Category: Articles
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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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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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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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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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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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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…