History & Place

CUES is anchored in its location at UC Santa Cruz and in the Santa Cruz region. We draw on our institutional history and unique geography to advance a “Santa Cruz approach” to critical urban and environmental studies, which we understand in three ways.

First, CUES builds on UCSC’s rich, transdisciplinary tradition of critical urban and environmental research. Among many others, this includes Marxist political economist James O’Connor’s founding of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, and environmental geographer Margaret Fitzsimmons’ prescient critique of “The Matter of Nature.” UCSC also formed one of the first interdisciplinary Environmental Studies departments in the country, and its faculty have remained leaders in political ecology, environmental anthropology, and critical sustainability studies. CUES supports current faculty and graduate students who are moving these traditions in new directions, including through work in anti/decolonial studies, abolition ecologies, urban-agrarian questions, and more. 

Second, CUES recognizes and addresses the divided history of our own region. We acknowledge the history of displacement and settler colonialism on the lands of the Central Coast, which are the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe, and support the cultural and land stewardship work of their descendants through the Amah Mutsun Land Trust and Amah Mutsun Relearning Program of the UCSC Arboretum. We are committed to understanding and addressing ongoing regional histories of displacement and exclusion along lines of race, class, and immigration status, and the environmental justice implications of these histories, in our research and action. 

Third and finally, we center the multiple urban and environmental interfaces of the Santa Cruz region. These include the urban-wildland interface adjoining the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary and Santa Cruz Mountains; the urban-rural interface between the major agricultural belts of the Pajaro and Salinas Valleys; and the urban-regional interface of the greater Bay Area and Silicon Valley, one of the most rapidly growing and dynamic, as well as unaffordable and unequal, areas of the country. Thanks to the complexity of the urban environmental issues of our region—such as the interrelationship between housing affordability, transit, agriculture, natural habitat, greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental justice–we are uniquely situated to study interactions between urbanization and the environment that have ramifications far beyond Santa Cruz.