News & Events
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PLANETARY URBANIZATION AND IMPERIALISM: A View from Guåhan/Guam
Read the full article here. Through this article I contribute to debates about planetary urbanization by specifying how imperialism, defined as states restricting the self-determination of other states or peoples, intersects with urbanization. While recent urban theory has explored how urbanization unfolds at scales beyond the city and in relation to global capital accumulation, it…
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Missing the Housing for the Trees (2022)
Missing the Housing for the Trees (2022) Climate change and social inequality are two defining crises of our time. While both of these problems are global in scope, attempted solutions are frequently urban in scale: planners and policymakers increasingly place their hope in cities as places where more just and sustainable ways of living can…
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Chapter 2 | From Romance to Utilitarianism: Lessons on Work and Nature from the New Deal
Read Chapter 2 of this publication here. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. They examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption—building a world that is sustainable both economically…
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Civilizing swamps in California: Formations of race, nature, and property in the nineteenth century U.S. West
Read the article here. This paper examines the production of settler ecologies through nineteenth century swamp reclamation projects in California. It focuses on the transformation of inland swamps into agricultural land and San Francisco salt marshes and tidelands into urban real estate. I argue that swamp reclamation was both an economic and a racial project.…
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OUT IN SPACE: Difference and Abstraction in Planetary Urbanization
Read the journal article here. A common thread has emerged in recent critiques of planetary urbanization. Whether on empirical, epistemological or theoretical grounds, critics tend to posit ‘difference against abstraction’, arguing that planetary urbanization—as an abstract theory of large-scale phenomena—occludes ‘everyday’ embodied, small-scale and place-based forms of social difference in its production and/or application. Here…
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Seeking Shelter: How Housing and Urban Exclusion Shape Exurban Disaster
Read the journal article here. From extreme weather to infectious disease, disasters now arrive in ever more rapid succession, combining with and compounding one another with increasing complexity and potential for crisis. In this context I suggest a particularly important site for analysis and intervention: the chronic lack of affordable housing and broader processes of…
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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…