News & Events
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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…
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Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans
Purchase the book here. Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a historically-grounded comparative study to examine the redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach…
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Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism
Read the journal article here. Urban political ecology (UPE), an offshoot of political ecology that emerged in the late 1990s, has had two major impacts on critical urban studies: it has introduced critical political ecology to urban settings, and it has provided a framework for retheorizing the city as a product of metabolic processes of…
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What on Earth Is Sustainable?
Read the article here. This article analyzes prevalent forms of sustainability discourse in California and around the world: eco-oriented sustainabilities, vernacular sustainabilities, justice-oriented sustainabilities, and market-oriented sustainabilities. It sketches the history of these discourses, argues that the meaning of sustainability depends on whose sustainability is being discussed, and lays out a framework for critical sustainability…
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Critical Sustainabilities Project (2013)
Critical Sustainabilities Project (2013) The Critical Sustainabilities project originated in 2012–2013 as a series of workshops attended by students and faculty at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the University of San Francisco, and supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). It continues today, in expanded form, through this website. Our…
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Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World
Purchase the book here. Branding New York traces the rise of New York City as a brand and the resultant transformation of urban politics and public life. Greenberg addresses the role of “image” in urban history, showing who produces brands and how, and demonstrates the enormous consequences of branding. She shows that the branding of New…