Sustainability and the City

This chapter establishes the book’s key theoretical premises, including capitalist cycles of crisis and resolution (Marx), double-bind theory (Bateson), the spatial fix (Harvey), and capitalism and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari). Using New York City as an example, it discusses how city leaders resolved economic crises through the continual exploitation of natural and human resources. The constant remaking of urban neighborhoods fueled the city’s economic engine, especially as the city shifted to a real estate-based economy. Towards the end of the twentieth century, this real estate imperative coincided with increased public concern about the dangers of climate change. The broad appeal of sustainability provided the perfect cover for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s neoliberal agenda to recreate New York as a luxury city. But just as Bloomberg’s emphasis on private industry intensified the gap between the city’s rich and poor it also unevenly distributed environmental benefits and burdens.

Conclusion

After summarizing the book’s main points and contributions, the concluding chapter proposes a way forward for achieving more just forms of sustainability. First, it reviews the three forms of environmental gentrification: green, industrial, and brown. Second, it recaps the book’s arguments about the paradoxes of nonprofit funding structures and participatory politics. Finally, it returns to post-Hurricane Sandy coalition-building. While this moment of middle-class precarity, political divisiveness and climate insecurity is giving rise to polarizing rhetoric and xenophobia, in everyday life, the increasing effects of climate change are also fostering new and surprisingly diverse political formations and solidarities. Rather than superficial and short-sighted sustainability initiatives, it is these kinds of coalitions, borne of crisis, that lie at the heart of our collective future.

Wiped Out by the Green Wave

Situated mainly in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, this chapter examines “green gentrification”—the correlation between environmental improvements and high-end real estate development. Taking an historic look at urban parks and property values, this chapter begins with nineteenth-century discourses about nature, social uplift, and morality. The symbolic value attached to green space soon correlated with material value, as parks boosted nearby property values. Despite their public status, parks became spaces of subtle racial and class-based exclusion. As sustainability gained popularity in the early 2000s and the real estate market boomed, new green spaces became an amenity that drew affluent residents to gentrifying areas. Environmental justice activists in these neighborhoods thus found that the very improvements for which they had been fighting now facilitated gentrification and threatened to displace low-income residents and communities of color.

“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”

This chapter defines the term “industrial gentrification” as the creation of new manufacturing zones that feature ecologically friendly, high-tech, and small-scale businesses designed to attract upwardly mobile, eco-friendly gentrifiers. I begin with an historic look at how zoning regulations created areas of sacrifice and gain. Initially, these regulations insulated wealthy residential zones from noxious facilities while interspersing industrial land uses and affordable housing. In the early 1960s, New York City elites reshuffled these spatial arrangements in ways that favored the growth of the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors and pushed industrial businesses to the city’s perimeters. Gentrification (and displacement) were a key part of this new economic strategy. After the 2008 recession, the Bloomberg administration rebooted the manufacturing economy as part of its larger sustainability agenda. However, like other green amenities, the location of low-tech manufacturing spaces corresponded with upscale redevelopment. This further concentrated heavy manufacturing facilities in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. Moreover, rather than reviving a lost employment sector, new manufacturing offered high-priced items produced by a small number of nonunionized, low-wage workers.

“Democracy Has Left the Building”

Just as sustainability has come to serve as a euphemism for profit-minded redevelopment, public participation and community engagement have become a ritualized but ultimately empty performance of democracy and shared decision making. This chapter examines how environmental justice activists have navigated the nonprofit funding system and the constant pressure to participate in various forms of citizen engagement. These have included requests from academics wishing to further institutional missions that emphasize public engagement. They also included invitations to sit on steering committees, to attend countless public hearings, to submit public testimonies about new development projects, to participate in urban planning initiatives, and more. Activists have found that such activities drain their time and energy, siphoning it away from their long-term goals. Ultimately, rather than supporting democratic action, institutionalized forms of civic engagement have undermined democracy itself.

Introduction

This chapter introduces some of the contradictions of urban sustainability in New York City by comparing the glassy, “green” high-rises, rooftop gardens, and waterfront parks of Manhattan and Brooklyn to the heavily industrialized north shore of Staten Island, largely populated by communities of color. The chapter then offers a brief overview of economic redevelopment in New York City during the 12-year mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg who effectively coupled sustainability with luxury real estate development. This pairing forms the basis of environmental gentrification, a process that exacerbates the uneven distribution of environmental benefits and burdens across the city and undermines the very definition of urban sustainability. This chapter lays out a framework for investigating this and other paradoxes that plague today’s “sustainable” cities.

Brown Spots on the Apple

The term “brown gentrification” describes the selective remediation and repurposing of toxic properties for profit. This chapter focuses on brownfield cleanup programs, which incentivize private developers to clean up and repurpose contaminated properties, especially those located in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Such programs initially appeared to address some of the most pernicious environmental problems facing communities of color. However, because cleanups were predicated on private investment, they inevitably favored neighborhoods where property values were set to rise. Conversely, hitching toxic cleanup to real estate development left non-gentrifying neighborhoods with no mechanism for remediating contaminated properties. By outsourcing the cleanup of contaminated properties to private investors, brown gentrification thus subordinated public health to property values. Moreover, it redistributed environmental burdens in a way that further concentrated them in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

“This Crosses Party Lines All over the Place”

Looking beyond the animosities and vitriol of national, partisan politics, chapter 6 shines a light on new political formations. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, residents of Staten Island’s southern and eastern shores petitioned for managed retreat programs that would relocate them inland. For years, these homeowners had joined forces with activists on Staten Island’s north shore to contest overdevelopment and to demand better flood protections, forming ongoing partnerships across geographic, political, racial, ethnic and economic divides. On a national level, flood survivors throughout the US similarly came together to create the national Stop FEMA Now (SFN) movement. In both cases, activists sidestepped their ethnic, racial, economic and political differences and worked together for better flood protections and environmental policy in the face of oncoming climate change. These issue-based coalitions demonstrate how a politics of disaffection can inspire new—and surprisingly nonpartisan—political formations.