Geography 595

Burying or Burning the ‘dirty’ (memories or garbage) December 4, 2008

I found Hagerman’s piece to be useful in providing a deeper assessment of urban change than simply stating gentrification has occurred.  The way in which nature and an ‘ideological landscape’ is discussed and presented serves the goals of particular actors in positions of power.  I liked this piece because of the discussion regarding how certain memories and/or histories can be disregarded or removed when re-constructing a space.   These forgotten memories not only include environmental pollution but also ‘legacies of social conflict and labour unrest.’  Hagerman ultimately explains that what started out as a particularly well-received plan for ecological restoration of the waterfront, has now turned into a quest for more residential housing for elite citizens.  Memories, histories, and already marginalized populations are further removed or hidden from the imagined landscape.  The notion of ‘livability’, which continues to play a prominent role in the development discourse and rhetoric offered up by cities, is an interesting notion as it is entirely subjective as an idea but is applied by cities and planners in a very concrete formulaic fashion, where livable means expensive, close to ‘nature’, and ‘clean’.  Hagerman makes a good point about how the old industrial processes as well as homeless populations are pushed out of the area rendering it more ‘livable.’  I see this as creating a picture where we end up with these landscapes overlain by interpolated degrees of ‘livability’ with a finite amount of total livability across the space.  If one area, the waterfront in this case, becomes more ‘livable’ another area then suffers a decrease in ‘livability’ as industrial processes and marginalized populations are shifted around according to the whims of urban planners and preferences of the elite. 

I also found it interesting how Hagerman described green images as being these symbolic and material representations of hope.  I had never encountered such a discussion so I thought that was quite interesting.  One aspect of the piece that I am unable to grasp is when Hagerman says the following: ‘the result is a denial of the social context of the industrial economies that shaped these landscapes.’  I understand what he means but I’m not sure how Hagerman would provide for an acceptance and accounting of the social context.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the Njeru piece alongside Moore’s piece in order to look at urban political ecology with respect to garbage or waste in the global south.  I found both to be very interesting as they both illustrated the complex challenges and political-economic roots of the two different trash problems.  They both dealt with the poor to non-existent provision of sanitary services and the political-economic forces stemming any wider spread, more equitable, provision of those services.  The Moore piece was particularly interesting to me because of how the location of the marginalized population with respect to the landfill became not only a source of feelings of inequity but also instilled a sense of power among the residents which drove them to block access to the landfill and protest in a very visible fashion.