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. In Shadows of a Sunbelt City, Eliot Tretter reinterprets this familiar story by exploring the racial and environmental underpinnings of the postindustrial knowledge economy.
The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city's identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region's environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a "city in a garden" perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century. In telling Austin's story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin's mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city's midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin's green growth.
Geopiracy is a study of the 'Bowman expeditions'—a project through which geographers, with funding from the US Army, are mapping the 'human terrain' of foreign lands. Wainwright offers a critique of human geography today that draws on contemporary social theory to raise unsettling questions about the nature of geography's disciplinary formation.
This collection examines the power and transformative potential of movements that fight against poverty and inequality. Broadly, poverty politics are struggles to define who is poor, what it means to be poor, what actions might be taken, and who should act. These movements shape the sociocultural and political economic structures that constitute poverty and privilege as material and social relations. Editors Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood focus on the politics of insurgent movements against poverty and inequality in seven countries (Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States). The contributors explore theory and practice in alliance politics, resistance movements, the militarized repression of justice movements, global counterpublics, and political theater. These movements reflect the diversity of poverty politics and the relations between bureaucracies and antipoverty movements. They discuss work done by mass and other types of mobilizations across multiple scales; forms of creative and political alliance across axes of difference; expressions and exercises of agency by people named as poor; and the kinds of rights and other claims that are made in different spaces and places. Relational Poverty Politics advocates for poverty knowledge grounded in relational perspectives that highlight the adversarial relationship of poverty to privilege, as well as the possibility for alliances across different groups. It incorporates current research in the field and demonstrates how relational poverty knowledge is best seen as a model for understanding how theory is derivative of action as much as the other way around. The book lays a foundation for realistic change that can directly attack poverty at its roots. Contributors: Antonádia Borges, Dia Da Costa, Sarah Elwood, David Boarder Giles, Jim Glassman, Victoria Lawson, Felipe Magalhães, Jeff Maskovsky, Richa Nagar, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, LaShawnDa Pittman, Frances Fox Piven, Preeti Sampat, Thomas Swerts, and Junjia Ye.
Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on several years of Melissa García-Lamarca’s engagement with activist research in Barcelona’s housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH). What García-Lamarca learned from fellow activists and the movement in Barcelona pushed her to rethink how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt. The book is also inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, García-Lamarca’s research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.
High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa.An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. High Stakes, High Hopes explores what changed in learning when teaching and assessment occurred inuniversity classrooms, township streets, and ordinary people’s households.Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighbourhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making. Oldfield traces the multiple personal and political relationships at play, exploring the shifting patterns of power in this productive, yet always negotiated, collaboration. This innovative methodologyreveals the ways in which activists, residents, students, and the author experienced and reworked the differences between them. High Stakes, High Hopesshares forms of practice, grounded in teaching, to train a next generation of urbanists to engage the city embedded in multiple publics and politics across the city. The book builds upon an archive of alternative kinds of urban knowledges, experiments which work to inspire more varied forms of urban theorizing.
Freedom Is a Place gives readers a snapshot of everyday life in the 1967 oPt (occupied Palestinian territories). A project of subaltern geopolitics, it helps both new and seasoned scholars of the region better understand occupation: its purpose, varied manifestations, and on-the-ground functions. This personal study brings to light how large-scale geopolitics play havoc with the lives of ordinary people and how people resist and endure. Using data collected over a decade of fieldwork, Ron J. Smith situates the everyday realities of the occupation within the larger project of Zionism. He explores the attempts to codify a temporary condition like occupation into permanency. Smith insists that occupation be understood as a changing process, not a singular event, and to explain its longevity, he argues that we must uncover the particular geographical and political dynamism at hand. Through careful use of interviews and participant observation, Smith reveals how the varied practices of occupation transform daily life into a prison. He also helps bring to light everyday narratives illustrating how people mobilize claims to freedom and sovereignty to maintain life under occupation. Freedom Is a Place uncovers how lessons from Israel’s seventy-plus-years occupation are used by other states to oppress restive populations. At the same time, Smith identifies how these lessons also can be mobilized to create new spaces and strategies toward achieving liberation.
"Mean Streets offers, in a single, sustained argument, a theory of the social and economic logic behind the historical development, evolution, and especially persistence of homelessness in the contemporary city. By updating and revisiting thirty years of research and thinking, Don Mitchell explores the conditions that produce and sustain homelessness, and how its persistence relates to the way capital works in the urban built environment. Consequently, he unpacks the structure, meaning, uses, and governance of urban public space. As one reviewer commented, "thinking about the histories under which the homeless have been produced and regulated is vital." Mitchell traces his argument through two sections: a broadly historical overview, followed by an exploration of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence that also expands the discussion beyond the regulation of the homeless and the poor, arguing that this has 'metastasized' to become more general issue, affecting all urbanites"--
“Community and regional planning involve thinking ahead and formally envisioning the future for ourselves and others,” according to Frederick R. Steiner. “Improved plans can lead to healthier, safer, and more beautiful places to live for us and other species. We can also plan for places that are more just and more profitable. Plans can help us not only to sustain what we value but also to transcend sustainability by creating truly regenerative communities, that is, places with the capacity to restore, renew, and revitalize their own sources of energy and materials.” In Making Plans, Steiner offers a primer on the planning process through a lively, firsthand account of developing plans for the city of Austin and the University of Texas campus. As dean of the UT School of Architecture, Steiner served on planning committees that addressed the future growth of the city and the university, growth that inevitably overlapped because of UT’s central location in Austin. As he walks readers through the planning processes, Steiner illustrates how large-scale planning requires setting goals and objectives, reading landscapes, determining best uses, designing options, selecting courses for moving forward, taking actions, and adjusting to changes. He also demonstrates that planning is an inherently political, sometimes messy, act, requiring the intelligence and ownership of the affected communities. Both wise and frank, Making Plans is an important philosophical and practical statement on planning by a leader in the field.
Sovereignty is a term used by stateless people seeking decolonization as well as by dominant social groups struggling to reassert their socially privileged positions. All sorts of political actors, it seems, are interested in sovereignty. It is less clear, however, just what the term means, and whether calls for sovereignty promote a politically progressive or conservative agenda. Examining how sovereignty functions allows us to better understand the dangers, promise, and limitations of relying on it as a political strategy. Islands and Oceans explores how struggles for decolonization, self- determination, and political rights permeate conceptualizations of how sovereignty operates. To support his theoretical claims, Sasha Davis works through a series of case studies, drawing on research that he conducted between 2013 and 2017 in Korea, Guam, Yap, Palau, the Northern Marianas, Hawai'i, and Honshu and Okinawa in Japan. Because of the hybridized and contested arrangements of sovereignty in these territories, these places are excellent sites to tease out some of the differences between official regimes of sovereignty and the actual control of social processes on the ground. In addition, analysis of the tensions and acute debates over sovereignty in these regions lays bare how sovereignty works as a process. Davis's study of these political cases within the Asia-Pacific region advances our understanding the nature of sovereignty more generally.