la ville. Je présente le concept de ‘gentrification écologique’, défini comme la mise en œuvre d’un programme d’aménagement de l’environnement relatif aux espaces verts publics qui conduit au déplacement ou à l’exclusion des populations les plus vulnérables sur le plan économique (les sans‐abri) tout en respectant une éthique environnementale. Je défends en conclusion un pluralisme énergique de ‘chez‐soi’ et d’‘espaces verts publics’ comme premier mouvement vers une renégociation des concepts de justice dans les zones urbaines. Des stratégies à court et long terme sont présentées pour résister au déplacement, à l’exclusion et à l’expulsion des sans‐abri des espaces verts urbains dans le but d’améliorer leur vie matérielle et spatiale, ces stratégies exigeant à mon sens de ré‐imaginer l’aménagement écologique urbain en s’inspirant de la volonté de Harvey de produire des espaces de justice, de nature et de différence.
There is evidence that the politics of economic development in the post-industrial city is increasingly bound up with the ability of urban elites to manage ecological impacts and environmental demands emanating from within and outside the urban area. More than simply a question of promoting quality of life in cities in response to interurban competition and pressures from local residents, the greening of the urban growth machine reflects changes in state rules and incentives structuring urban governance as part of an evolving geopolitics of nature and the environment. The adoption of principles and practices of ecological modernization potentially represents a dramatic shift in the social regulation of urban governance away from unconstrained neoliberalized modes. In this article we explore how different demands on and for urban environmental policy have played out vis-à-vis changing modes and practices of governance in two English post-industrial cities. We explore differences in the ways that entrepreneurial urban regimes have sought to incorporate the green agenda (Leeds), or insulate themselves from ecological dissent (Manchester). We further attempt to conceptualize evolving urban economy-environment relations in the UK in terms of an ensemble of governance practices, strategies, alliances and discourses that enables the local state to manage, though not necessarily resolve, seemingly conflicting economic, social and environmental demands at different scales of territoriality. Here we propose the notion of an ‘urban sustainability fix’ to describe the selective incorporation of ecological objectives in local territorial structures during an era of ecological modernization.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
A report from the Local Government Association have encourage the councils to use its powers in tackling the issue of climate change. Councils have a central role to play, as they have the democratic mandate for action, closer relationship with the people, and serves as the leader to public, private and voluntary sector partners. The report suggests that councils must lead by example in promoting energy efficiency and smarter choices. A summary of the main recommendations are included and outlined in the LGA paper and are divided into different sections.
Spaces of Sustainability is an engaging and accessible introduction to the key philosophical ideas which lie behind the principles of sustainable development. This topical resource discusses key contemporary issues including global warming, third world poverty, transnational citizenship and globalization. Combining the latest research and theoretical frameworks Spaces of Sustainability offers a unique insight into contemporary attempts to create a more sustainable society and introduces the debates surrounding sustainable development through a series of interesting transcontinental case studies. These include: discussions of land-use conflicts in the USA; agricultural reform in the Indian Punjab; environmental planning in the Barents Sea; community forest development in Kenya; transport policies in Mexico City; and political reform in Russia. Written in an approachable and concise manner, this is essential reading for students of geography, planning, environmental politics and urban studies. It is illustrated throughout with figures and plates, along with a range of explanatory help boxes and useful web links.
Hardly a day passes without the media discovering some community or neighborhood fighting a landfill, incinerator, chemical plant, or some other polluting industry. This was not always the case. Just three decades ago, the concept of environmental justice had not registered on the radar screens of environmental, civil rights, or social justice groups. 1 Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Memphis in 1968 on an environmental and economic justice mission for the striking black garbage workers. The strikers were demanding equal pay and better work conditions. Of course, Dr. King was assassinated before he could complete his mission. Another landmark garbage dispute took place a decade later in Houston, when African American homeowners in 1979 began a bitter fight to keep a sanitary landfill out of their suburban middle-income neighborhood. 2 Residents formed the Northeast Community Action Group or NECAG. NECAG and their attorney, Linda McKeever Bullard, filed a class action lawsuit to block the facility from being built. The 1979 lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was the first of its kind to challenge the siting of a waste facility under civil rights law. The landmark Houston case occurred three years before the environmental justice movement was catapulted into the national limelight in the rural and mostly African American Warren County, North Carolina. The environmental justice movement has come a long way since its humble beginning in Warren County, North Carolina where a PCB landfill ignited protests and over 500 arrests. The Warren County protests provided the impetus for an U.S. General Accounting Office study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. 3 That study revealed that three out of four of the off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in Region 4 (which comprises eight states in the South) happen to be located in predominantly African-American communities, although African-Americans made up only 20% of the region's population. More important, the protesters put "environmental racism" on the map. Fifteen years later, the state of North Carolina is required to spend over $25 million to cleanup and detoxify the Warren County PCB landfill.
During the past decade, renewed calls for central city revitalization have come from scholars and practitioners working within a new regionalist perspective. Such arguments have provided much of the ideological underpinning for coalitions around the country promoting smart growth and other regional reforms. Smart growth policies seek to curb urban sprawl by channeling investment into already developed areas, including inner-city communities. Given the attention paid to urban policy among advocates of the new regionalism, one would expect inner-city minorities to be well represented in the dialogue. However, the dialogue over smart growth and regionalism has largely failed to engage inner-city African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities. This article asks why that is the case, examines the consequences, and proposes a strategy for reframing the new regionalist debate in a way that may resonate more with minority stakeholders.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
Abstract Nothing inherent in the discipline steers planners either toward environmental protection or toward economic development -- or toward a third goal of planning: social equity. Instead, planners work within the tension generated among these three fundamental aims, which, collectively, I call the "planner's triangle," with sustainable development located at its center. This center cannot be reached directly, but only approximately and indirectly, through a sustained period of confronting and resolving the triangle's conflicts. To do so, planners have to redefine sustainability, since its current formulation romanticizes our sustainable past and is too vaguely holistic. Planners would benefit both from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental injustice.
This article seeks to analyze urban politics through the lens of the social constructionist approach to scale. This approach views scale not as a set of pre-given, natural, and immutable levels upon which social life occurs. Rather, it regards scale as a fluid context for and product of power relations in society. The article argues that urban politics is frequently characterized by political strategies that frame reality in terms of scale. Agents of the state, capital, and civil society all engage in the politics around competing scalar framings. As a result, the politics of scale has important but contingent material consequences. The article illustrates these points through a case study of the politics that surrounded the development of a new neighborhood planning initiative in Austin, Texas in the late 1990s. Based on this case study, the article also argues that while geographers studying the politics of scale tend to explain it solely in terms of spatial scale, scalar politics in the urban context frequently combines framings of spatial and temporal scale. This simultaneous framing of space and time in the city has important, if sometimes unpredictable, implications for policy and politics.
A growing body of evidence reveals that people of color and low-income persons have borne greater environmental and health risks than the society at large in their neighborhoods, workplace, and playgrounds. Over the last decade or so, grassroots activists have attempted to change the way government implements environmental, health, and civil rights laws. Grassroots groups have organized, educated, and empowered themselves to improve the way government regulations and environmental policies are administered. A new movement emerged in opposition to environmental racism and environmenttal injustice. Over the last decades or so, grassroots activists have had some success in changing the way the federal government treats communities of color and their inhabitants. Grassroots groups have also organized, educated, and empowered themselves to improve the way health and environmental policies are administered. Environmentalism is now equated with social justice and civil rights.
City-regionalism and livability are concepts that feature prominently in recent writings on urban politics and policy. Policy discussions have seen the two concepts fused together in such a way that regional competitiveness is generally understood to entail high levels of 'livability' while urban livability is increasingly discussed, measured and advocated at a city-regional scale. It is, then, important to understand how these concepts work in tandem and to delineate the often-elided politics of reproduction through which they operate. This paper begins by elaborating on the politically powerful fusion of city-regionalist and urban livability discourses, using the example of Richard Florida's creative city argument. It then discusses the politics of city-regionalism and livability through the case of Austin, Texas, a city that has framed its policy in terms of regionalism and livability but which is also characterized by marked income inequality and a neighborhood-based political struggle over the city's future. The paper concludes by drawing lessons from the discussion and suggesting that the city-regional livability agenda can best be understood as a geographically selective, strategic, and highly political project. Copyright (c) 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..
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