Category: Articles
-
Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change
In a new article for the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, UC Santa Cruz researchers laid out the foundation for their highly-anticipated upcoming study of how lack of affordable housing in urban areas of California may be driving increased development in and near wildlands, leading to more severe climate change impacts. Read more in this campus…
-
A Conjunctural Mapping of People’s Park
Following calls to spatialize conjunctures, this article proposes and practices conjunctural mapping through a case study of the ongoing struggle at People’s Park in Berkeley, California. Although the method of conjunctural analysis enables and requires an investigation into the multiple forces at work in the production of hegemony, such analyses tend to focus on cultural,…
-
Ethnographic Diaries: Capturing the Everyday in Crisis
This ethnographic project was published through the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) in collaboration with Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, and produced by the ACSS working group on “Ethnography and Knowledge in the Arab Region.” Read the Ethnographic Diaries co-authored by Aida Mukharesh. Aida is currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology…
-
Environmentalizing Urban Sociology
Read the journal article here. Urban sociology, like sociology as a whole, has traditionally excluded the natural environment. The Chicago School notoriously treated external nature as a metaphor for human society in its “human ecology” paradigm, while naturalizing urban inequality, segregation, and power relations. Such canonical and “de-natured” understandings of urban environments still pervade much…
-
Critical Environmentalisms: Overcoming Institutional Obstacles to Meet Students’ Demands for Sustainability Curricula and Action
Read the full article here. This chapter brings together the voices of undergraduates, faculty and staff to share their perspectives about whether UC Santa Cruz is doing enough to address environmental concerns, and how it can better support critical sustainability and action. In the first section, we report the longitudinal results of surveys conducted in…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
