News & Events
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How Green Became Good | Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens
Purchase the book on the publisher’s website. As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are…
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Why does everyone think cities can save the planet?
Read the journal article here. This article identifies and explains an underlying transition in global urban policy and discourse from the city as a sustainability problem to the city as a sustainability solution. We argue that contemporary policy discourses of cities saving the planet should be understood in the context of three major historical developments…
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Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century
Read the full article here. Katherine McKittrick famously wrote in Demonic Grounds that “black lives are necessarily geographic, but also struggle with discourses that erase and despatialize their sense of place” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xiii). From analyses of diaspora to the plantation, from studies of urban segregation to anticolonial circuits of resistance, Black thought has long been…
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No Place Like Home (2018)
No Place Like Home (2018) No Place Like Home is a community-initiated, student-engaged research project on the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County. Based at UC Santa Cruz, the project grew out of two ongoing research initiatives: Critical Sustainabilities, led by Miriam Greenberg, and Working for Dignity, led by Steve McKay. Community partners working with low-income residents…
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Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power
Purchase the book on the publisher’s website. A critical resource for approaching sustainability across the disciplines Sustainability and social justice remain elusive even though each is unattainable without the other. Across the industrialized West and the Global South, unsustainable practices and social inequities exacerbate one another. How do social justice and sustainability connect? What does…
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Green and Gray: New Ideologies of Nature in Urban Sustainability Policy
Read the journal article here. In the past two decades, urban sustainability has become a new policy common sense. This article argues that contemporary urban sustainability thought and practice is coconstituted by two distinct representational forms, which we call green urban nature and gray urban nature. Green urban nature is the return of nature to…
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The Breathers of Bayview Hill: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in Southeast San Francisco
Read the full article here. The “Toxic Tour” described in this article takes readers through the contentious redevelopment of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. The shipyard, closed in 1974, has been a focal point for environmental and health concerns due to its history of industrial warship-building and radioactive waste. Lennar Inc. aims…
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Democratizing the Green City Conference (2017)
Democratizing the Green City Conference (2017) This conference examines a paradox: urban sustainability initiatives that are so vital in countering climate change can, through their improvements, contribute to driving up rents and driving out residents, and in the process, exacerbate sprawl, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change itself. Our speakers examine this growing link between environmental improvement…
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Expand the frontiers of urban sustainability
Read the journal article here. Social equity and global impacts are missing from measures of cities’ environmental friendliness, write David Wachsmuth, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Hillary Angelo in this Nature article.
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From the city lens toward urbanisation as a way of seeing: Country/city binaries on an urbanising planet
Read the journal article here. In recent years, three superficially distinct urban subfields have made parallel efforts to incorporate the city’s traditional ‘outsides’ into urban research. Urban political ecology, American urban sociology and postcolonial urban studies have made, respectively, ‘nature’, the ‘rural’ and the ‘not-yet’ city the objects of self-consciously urban analyses. I argue that…
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Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice | Chapter 4 “The Sustainability Edge”
Read Chapter 4 of this book here. 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…
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Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard
Read the article here. This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as formerly industrial and contaminated properties, in the 1990s brownfields emerged as the grounds for new forms of urbanization and an emerging environmental remediation industry. Through…