At the foot of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains on the forested shores of Puget Sound, Seattle is set in a location of spectacular natural beauty. Boosters of the city have long capitalized on this ...splendor, recently likening it to the fairytale capital of L. Frank Baum'sThe Wizard of Oz, the Emerald City. But just as Dorothy, Toto, and their traveling companions discover a darker reality upon entering the green gates of the imaginary Emerald City, those who look more closely at Seattle's landscape will find that it reveals a history marked by environmental degradation and urban inequality.
This book explores the role of nature in the development of the city of Seattle from the earliest days of its settlement to the present. Combining environmental history, urban history, and human geography, Matthew Klingle shows how attempts to reshape nature in and around Seattle have often ended not only in ecological disaster but also social inequality. The price of Seattle's centuries of growth and progress has been paid by its wildlife, including the famous Pacific salmon, and its poorest residents. Klingle proposes a bold new way of understanding the interdependence between nature and culture, and he argues for what he calls an "ethic of place." Using Seattle as a compelling case study, he offers important insights for every city seeking to live in harmony with its natural landscape.
Seattle, often called the "Emerald City," did not achieve its green, clean, and sustainable environment easily. This thriving ecotopia is the byproduct of continuing efforts by residents, businesses, ...and civic leaders alike. InSeattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability,Jeffrey Craig Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the "urban crisis" of the 1960s and its aftermath.
Like much activism during this period, the environmental movement began at the grassroots level-in local neighborhoods over local issues. Sanders links the rise of local environmentalism to larger movements for economic, racial, and gender equality and to a counterculture that changed the social and political landscape. He examines emblematic battles that erupted over the planned demolition of Pike Place Market, a local landmark, and environmental organizing in the Central District during the War on Poverty. Sanders also relates the story of Fort Lawton, a decommissioned army base, where Audubon Society members and Native American activists feuded over future land use.The rise and popularity of environmental consciousness among Seattle's residents came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements. Yet, as Sanders reveals, it was in the small, local struggles that urban environmental activism began.
Imagining Seattledives into some of the most pressing and compelling aspects of contemporary urban governance in the United States. Serin D. Houston uses a case study of Seattle to shed light on how ...ideas about environmentalism, privilege, oppression, and economic growth have become entwined in contemporary discourse and practice in American cities. Seattle has, by all accounts, been hugely successful in cultivating amenities that attract a creative class. But policies aimed at burnishing Seattle's liberal reputation often unfold in ways that further disadvantage communities of color and the poor, complicating the city's claims to progressive politics. Through ethnographic methods and a geographic perspective, Houston explores a range of recent initiatives in Seattle, including the designation of a new cultural district near downtown, the push to charge for disposable shopping bags, and the advent of training about institutional racism for municipal workers. Looking not just at what these policies say but at how they work in practice, she finds that opportunities for social justice, sustainability, and creativity are all constrained by the prevalence of market-oriented thinking and the classism and racism that seep into the architecture of many programs and policies. Houston urges us to consider how values influence actions within urban governance and emphasizes the necessity of developing effective conditions for sustainability, creativity, and social justice in this era of increasing urbanization.
Native Seattle Thrush, Coll; Cronon, William
11/2009
eBook
Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography
In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of ...contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native.
On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself.
After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms.
In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region.
Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345
In this in-depth examination of community policing in Seattle, William T. Lyons, Jr. explores the complex issues associated with the establishment and operation of community policing, an increasingly ...popular method for organizing law enforcement in this country.
Stories about community policing appeal to a nostalgic vision of traditional community life. Community policing carries with it the image of a safe community in which individual citizens and businesses are protected by police they know and who know them and their needs. However, it also carries an image of community based in partnerships that exclude the least advantaged, strengthen the police, and are limited to targeting those disorders feared by more powerful parts of the community and most amenable to intervention by professional law enforcement agencies.
The author argues that the politics of community policing are found in the construction of competing and deeply contested stories about community and the police in environments characterized by power inbalances. Community policing, according to the author, colonizes community life, increasing the capacity of the police department to shield itself from criticism, while manifesting the potential for more democratic forms of social control as evidenced by police attention to individual rights and to impartial law enforcement.
This book will be of interest to sociologists and political scientists interested in the study of community power and local politics as well as criminologists interested in the study of police.
William T. Lyons, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Akron. He previously worked for the Seattle Police Department.
Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO)Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association
Seattle would not ...exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city.
When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites' relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis.
Throughout Seattle's history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. InThe City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.
Historically, Filipina/o Americans have been one of the oldest and largest Asian American groups in the United States. In this pathbreaking work of historical scholarship, Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony ...traces the evolution of Seattle as a major site for Philippine immigration between World Wars I and II and examines the dynamics of the community through the frameworks of race, place, gender, and class. By positing Seattle as a colonial metropolis for Filipina/os in the United States, Fujita-Rony reveals how networks of transpacific trade and militarism encouraged migration to the city, leading to the early establishment of a Filipina/o American community in the area. By the 1920s and 1930s, a vibrant Filipina/o American society had developed in Seattle, creating a culture whose members, including some who were not of Filipina/o descent, chose to pursue options in the U.S. or in the Philippines. Fujita-Rony also shows how racism against Filipina/o Americans led to constant mobility into and out of Seattle, making it a center of a thriving ethnic community in which only some remained permanently, given its limited possibilities for employment. The book addresses class distinctions as well as gender relations, and also situates the growth of Filipina/o Seattle within the regional history of the American West, in addition to the larger arena of U.S.-Philippines relations.
The Pacific Northwest is known for its diverse, unusual politics. There are thriving gay and lesbian communities and populations of staunchly conservative Christians. Both groups wield political ...power out of proportion to their numbers and yet both feel beleaguered. How do members of these groups—both community leaders and everyday citizens—perceive the political climates that surround them
This book tells a tale of two Northwestern cities: Seattle, well known nationally for its liberalism, and Spokane, its conservative cousin to the east. Weathering Change characterizes the ways these liberal and conservative environments translate into hostility and hospitality for the Christian conservatives, gay men, and lesbians who live within them. Linneman gives us a firsthand account of how people from both groups think about social change in relation to the media, the public, the government, their communities, and their opposition. Indeed, we gain much needed insight into why Christian conservatives view the progress of the gay and lesbian movement as such a threat.
From the origins of the city in the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, Seattle's urban workforce consisted overwhelmingly of migrant laborers who powered the seasonal, ...extractive economy of the Pacific Northwest. Though the city benefitted from this mobile labor force-consisting largely of Indigenous peoples and Asian migrants-municipal authorities, elites, and reformers continually depicted these workers and the spaces they inhabited as troublesome and as impediments to urban progress. Today the physical landscape bears little evidence of their historical presence in the city. Tracing histories from unheralded sites such as labor camps, lumber towns, lodging houses, and so-called slums, Seattle from the Margins shows how migrant laborers worked alongside each other, competed over jobs, and forged unexpected alliances within the marine and coastal spaces of the Puget Sound. By uncovering the historical presence of marginalized groups and asserting their significance in the development of the city, Megan Asaka offers a deeper understanding of Seattle's complex past.
The first edition ofShaping Seattle Architecture, published in 1994, introduced readers to Seattle's architects by showcasing the work of those who were instrumental in creating the region's built ...environment. Twenty years later, the second edition updates and expands the original with new information and illustrations that provide an even richer exploration of Seattle architecture.
The book begins with a revised introduction that brings the story of Seattle architecture into the twenty-first century and situates developments in Seattle building design within local and global contexts. The book's fifty-four essays present richly illustrated profiles that describe the architects' careers, provide an overview of their major works, and explore their significance.
Shaping Seattle Architecturecelebrates a wide range of people who helped form the region's built environment. It provides updated information about many of the architects and firms profiled in the first edition. Four individuals newly included in this second edition are Edwin J. Ivey, a leading residential designer; Fred Bassetti, an important contributor to Northwest regional modernism; L. Jane Hastings, one of the region's foremost women in architecture; and Richard Haag, founder of the landscape architecture program at the University of Washington and designer of Gas Works Park and the Bloedel Reserve.
The book also includes essays on the buildings of the Coast Salish people, who inhabited Puget Sound prior to Euro-American settlement; the role that architects played in speculative housing developments before and after World War II; and the vernacular architecture built by nonprofessionals that makes up a portion of the fabric of the city.
Shaping Seattle Architectureconcludes with a substantial reference section, updated to reflect the last twenty years of research and publications. A locations appendix offers a geographic guide to surviving works. The research section directs interested readers to further resources, and the appendix "Additional Significant Seattle Architects" provides thumbnail sketches of nearly 250 important figures not included in the main text.
