The “in’s” and “out’s” of the city

The (unintended?) theme of this week’s readings is closely related to Tim Cresswell’s conception of inspace/outspace, where power dynamics of where to locate garbage and how livability is defined says a great deal about a city.  Once again, we are dealing with what is conceived of as “acceptable nature” – green waterfronts – and “unacceptable nature,” an obvious example being garbage.  The spatial development of city is never far removed from these societal processes.

I enjoyed the end of Hagerman’s piece about urban waterfront redevelopment in Portland when he begins to explore the meaning of the new landscape in relation to what it was, especially of the “legacies of oppression and pollution and the history of workers and residents.”  When read in conjunction with Maria Kaika’s discussion of the City of Flows, the idea of how to write about urban landscapes can be tied to the history of what was once there.  The abrupt erasure of an old landscape with a new one informs us of what is “in” and what is “out”; what was once considered emblems of progress and modernity – industrial smokestacks pointing towards the heavens and water networks snaking through the city – is suddenly passe at a later date.  However, this method seems to say more about the humans themselves than it does about re-engaging nature, something we’ve discussed about in class.

A former friend of mine once opined about how these livability ratings in Houston (my hometown) generally rated sections of the city that were inhabited by middle to upper-class white residents as being more desirable than other sections, especially those where minority residents tended to cluster.  In other words, the parts of the city that were rated as “more livable” correlated with the proportion of residents who were white and upper middle class (one part of the metropolitan area – The Woodlands – was described as being racially diverse even though the only know minority population there is a small, small concentration of Asian Americans). Of course, these ratings took a lot of these livability factors into account that Hagerman brought to mind, but they also utterly masked the social processes behind how these livability factors were unevely distributed throughout the city.  I think Hagerman is right when he says that the livability discourse is something not easily divivded along conservative/progressive debates since it is seens as a rather objective criteria not subject to critical analysis.

The idea of an unevenly distributed urban landscape plays well with the two pieces about garbage, but I suppose the idea that marginal urban residents having to live a waste-infested locales in the city is not something new.  So, in one sense, it is not surprising that urban squatters in Nairobi and indigenous populations in Oaxaca have to deal with the refuse from wealthier parts of city.  Would the garbage have been dumped near wealtheir parts of the city, given the gross disparities in income in those two countries?  I had a hard time seeing whether these case studies were useful because they were exceedingly particularlistic (that is, they represented something different than the norm when we theorize about such issues, especially as related to envirnomental justice) or whether they are just interesting stories to tell that valorize an existing theoretical model.  Perhaps what is new is the urban ecological perspective, which has the ability to unearth the private-political coalitions that benefit from constructing and maintaining the city in a certain way, especially in how space is utilized.