May 6. The City and Nature: Environmental Change
Workshop: Chris Ryan
Theory
Bruce Braun, 2005. “Environmental Issues: Writing a More‐than‐human Urban Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 29(5): 635-650.
Jane Bennett, 2010. “The Force of Things,” chapter 1 in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Catherine Seavitt-Nordenson, Guy Nordenson, and Julia Chapman, 2018. “Reimaging the Floodplain,” chapter 3 in Structures of Coastal Resilience. New York: Island Press.
Deborah Balk, Stefan Leyk, Bryan Jones, Mark R. Montgomery, Anastasia Clark, 2018. “Understanding Urbanization: A Study of Census and Satellite-Derived Urban Classes in the United States, 1990-2010,” PlosOne, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208487
Approach to Case Study: Greening the City?
Bonnie L. Keeler, et al 2019. “Social-Ecological and Technological Factors Moderate the Value of Urban Nature.” Nature Sustainability 2: 29-38;
Matthew Gandy, 2002. “Rustbelt Ecology,” chapter 5 in Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Potential discussion topics include: Green New Deal, green gentrification, green washing, the urban lead crisis, air pollution (e.g. Juliana Maantay), brownfields, coastal cities and climate change, cities and wildfires, urban nature (Matthew Gandy)
Jon Cramer, 2015. “Race, Class, and Social Reproduction in the Urban Present: The Case of the Detroit Water and Sewage System.” Viewpoint Magazine October 31
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, 2019. The Political Scene: “How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Allies Supplanted the Obama Generation,” The New Yorker, January 17, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/how-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-allies-supplanted-the-obama-generation?reload=true [(or Green New Deal).
David Gissen, 2010. “Growth: Corporate Atria and the Cultivation of Urban Nature,” chapter 2 in Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Matthew Gandy, 2013. “Marginalia, Aesthetics, Ecology, and Urban Wastelands,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(6): 1301-1316.
This week’s readings deal with the intersection of nature and urban life, and as such, cover a broad range of ecological topics. Bennett (2010) provides a philosophical narrative that explores how we define both life and nature and where humans fit in this discussion. As Bennett notes, “people […] redistribute and concentrate oxygen […] and other elements of Earth’s crust into two-legged, upright forms” (p. 11). As a species, we continue to have a profound impact on our lived environment – altering it in numerous ways. For example, the transformation of natural wetlands on Staten Island, to the largest garbage dump in the world with mountains of trash reaching 500 feet, to a site that becomes sacred with the pulverized remains of hundreds of 9/11 victims, to eventually the second largest park in the NYC (Gandy, 2002). Developed urban greenspace undergoes multiple transformations from its pre-human intervention origins developing history and meaning along the way, and how we define nature surely becomes blurry during this transformation. Is it a field of cultivated and mowed turfgrass on a capped mound of 20th century garbage considered in the realm of natural?
I really enjoyed Nixon’s (2011) emphasis of scale in terms of violence, especially as it relates to harm to the environment and the slower, long-term impacts that it has, especially on disadvantaged populations. Consider Ocasio-Ortez’s (2019) Green New Deal resolution that repeatedly emphasizes how this slow violence has “disproportionately affect[ed] indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” Perpetrators of slow violence rarely face repercussions as responsibility becomes diffuse on both spatial and temporal scales in addition to regulations that do not capture the regional to global and multi-generational scales of such violence. Keeler et al. (2019) describes (among other things) how the positive benefits of natural resources are not evenly distributed within urban contexts, but also cautions that new green space developments could have the unintended consequence of gentrification and displacement.
Nordenson et al. (2018) describes the dynamic and multi-faceted approaches that cities can take moving forward to mitigate flood risk and improve coastal resilience. McKibben (2019) also looks to the future exploring the economic forces that will drive a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and how a very rapid tipping point is not too far from the future. As academics of urban studies, we are all greatly poised for conducting work that leads to more socially equitable and ecologically healthy futures.
-Christopher Ryan
As I was reading the Balk et al article, I couldn’t stop thinking about the current case being reviewed by the Supreme Court about whether to include a question regarding citizenship on the U.S. census survey. The issue at stake is: by including a question about citizenship, there is a risk that those who are undocumented will opt out of filling out the census forms for fear of possible deportation. This could lead to a miscount of residents in each area, affecting the allocation of Federal funds in addition to Congressional representation. This poses a problem to cities like New York, where an estimated 1.2M undocumented immigrants reside. The City relies in part on Federal funding to provide social services and Medicaid to its residents – and this funding is provided based on the number of residents that qualify for the services. What could be the impact of undercounting undocumented residents, especially for those who have moved to the suburbs where there is already a gap in services and political representation?
I was curious about the point being made in the Keller et al article regarding the equity and distributional implications of urban ecology. While this is certainly true in New York, it was interesting to learn that access to nature in cities across the globe is unequal and inequitable. In particular, whereas wealthier residents tend to live closer to parks or other natural urban spaces, “low-income and minority communities have greater exposure to air and water pollution, floods, and other extreme events” (34). However, I’m always reminded of the example of the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, which lies along the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site. Despite being a toxic waste site, the neighborhood has become a real estate hot spot ever since the zoning changed from primarily industrial to residential. Given that Gowanus is sandwiched between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, it is not surprising that the area became a popular residential neighborhood overnight. However, in the context of the Keller article, Gowanus stands out as an exception to the rule, where wealthy residents are moving in, in spite of the toxic waste site.
– Rebecca Krisel
It was interesting to read Nixon’s chapter at a time when global corporates are spreading out faster than the sun, leaving next generations under the shadow of new forms of economic imperialism. (As also mentioned by Christopher) From Ocasio- Cortez’s The Green New Deal back in February to European Union’s first Environmental Action Programme dating back to 1973, the national and local governments are trying to come up with action plans yet “slow violence” seems to be catching us. Some policies are/ were used as tales to gain votes, some changed the way we produce, buy and consume. Yet the bigger impact seems to be branching out from the capitalisation of urban spaces. Braun mentions some of the theoretical lacking of seeing the urban spaces as separate entity form the natural environment whilst some other fields such as city branding continues to emphasise the consumption of urban spaces across all levels of economic and politics.
What Nixon emphasised in slow violence is what we are, also, somehow contributing at this very moment too. This week’s readings made me realised the cross-and-multi disciplinary nature of this problem and that it requires a combined effort to even begin to tackle the core issues. Greener solutions/ considerations often do not necessarily offer profitable or attractive solutions for corporates (unless it has some promotional impact), and without their substantial interest, the economy of the cities will eventually fail to thrive at the same time as putting the political power to a risky position leaving the cities to the hands of uncertain futures.
Since we’re covering environmental themes today, I figured that I would report from Durban, in a way that works across a number of themes raised in the readings.
A biodiversity hotspot is a region that contains at least 1,500 species of vascular plants found only there and that has also lost at least 70% of its native vegetation. There are 36 such regions on the Earth. Durban, the largest city on the east coast of Africa and the third largest in South Africa, sits within the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany Hotspot, which stretches in a northeasterly direction, flanked as it goes along its side by the soaring basalt cliffs of the Drakensberg and the warm Indian Ocean.
Within its borders, the Durban municipality manages this biodiversity primarily through the Durban Metropolitan Open Space System (D’MOSS). Especially in the early twentieth century white South Africans, as an explicit political project of such figures as Jan Smuts, formed a sense of common identity, belonging, and national pride through a custodial appropriation of the extraordinary natural endowments of the African continent. The Kruger National Park was perhaps its most famous product. D’MOSS, formed in 1982, was a later Durbanite residue.
A green layer atop the city’s map, D’MOSS connected the city’s open spaces to preserve their migratory routes. It includes estuaries, wetlands, reedbeds, grasslands, thickets, forests, mangroves, and dunes. Considerably expanded in spatial and regulatory reach after 1994, D’MOSS prohibits any development within the green layer except where this development will not, in the view of the City Council, negatively impact its biodiversity or its environmental services. The expansive notion of “environmental services” includes not only protection from flooding and sea level rise, but also soil formation, erosion and sedimentation control, the supply and regulation of water, food production and broader nutrient cycling, the provision of raw materials for craft and building, and carbon sequestration.
Durban, under the influence of a local environmental scientist initially at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, but one with strong global connections into the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEA), the various UN environmental processes, and associated funders, has sought to position itself as a world leader in urban environmentalism. In recognition of its efforts it hosted the 17th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP17). I have heard of some examples of the circumvention of D’MOSS by politically connected businesspersons. A supportive and powerful city manager, incumbent until 2011, served to check such efforts but they have increased since. Developers sometimes accept stiff fines after not seeking approval for irreversible modifications. Still, D’MOSS remains a relatively rigid constraint on environmentally destructive development and it is only the most prominent component of a much broader array of environmental policies, around such matters as pollution control, energy efficiency and renewable energy, various further forms of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and environmental education.
There is, however, another side to this city. In the South Durban Basin, one of the great chemical manufacturing centers of South Africa, a swath of the city’s working class lives with extremely high asthma and cancer rates. The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, formed as a splinter of the anti-apartheid movement in 1995, has with its affiliates been fighting for more stringent regulation of polluters for decades. The city has exploited the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to establish a pilot methane to electricity plant at the Bisasar Road Dump in Clare Estate, itself the site of extended struggle since its establishment by apartheid authorities in the 1980s across the road from residential settlements. Its expansion since is also a cause of respiratory illness and cancer. In these ways and more environmental action remains power-bound and often double-edged.
– Ryan Brunette
Here is something like a map with the green layer. I can’t seem to gain access to the eThekwini GIS. The municipality is I hear having a bit of a shocker.
https://imgur.com/4smvamx
Sorry that I won’t be able to join you all in class this week due to travel. Really interesting set of readings. This week’s themes overlapped with a lot of the discussion from a panel from a conference I just attended titled “There is No Right to the City without Climate Justice.” In Gandy’s discussion about the distribution of environmental hazards in the New York landscape, I was intrigued by the discussion of multi-ethnic cohesion in the anti-incinerator movement of the early 1990s – I see so many parallels here too with the current debates over the push to build new jails across the city, specifically with the outpouring of protest in the Chinatown community. Connections can also be made across anti-displacement activism through groups like Sustainable Little Tokyo in LA, looking to partner with development as long as it engages the community in a meaningful way and supports environmentally conscious planning. This tension acknowledges that development and environmental risk doesn’t affect the city equally, as further made evident through the quotation from The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (Gandy 213).
I also can’t help but think even beyond the right to the city to connect with Nixon’s “slow violence” and the emerging reality of climate-related displacement and refugees, and how the U.S.’s responsibility in global climate change will disproportionately harm those who are often facing the most restricted global mobility (and ever-disappearing paths to immigrate to the US). As we continue to advocate for climate justice in the context of rising levels of urbanization, it will continue to be even more important that we connect and see parallels with local environmental activism and global systems of power and mobility. How do all of these scales (city, state, nation, international) fit in with the passage of New York’s Climate Mobilization Act last week and the federal government’s inability to act? https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/new-york-city-climate-mobilization-act/553134/
-Ali
I did not expect to connect this week’s readings to the Jewish meditation training I was at today, but here I am and cannot resist sharing. The Jewish calendar is currently in the middle of the Omer – a period in which we count the days between Passover and Shavuot. There is a Kabbalist tradition of counting the Omer using a system of elemental energies. The energy that receives particular attention this week is called gevurah, translated as strength or discernment or discipline. In particular we discussed gevurah as boundary-setting, and the images of the various plans for different city flood plains in the Seavitt et al were vivid in my mind. While planners of the past have relied on the brute, but ultimately untrustworthy levees and walls, Seavitt insists that climate resilience depends on a network of boundaries and safeguards that are flexible and interdependent. The authors’ theory of integrating the strategies of planning, protection, and attenuation strives for what they call “layered redundancy.” It understands the impacts of climate change, particularly flooding, as unpredictable and growing in volume and intensity. And, so, we need dynamic, place-based systems that can adapt to the storms they face.
Today is the particular day in this counting practice where one reflects, actually, gevurah as it relates to gevurah (stick with me) – discernment within discernment. It may be tempting, looking at the intensity of the threat posed by major flooding, to respond by throwing up big walls. But the way to build resilience is through the thoughtful construction of multiple forms of boundaries, choosing location and technique carefully – with discernment?!
Anyway – this was a surprisingly wonderful contribution to my meditation today I hope this post isn’t too woo-woo.
– Toby
The concept that the poor or disenfranchised suffer the brunt of artificially heightened environmental dangers is a thread that runs through each reading for this week. As is summarized in the discussion of the Amphibious Suburb, it is often difficult to locate exactly who should take on the burden of funding protections against natural disasters like floods or storms. Retreat would mean an abandonment of the original capital investment and a loss of money for the already-poor residents who cannot afford the means to extricate themselves from such a precarious situation, and yet extra fortifications are extremely expensive and possibly ineffective. Catharine Seavitt points out a very pragmatic solution to these sorts of watery problems, which is to manage nature effectively and to use, whenever possible, natural buffers in order to blunt the effect of storms, floods, and tidal surges. Fundamentally, the economies of cities have a tendency to rip or kill off the natural buffering system, through pollution or landfill, and substitute man-made fortifications. The issue, as she discusses in relation to New Orleans, is that not all man-made protections are made equal, and inequal protection spells disaster.
I couldn’t help thinking, as I read Catharine’s article in particular of the Flood of 1993. My family have been farmers in Illinois for generations, and despite having been born in 1994, the Great Flood is so indelibly etched into the collective consciousness of my community, along the banks of the Mississippi River, I feel like I was there. When I was little I asked my father about it—this great war that we as a community had waged against a threat that was measured in half-inches against the sloping walls of the levees. I was confused, because he had told me before that the reason why the fields below the bluffs of the Mississippi were so rich was precisely /because/ the river flooded. I didn’t understand why it was a bad thing now. And he told me, as Catherine Seavitt also points out in her article, that it is not the flood itself that devastates. It is our attempt to control it. The levees that hold the river in place are made of sand. When a levee breaks, the river pours through and carries hundreds of thousands of tons of sand with it, coating the soil in a thick layer. A once-productive farmland turns, effectively, into a desert for the next several generations. The surrounding farms undergo serious damage as well, while those further downstream simply forfeit a season’s worth of crops and actually benefit from the mineral influx brought in with the water.
The essential (neoliberal) problem, evidenced both in the Gandy and the Braun pieces, is that individual districts are left responsible for universal environmental problems, with causes and effects that extend well beyond their jurisdiction, leaving both an environmental and a political mess behind. In the case of the Flood of ’93, each levee district was (and still is) responsible for its own levees, which cost many millions of dollars for just a portion of the riverbank—no small change for family farmers. And the families in the district in which the levee breaks find themselves utterly adrift, their once-productive land worthless, with no way to rebuild or repair the damage.
Such a system, a system that attempts to corral and curtail otherwise benign natural events, raises the environmental and industrial stakes for everyone and yet, when the thunderstorms come, exclusively benefits those who have the capital to make certain that they keep their head above water.
-Caroline House
Newtown Creek, which lies adjacent to our study area this semester, is among the most polluted waterways in the United States. A naturally-occuring canal, Newtown Creek was extended and deepened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to accommodate more traffic. Some of the most noxious and toxic uses lined its shores, including 100 of Standard Oil’s distilleries, tanneries, sugar refineries, and copper wiring plants. Natural plant and wildlife was eradicated, and the inflow of fresh water from the East River slowed, turning the Creek into a stagnant, oily basin. In the 1950s, a manhole cover exploded from a surface street in nearby Greenpoint due to pressure from what would be revealed as a 17 million gallon oil spill under the neighborhood, larger than the Exxon Valdez site! The creek has been a Superfund site for nearly a decade, but remediation hasn’t begun in earnest yet. Non-profits, like the Newtown Creek Alliance, have taken steps to draft and publicize large-scale remediation and landscaping, and they’ve done so in tandem with other advocacy groups, elected officials, and community members.
The creek still bisects an industrial neighborhood, among the few protected industrial business zones in the city. Thankfully, gas and oil refineries and tanneries have been replaced by warehouses and light manufacturing. A new landmark has taken place to ameliorate wastewater treatment: the digester eggs. The eggs digest human waste, using anaerobic bacteria, into, among other outputs, fertilizer. The methane gas produced by this metabolic process powers the plant’s activities, and the remainder is siphoned and converted into natural gas by National Grid. Bennett’s assertion of material’s “power of action” made me think of the trillions of bacteria creating power out of waste in those eggs.
How would the remediation of Newtown Creek and the expanded activities of self-sustaining waste treatment plants like the eggs look under a policy framework like the Green New Deal? It’s crucial that the communities bordering the creek retain their industrial uses and jobs. But the manufacturing and industrial jobs of peak economic activity and labor participation were largely predicated on ignoring the dangerous and toxic externalities of production. Incentivizing private companies to pursue green manufacturing is a good first step, but any plan would have to retain inclusive hiring and training, entrepreneurship opportunities, access to education, and equitable distribution of both environmental benefits and costs across the diverse socioeconomic communities bordering the creek.
The Braun and Bennett writings really connected to each other for me this week. When Braun describes the “city” as being not entirely apart and indifferent to nature it related, in my mind, very much to Bennett’s point of humanity being a “particularly rich and complex collection of materials” and yet materials all the same. It left me willing to accept the idea of cities as relatable to nature and not prone to such dichotomies of country/city urban/rural. Both cities and the human body may be examples of extraordinary materiality but we run the risk of fetishizing the dichotomous other if we fail to recognize that nature/objects relate heavily to ourselves and our urban surroundings.
Regarding the “slow violence” of Nixon, there does seem to be an increasing agency being applied to the idea of climate change. The prominence of wildfires, severe storms, and extreme weather in the Green New Deal all evidence an increasing tempo of danger in how we discuss environmental concerns. Meanwhile, traditional warfare and bloodshed appears to be in a temporal slow down as the United States enters its 16th and 18th year of the Iraq conflict and War in Afghanistan, respectively. Is there a future where both type of crisis hold our attention or are we at risk of increasing attention on one concern while we avoid the endless bloodshed of another?
-Adam Sachs
The Global at the Local
This week’s set of readings is thoroughly absorbing. Something that I have been drawn to this semester is interplay between the local and the global. Some urban issues and patterns are brought to clarity when we read an historical account and analysis that is hyper-focused 0n the specificities of the local, down to the neighborhood level or even the level of the street/block or building/structure, while other issues and relations are revealed to have sometimes surprising origins or structural links to a faraway place.
This week the message is often, “you need to attend closely to both” – clearly global warming and other climate change effects are the exemplar of the “global” but the case studies in Seavitt-Nordenson et al’s chapter and the discussion of midtown atria in Gissen showcase the equally determinative role of local topography (and hydrography, especially for coastal and riverine sites), local zoning/tax/regulatory codes, and the like.
I traveled this past week to the Boston area, and many of this week’s readings were on my mind. I went to see “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment”, an ambitious art exhibition (a traveling show, currently at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem that proposes a revised “eco-critical” narrative of American Art). (Link: https://www.pem.org/exhibitions/natures-nation-american-art-and-environment). The exhibition opened at Princeton’s art museum last year, attached to a plethora of ecologically-themed symposia and lectures by noted environmental figures, including McKibben from this week’s added reading. The Princeton iteration comes with an excellent website on “the Ecology of an Exhibition” – for us internet/digital junkies who like to do our reading on the computer and tablets, you may be surprised (or, by now, not) by the horrible ecological consequences of reading online (eg using electricity!) versus reading a sensibly-made exhibition catalog book (link: https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/ecologyofanexhibition/)
On the issue of the ecological consequences of OUR everyday practices and material conditions of our life, consider the following as you make your way to class: how much of the clothes you wear and the stuff in your bag or backpack (including the bag or backpack) you carry are manufactured products? Possibly ALL, and most certainly almost all, which means quite a lot from the factories along the Chinese industrial deltas of Pearl (near HK, Shenzhen and Guangzhou) and the Yangzi (near Shanghai). My Boston host, who has seen more factories in China than probably any American of our generation (he covered them as a reporter), told me, “America is (relatively) clean BECAUSE China is dirty.” Our consumerist life would be far more obvious polluting and we would feel a lot guiltier if the factories that made the stuff are next to NY rather than next to Shanghai and Shenzhen. I know our readings this week emphasize how dirty America is – it would be truly disgusting if we include the industrial and mining belts of China (and Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mozambique, etc. etc.) in that discussion. Fresh Kills is a relative haven compared to the plastic-burning hell that is featured in the documentary ‘Plastic China”; I recommend it highly, streamable on Amazon Prime if you get that. (Link: https://www.plasticchina.org/)
I also visited one of the most famous early factories and company towns in 19th century America, Lowell. The rationale for siting the textile mills at the confluence of two rivers in what was then the agricultural countryside was to take advantage of the running water to turn the mechanical looms; the construction of the company towns (the dorms for the mostly young, unmarried female workforce (and, yes, also a lot of child laborers), the (Episcopalian) church they had to attend on Sundays (a Catholic church was added later in the 1800s when mostly white European immigrants, especially the Irish after the 1840s potato famine, became the main workforce). These mills were at one point were such a marvel that very famous writers and notables visited Lowell and commented favorably on its conditions (in comparison to Manchester and other English mill towns). It’s been more than a century since its heyday and the mills are literally museums (managed by the national park Service). Lowell is a textbook case of industrial town obsolesence; since the factories shut, Lowell has been a poor town (and “therefore” a site of waves of refugee resettlement – with a surprisingly large concentration of Cambodians (also, Nepalis, Burmese, Iraqis, Syrians) – the Cambodian refugee and current community college student working the diner where I had lunch told me her Lowell high school is majority Cambodian).
With the resilence readings in mind, I also walked all around Boston (includng Brookline, Allston, Cambridge – SOME of these places are not technically part of the city of Boston: a mini-lesson in how richer folks avoid the tax responsibility/burdens of the city next door by not being in that city despite working in and enjoying the benefits of that city) and visited the many places along the coast and the riverbanks that the city of Boston’s planning department have identified as highly vulnerable to flooding in the coming decades. Boston had a little drizzle of rain while I was there – and the many many spots that were flooded to an inch or two or more underscore that it’ll be a very expensive adaptation for Boston to deal with the coming changes.
I’m posting late this week, and I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s comments so far. One thing that hasn’t come up as much that I took from the readings was the production of nature in architectural development. Gissen’s chapter on corporate atria was a really fascinating example of this. It also made me think of the high line as a contemporary example. Is the high line the corporate atrium of the 21st century? Explaining the political economy of corporate atria, Gissen writes: “As Midtown East increasingly transformed into a space of corporate work, the planning of green spaces shifted from those forms of nature production situated within the state’s sphere – the “outside” – to one situated within the corporation’s sphere – the interior of the office building and its immediate environs.” Contemporary park projects show the second shifting of nature production from the interior corporate sphere to the neoliberal public/private sphere. And rather than reflecting a romantic concept of pristine nature, the high line is more reflective of a theory of nature that situates the human within the ecological, a park built on the premise of weeds sprouting from an abandoned industrial landscape. Indeed, it is a recreation based on the “Marginalia” of Gandy’s theory of wastelands.
A problem with these contemporary productions of nature is that they ignore the unboundedness of urban life that Braun describes. The high line is an international tourist destination, flanked by super-gentrification developments (as well as more typical gentrification, development, and displacement dynamics). Despite being built on a ruin of transportation, the nature that the high line produces does not take into account our global networks of exchange. Neither do many of the other symbols of sustainability, such as public parks on the rooftops of private buildings.