Austin, Texas, is often depicted as one of the past half century's great urban successstories—a place that has grown enormously through "creative class" strategies emphasizing tolerance and ...environmental consciousness. In Shadows of a Sunbelt City, Eliot Tretter reinterprets this familiar story by exploring the racial and environmental underpinnings of the postindustrial knowledge economy. He is particularly attentive to how the University of Texas—working with federal, municipal, and private-sector partners and acquiring the power of eminent domain—expanded its power and physical footprint. He draws attention to how the university's real estate endeavors shaped the local economy and how the expansion and upgrading of the main campus occurred almost entirely at the expense of the more modestly resourced communities of color that lived in its path. This book challenges Austin's reputation as a bastion of progressive and liberal values, notably with respect to its approach to new urbanism and issues of ecological sustainability. Tretter's insistence on documenting and interrogating the "shadows" of this important city should provoke fresh conversations about how urban policy has contributed to Austin's economy, the way it has developed and changed over time, and for whom it works and why. Joining a growing critical literature about universities' effect on urban environments, this book will be of interest to students at all levels in urban history, political science, economic and political geography, public administration, urban and regional planning, and critical legal studies.
The compatibility between an agenda for sustainable urban development and the neoliberal economic restructuring of urban space has been observed within cities in developed countries across the globe. ...From providing economic support to local ‘green’ industries to creating bike lanes, municipalities develop sustainability strategies that are designed to boost their competitive advantage. Moreover, municipalities are responding to demands from popular social movements and national governments that seek to reconfigure societal relationships with the natural environment in cities. Cities are increasingly understood not as part of the ecological crisis but as part of the solution, or as places where alternative patterns of sustainable consumption and new socially and ecologically responsible industries can be developed. Over the last decade in Austin, environmental sustainability has become an uncontested paradigm that has progressively shaped the city's urban space and policy. Two competing conceptualizations of the environment, so‐called ‘environmental’ and ‘just’ sustainability groups, are explored in this article. I demonstrate how the notion of environmental sustainability has been selectively incorporated into the hegemonic vision of Austin's strategic growth plan. I argue that the dominance of this conceptualization is best understood by asking what counts as the ‘environment’ for environmentalists, and understanding the unstated assumptions about the environment shared by the business community and environmentalists.
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Digitalization is profoundly impacting natural resource extraction. Mines and wells are monitored and managed in new ways from real-time data streams to algorithmic decision-making to implementation ...of automated vehicles. How mines and wells are superintended is restructuring the geographies of employment as more of the day-to-day mining operations are centralized in urban locations distant from sites of extraction. Digital infrastructures allow for greater control over distant non-urban extractive geographies, but they also are remaking urban spaces. While the tendency today is to create ever more geographically extensive extractive-labor regimes, these regimes are increasingly modulated by digital technology advances, a feature that also central in the drive for cities to become “smart.”
Here, in a review of the literature, we theorize these transformations and show that they raise pressing new research questions at the (digitalized) nexus of urban — carbon — labor. We argue that to date, research, particularly that on digitalization, has at any time tended to focus on two of the three nodes in this nexus, and better integrating all 3 of them raises unique theoretical challenges. We offer 4 inquiries as an agenda that can guide future research. First, how should urban labor be brought to bear on digital extraction scholarship? Second, how is digitalization of carbon-extractive economies shaping social divisions of labor in the smart city? Third, does the datafication of “nature” in energy-extractive industries transform political ecology relations? Fourth, how does the particular context of the extractive industries make us rethink urban economies of digital labor?
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: While many have recognized since the 1970s the strong relationship between culture and urban renewal, particularly as cities began to use cultural amenities to change their images and lure ...potential investors, little has been written about how and why cultural assets may be valued investments in their own right. There is at least one notable exception, in the work of David Harvey, and this approach takes as its starting point the importance of the monopoly aspects of culture, particularly for rents, competition and fixed capital. In part, I bring Harvey's theoretical insights on the political economy of culture to bear on the case of Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s, and particularly its nomination as the European City of Culture, with particular attention paid to how the economics of culture is related to local politics.
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This paper explores the development of the smart growth programme in Austin, Texas. Drawing on growth machine theory, it documents the conflict in Austin in the 1980s and 1990s between pro-growth and ...anti-growth machine coalitions over urban sprawl. Around that time, the business community also began to focus on the redevelopment of city's downtown and the need to address the problems of crime and homelessness. By the mid 1990s, the need to 'clean up the streets' was increasingly coupled with arguments about being 'green'. It is argued that the development of the particular urban sustainability compromise that emerged in Austin, which has become a core part of the city's competitiveness, was an institutional innovation made possible by struggles between the business community and local environmental activists. The institutional compromise, however, was achieved only by a spatial compromise that shifted the costs of growth from natural ecological onto the city's homeless population.
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The importance of commemorative place-naming has been the focus of numerous studies that explore the relationship between memory and political representation. Few studies, however, have ...systematically examined regional geographical patterns of racial minorities in the United States. Using a variety of Internet-based mapping tools, I have collected a data set on the regional variation of the commemoration of thirty famous African-Americans (fifteen men and fifteen women). The research presented here explores how there are regional characteristics associated with where African-Americans are commemorated, particularly pertaining to cities. I also explore the geographic dispersal of these commemorations and whether there is a gender bias in the process of commemoration. Additionally, I focus on the duality of commemorations as an index of both African-American and the dominant white power structures.
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In this introductory essay, we provide an overview and theoretical context for this Intervention of seven critical reflections on the recent ‘pro‐housing’ movement YIMBYism (‘Yes in My Backyard’). In ...cities across the United States and Canada, YIMBYism has become important in local debates about housing and land use; some key North American urban centers are the focus of the commentaries included here. On the whole, academic discussions of YIMBYism have remained focused on local and place‐specific narratives. In this introduction we discuss the essays in this Intervention and resituate the discussion towards a more macro‐level urban theoretical framework, specifically examining the ongoing restructuring of urban neoliberalism, racial capitalism and hyper‐urbanization. We argue that YIMBYism reflects unresolved tensions in the current urban housing crisis that can be seen as connected to the ongoing dismantling of the remnants of Keynesianism and the intensification of neoliberalism and uneven urban development. We note that these shifts relate to how racism and patriarchy suffuse changing regimes of capitalist orders, especially in housing markets and residential geographies. The Intervention as a whole suggests that the YIMBY movement deserves more research attention as a force in the ongoing unfolding of neoliberal urbanism.
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8.
New Geographies of Racism Tretter, Eliot
Labour,
03/2021, Volume:
87, Issue:
87
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Open access
In many books, even critical ones, the term "racism" does not appear, the issue is treated as only marginally important, and/or race and racism are presented as synonymous with ethnicity and ...ethnocentric bigotry.1 What is lost in these accounts is the central tenet that underpins contemporary scholarship on racism, which is that it is a hierarchical system of valuation that is historically and geographically contingent. ...they downplay the significant part that the devaluation of non-whites has played in the Canadian urban context. The collection certainly reflects their Canadian exper-tise and notoriety. ...it is clear that their distinction afforded them the ability to assemble several noteworthy contributions from recognized scholars working in the four different national contexts explored in the col-lection: ...among urban studies scholars the presence of Indigenous people in cities has rarely been front and centre, and for the most part, the Indigenous peoples remain invisible and are treated as a marginal popula-tion that is largely irrelevant to the production of most urban spaces in these national contexts. Indigenous peoples have long been present in these urban spaces, and in many cases it was their forced removal and exclusion from settler spaces that resulted in their de-urbanization. ...as the authors in this collection do a mar-vellous job revealing, contemporary Indigeneity has been significantly shaped and altered, especially regionally, by urbanization.
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9.
Petrocity Tretter, Eliot
International journal of architectonic, spatial, and environmental design,
2022, Volume:
16, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The following is an edited transcript of the keynote delivered by Eliot Tretter at the Constructed Environment 2021 conference in Calgary, May 12, 2021. Find the presentation online: ...https://youtu.be/ImXrj7kNcxI.
The production and transfer of knowledge are essential for producing oil. In this paper, I examine the nexus between a subnational quasi-state publicly funded hydrocarbon research program and a novel ...knowledge-production regime and explore how this relationship resulted in the production of oil from Alberta's oilsands. In particular, the paper highlights the significance of the Alberta Oilsands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA), a quasi-public institution credited with financing research, which among other finding, made the in-situ oilsands' mining method steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) commercially viable. SAGD proved essential in enlarging the Province's oil reserves, but this paper focuses on AOSTRA's novel intellectual property regime. Under that regime the intellectual property AOSTRA (the Provincial government) held the licensing rights to the research it funded and commanded its future revenues. In contrast to accounts of the development of the current mode of entrepreneurial knowledge production that emphasizes the new knowledge-enclosures of the biosphere, I suggest this was a novel system of knowledge-enclosure of the "necrosphere." I stress how this knowledge-production-transfer regime only emerged in Alberta because of the specific material characteristics of bitumen and the Provincial government's tripartite role as resource rentier, funder of the research, and owner of the resource.
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