The final paper is a written reflection on one (or more) of the media collections that we have been conducting throughout the term. The paper should be short (~1200 words) and empirically grounded. In order to complete this paper, first select one(or several) of the collections as your source of evidence. Then, read through the responses of your classmates and the notes they submitted for their submissions. For at least half (15) of the responses, code (i.e. tag) the text for common terms, themes, or tropes. Develop a descriptive framework or set of categories for making sense of the variations. In other words, find a way of succinctly expressing what has been said across the scope of responses. Try to acknowledge and make a place for outliers, rather than discarding them outright. Use this descriptive framework to make and defend a claim of your own that confirms, extends or refutes a single argument from more than one of the readings that you have been assigned this term. Bring in other literature that we may have not discussed but is relevant to making your case. Use representative quotes from the corpus of student responses in order to illustrate your points, rather than simply summarizing the evidence. Use footnotes for all references, including student media collections. Consult the Chicago Manual for questions of style and citation: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. Egregious spelling and grammar mistakes will result in a lower grade. I suggest having someone else in the class proofread your paper before submitting it. Plagiarism is grounds for disciplinary action. Your paper should be submitted in text form (.doc, .txt, .rtf) Rubric: Here is a simple rubric to help you with the paper. Claim: Does the paper focus on an identifiable and reasonable claim that extends or contests an argument from one of the assigned class readings? 10: The claim is identifiable and creative. 9: The claim is identifiable. 8: The claim could be clearer. 7: The claim is confusing. 6: There is no clear claim. Evidence: Does the paper present effective evidence for the claim in the form of excerpts and summaries of student field notes? 10: All evidence effectively supports the claim. 9: Some evidence supports the claim. 8: Evidence is used, but does not effectively support the claim. 7: Evidence is used sparsely. 6: There is no clear evidence. Craft: Is the paper clearly structured and well-written with minimal spelling and grammatical mistakes? 10: The writing is expressive, easy to follow, and has few spelling or grammatical mistakes. 9: The writing is easy to follow and has few spelling or grammatical mistakes. 8: The writing has few spelling or grammatical mistakes, but could be more clearly structured. 7: The writing has significant spelling and grammatical mistakes and could be more clearly structured. 6: The writing has major structural and grammatical problems. INTRODUCTION URBAN SUSTAINABILITY AS MYTH AND PRACTICE MELISSA CHECKER City University of New York GARY MCDONOGH Bryn Mawr College CINDY ISENHOUR University of Maine Sustainability is everywhere. As the world’s population grapples with rapid urban growth, ecological degradation, global climate change, and the distribution of risks and rewards in a complex global socio-ecological system, sustainability has become a call to arms, a catchword, and a slogan. “Sustainability,” Miriam Greenberg writes (Chapter 4), “has become, quite simply, a new common sense.” And yet, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously demonstrated, common sense is neither sensical nor common – it is imbued with both emotions and rationalities that are shaped by specific historic, geographic, cultural, economic, and political conditions. Most importantly, common sense wisdom “is shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc” (Geertz 1983:81). The authors in this volume similarly treat sustainability as a seductively ambiguous term (Trouillot 2003) that reflects both universalized assumptions and a tangle of disparate, contradictory, paradoxical, and culturally contingent ideas and practices. We believe that the power and ubiquity of sustainability as a discourse, and its diversity as a set of practices, come to the fore especially in the context of today’s rapidly growing cities. Here, the term simultaneously signals a “modern” way of envisioning the future, a way to understand relationships between the built environment and ecological resources, a foundation for demanding more just social relations, an approach to urban planning, a branding strategy, and a nostalgic reference to a preindustrial past. We contend that the diverse meanings ascribed to urban sustainability are not merely fodder for academic discussion. Rather, as we show in this volume, they have concrete consequences for the lives of everyday 1 2 Sustainability in the Global City urban dwellers, for the environment, and especially for social justice and equity. In short, the essays collected here highlight the fact that urban sustainability can entail both vital strategies for change and strategies for domination. Accordingly, our explorations of sustainability in the global city develop a dialectical understanding of universalized conceptualizations and particularized local practices (Harvey 1996). Thus, we examine the concept of sustainability as a globally circulating discourse that aligns with widespread myths that idealize technological innovation, economic growth, and modernity on one hand and draw on diverse and even contradictory visions of nature and its value on the other. In addition, we pay careful attention to sustainability as a set of specific local practices that reflect the beliefs, behaviors, and negotiations that are the stuff of daily life. Traversing the globe from Memphis, Tennessee, to New Delhi, India, and many places in between, we explore a diverse range of experiences with urban sustainability policies and programs, from those that involve substantive ecological and social change to those that are incomplete, fragile, or abandoned. To develop our understanding of sustainability as both myth and practice, we use the tools of ethnography to create detailed accounts of local histories, cultural meanings, and everyday lives. At the same time, we contextualize those accounts in the historic, social, and cultural complexities that shape how people understand and experience the world. This ethnographic perspective sets this volume apart from an explosion of both popular and academic books – from professions and disciplines as diverse as architecture, urban planning, business management, geography, and environmental ethics – on the centrality of sustainability to contemporary urbanism and urban policy. While many of these works present a useful approach to sustainability, we find little information about how urban citizens interact with this ubiquitous discourse in their daily lives or about its larger consequences for issues of global equality and uneven development practices. In contrast, this volume focuses on what happens in between the promises and the propaganda of sustainability programs: How do commitment and belief shape how people act on and evaluate sustainability? How can we recognize and learn from program outcomes that varied from, or altered, public expectations? In our various approaches to answering such questions, we examine sustainability’s multiple contradictions, manipulations, and embodiments. At the same time, we show how this complex concept continues to offer an opportunity to explore the imagined futures that motivate human behaviors. We hope that the examples presented here allow readers to learn from past successes as well as unforeseen missteps and mistakes. Above all, we hope that this volume can help to inspire new kinds of policies, actions, and collaborations that move us toward more equitable, just, and sustainable urban futures. Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice The rest of this introduction develops a basis for this volume’s dialectical approach to urban sustainability as both myth and practice, and as both a strategy for change and for domination. In the following section, we describe two poles of an ongoing debate over the role of cities in creating sustainable futures: the city as beacon of hope and the city as inherently unsustainable. We next trace the origins of these debates, outlining a brief genealogy of urban sustainability, its convergence with neoliberal policies and ideologies, and its path to ubiquity. We argue that while the meaning and use of sustainability splintered in some dramatic ways, the term continues to have global reach and mythic power. The subsequent section thus explores anthropological understandings of myths and the role they play in contemporary urban landscapes and lives. Of course, myths are as influenced by local practices as they influence them – thus, we complement this section with an introduction to the study of urban sustainability in practice. Finally, we provide a brief overview of the sections, chapters, and snapshots that make up this volume. DEBATING THE ROLE OF CITIES IN SUSTAINABLE FUTURES In 2010, a United Nations study estimated that the proportion of the Earth’s population living in cities reached 50.5 percent, a number expected to rise to 69 percent by 2050.1 Clearly, cities play an increasingly pivotal role in the future of our planet. Some uphold them as our best hope for alleviating global, social, economic, and climate crises (Yanarella and Levine 2011; Duany and Talen 2013). In this view, the efficiencies of scale, technological innovations, green designs, and participatory initiatives emerging from today’s cities will lead the way to a more economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable planet – an image often posed in opposition to the equally powerful idea of suburbia and sprawl (Bruegmann 2005; Owen 2009; Fitzgerald 2010). Numerous books and articles published over the past two decades showcase the sustainable achievements of cities like Stockholm, Denver, Curitiba, Portland, Hamburg, the Tianjin Eco-City, Nantes, and Barcelona (Nijkamps and Parrels 1994; Fitzgerald 2010; Troy 2012). Certainly, municipal governments can more readily affect planning initiatives and economic incentives that lead to fairly immediate and substantive changes. Whereas summits in Copenhagen, Cancun, and Rio failed to produce commitments from world leaders and a consensus adequate to curb greenhouse gases, C40 Cities, a global network of megacities, secured promises from fifty-nine mayors from around the world to slash emissions of greenhouse 1 See http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/doc_press-release.htm 3 Sustainability in the Global City 4 gases by 248 million metric tons by 2020, and by more than one billion tons by 2030 (Top 2013). As C40 Cities’ website states, “Cities have the power to change the world . . . What our cities do individually and in unison can set the agenda for a sustainable future.”2 But how far can these civic campaigns go in solving global environmental problems? And how are those contributions to be measured? Moreover, as individual municipalities define sustainability, how do they negotiate competing short- and long-term imperatives? Is human justice as important to urban sustainability as food supplies, “green” energy, or public transportation? Critics argue that the very concept of urban sustainability is an oxymoron (Rees 1997; Hornborg 2001, 2009). With their towering buildings, teeming sidewalks, and snarled traffic jams, cities are places of intense energy and resource use. The World Bank estimates that urban areas consume 75 percent of the world’s energy and produce 80 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions (Baeumler, Ijjasz-Vasquez, and Mehndiratta 2012). While the power of municipalities to solve global climate crisis may be limited, it is a truism that individual cities affect socio-ecological processes far beyond their boundaries. Thus, while sustainability advocates frequently call for regionalism or greater resource independence, critical urban scholars point out that urban consumption and production systems are deeply embedded in global interdependencies that expropriate resources and surpluses from rural and developing areas to support growing urban demand (Bunker 1985; Swyngedow 2004; Hornborg 2009). As Chapter 2 demonstrates, these extensive relationships demand that, at the very least, we scrutinize urban policies, practices, and programs that declare themselves to be “carbon neutral.” Cities are also defined by their density, making them an inherently “vulnerable form of human organization” that is particularly susceptible to disaster and disease (Harvey 2003:25; Schneider and Susser 2003). Processes like densification, which shaped the industrial nightmares of nineteenthcentury Europe and the United States, have now recurred in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the next few decades, hundreds of millions of rural immigrants will move from villages to cities in China alone, further complicating issues of air quality, traffic, and sanitation. Sustainable policies and practices constitute central debates within these changes. Indeed, to remain vital, a city must constantly accommodate new and growing populations, forever creating new market opportunities and absorbing capitalist booms and busts (Harvey 1996). While some believe that this ongoing flux generates creativity and innovative forms of efficiency, others wonder whether planning for sustainability is even possible, especially in the context of climate instability 2 www.c40cities.org/news/news-20091215.jsp Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice and the potential for abrupt climate change. How far ahead must municipal governments plan, and based on which predictions? Is it even possible to find a balance between economic imperatives, the preservation of ecological resources, and the needs of burgeoning populations, while also pursuing social justice? For a number of scholars, sustainable goals and outcomes will always be shaped – and constrained – by political and economic agendas (Moore 2007; Krueger and Gibbs 2007; Choy 2011). For instance, in today’s increasingly competitive global marketplace, cities must vie for investment dollars, selling the city’s image to investors, visitors, residents, and even urbanists (see Chapters 1 and 4). In some ways, urban governments have far more power over constructing their images than they do over making a substantial difference in climate change. The packaging of cities as commodities (Boyer 1994; Low 2005) is now intimately tied to sustainability discourse (we discuss this in further detail in the following section). As green awards proliferate, and world cities continually call attention to their green amenities, it becomes hard to separate boosterism from assessment or to distinguish examples of sustainability that advance social justice from those that reproduce social inequalities (see Krueger and Ageyman 2005). For instance, a gleaming new Bank of America building in Manhattan received widespread acclaim in 2010 for being “the world’s greenest office tower.” Yet, by 2012, New York City data reported that the Bank of America Tower produced “more greenhouse gases and use[d] more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan.”3 For critical sustainability scholars, such examples demonstrate that, as sustainability increasingly becomes a politically neutral and co-optable concept, it risks becoming mere greenwash, with diminished relevance for both ecological improvements and social justice. In this volume, we seek neither to align ourselves with boosters nor naysayers. Rather, we explore what sustainability means in different urban contexts, and the implications of those meanings for urban citizens, especially those who are socially, economically, politically, and geographically marginalized. We know that neither city governments nor individual citizens can control environmental imbalances on their own, nor can they determine the fate of the climate or the planet. Yet we also firmly believe that by bringing together diverse groups of actors, including universities, think tanks, grassroots movements, nonprofit agencies, lobbyists, capitalist investors, and even those who are simply heedless of environmental consequences, cities can be crucibles for thought, debate, innovation, and action on a global scale. 3 www.newrepublic.com/article/113942/bank-america-tower-and-leed-ratings-racket/ 5 Sustainability in the Global City 6 “URBAN SUSTAINABILITY”: A RISING TIDE Developing one – or even six – definitions of urban sustainability would contradict our aim to highlight multiple and variegated perspectives on, and interpretations of, the term. At the same time, we find it useful here to outline a brief genealogy of the concept of sustainability and its marriage to “the urban.”4 While we recognize that sustainability draws upon centuries of concerns with creating healthy, just, and functional cities, the term and its applications have crystallized and also diverged in recent decades in ways that merit special attention. The popularization of the term “sustainability” can be traced to the circulation of its close companion, “sustainable development.” During the post–World War II era, the idea that so-called “first world” countries should assume a responsibility to rescue “third world” countries from poverty and repressive governments fostered a proliferation of international economic development programs and accompanying global institutions (such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund). Cold war–era fears about the spread of communism rationalized these programs, distracting public attention from the degree to which they ensnared developing countries in webs of debt while allowing corporations and governments in the global north to accrue massive wealth and power (Redclift 2005). Moreover, development programs encouraged the use of pesticides, monocropping, deforestation, and other practices that were extremely detrimental to environmental resources (Escobar 1995). Eventually, the failure of development programs to eradicate poverty, and the pervasive environmental degradation they caused, became inescapable (Portney 2013). In 1983, the UN Secretary General created a new commission, to be led by former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and charged it with setting an international agenda for promoting development that prioritized social, economic, and environmental goals over such devastating growth. In 1987, the commission published “Our Common Future,” also known as the Brundtland Report, stating: A world in which poverty and inequity are endemic will always be prone to ecological and other crises. Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (Brundtland 1987:8) 4 Many excellent texts contain more extensive histories and working definitions of sustainability and urban sustainability. See our index and bibliography for references to such work. Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice Importantly, the Brundtland Report calls for economic development that is both ecologically and socially conscious. Thus, its ideals were similar to those of socially democratic countries, and they echoed the philosophies of social justice activists across the globe. The Report had a powerful impact, spawning a series of global discussions. Some of the most influential of those took place during the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development – Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. There, participants adopted Agenda 21,5 which followed up on some of the ideas set forth by Brundtland. Consistent with neoliberal practices and ideas that devolved responsibility away from federal governments, Agenda 21 emphasized the role of “local authorities” in creating policies, regulations, and infrastructure that would advance sustainable goals (Portney 2013). Accordingly, leaders from European cities and towns came together two years later to pass the Aalborg Charter,6 a plan for achieving sustainable goals, mainly through local initiatives. As sustainability discourse grew in popularity, neoliberal ideas also achieved prominence, solidifying into a range of policies that would restructure economies and governance in cities, states, and nations throughout the globe. In addition to favoring local – rather than national – governance, neoliberalism also promulgated the idea that if left to prosper unfettered, market-based economies would not only “lift all boats” (i.e., benefit all citizens) but also regulate themselves. From this perspective, the role of government should be to promote private economic development and allow the market itself to resolve the ecological and social concerns raised by the Brundtland Report (Escobar 1995; Harvey 2005; Redclift 1987, 2005). Accordingly, neoliberalism encouraged the widespread privatization of public services, including the provision and distribution of water and energy. As well, it led to the privatization and commoditization of environmental resources, such as forests, nature reserves, and even carbon. Private companies, the thinking went, would be incentivized to find efficient and profitable ways to provide and manage these services and resources, and be free from the partisan politics that tend to bog down governmental entities. As geographer Eric Swyngedouw explains, neoliberal approaches to sustainability were based on [T]he basic vision that techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it contains. Difficulties and problems, such as environmental concerns that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical arrangement, and the production of consensus. (2007:26) 5 6 www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/ Since 1994, the Aalborg Campaign has resulted in a number of initiatives including the recent Aalborg Commitments signed in 2004. See www.aalborgplus10.dk/ 7 8 Sustainability in the Global City According to neoliberal logics, technological fixes to environmental problems were objectively rational and thus divorced from macro and micro politics. As a result, all kinds of stakeholders could come to the table and eventually find consensus on the optimal way to approach environmental issues. Redclift refers to such neoliberal versions of sustainability as “the ‘new’ sustainability discourses,” which, he contends, “were often clothed in new language – deliberation, citizenship, even the rights of species – but they hid, or marginalised, the inequalities and cultural distinctions, which had driven the ‘environmental’ agenda internationally” (2005:81; see Chapters 3 and 9). This new clothing fit especially well in urban contexts. After economic crises of the 1970s left North American and European cities in chaos (much of which was blamed on failures of governance), neoliberal trends toward privatization, free markets, and small government took hold of city policy agendas and the structure of municipal governments (Hackworth 2006). At the same time, the social unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s gave rise to political discourses about enfranchisement, equality, and participatory politics, which were selectively appropriated by urban regimes (Steinberg 1996). Several decades later, as public concerns about global climate change and urbanization grew, neoliberal agendas adopted sustainability as a popular discourse that simultaneously signaled environmental concern and progressive and participatory governance. As a brand, it especially appealed to the upscale, cosmopolitan, and politically liberal urbanites that cities hoped to attract (see Chapter 4). It is crucial to note here that we do not intend to dismiss sustainability as a wholly co-opted discourse, now useful only as a marketing device for duped urban citizens. Rather, we recognize that for many activists and practitioners, it has continued to provide a useful framework for addressing the economic, social, and/or ecological concerns initially imparted by the Brundtland Commission. In particular, the sustainability conferences and agendas of the early 1990s ignited the imaginations of urban planners, architects, and designers who went on to use the concept to innovate more ecologically minded projects. Indeed, for urban professionals, sustainability rekindled ideals about green space and density that have historically been an important part of city planning. For instance, parks and gardens have always been important features of urban areas, from the reflexive spaces of China and Japan to the Imperial Esplanades of Paris and Vienna (claimed by revolutionaries and republicans for new publics). During and after the Industrial Revolution, these spaces became especially essential, as planners and activists reacted to urban pollution and pestilence by channeling their concerns about the importance of green space, clean air and water, and salubrity into city beautiful and garden city movements. Such efforts resulted in massive park creation, public health, and restoration Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice projects. A few decades later, similar ideas about the role of green space in urban improvement informed regional planning and civic campaigns that sought to preserve nature through designated areas and connective parkways (Fanstein and Campbell 2003; Condon 2010; Farr 2012). In addition, planned spaces combined walkability, community-mindedness, and access to open spaces and recreation. These spaces then constituted the foundations for the creation of a wide variety of garden cities and new towns – from Ebenezer Howard’s visions of a rural–urban hybrid to Clarence Perry’s models for new neighborhoods, the planned developments of Greenbelt suburbs, or generations of greenfield suburban “communities.” Importantly, planning for parks, greenways, and even garden cities was never without controversy, especially as clearing the way for green spaces was often a mechanism for clearing impoverished areas, and opportunities to experience urban nature were frequently limited to middle and upper class, white citizens (Checker 2010).7 Today, historic ideas about integrating nature and urban/suburban space find expression in various interpretations of sustainable urban planning. However, the role of social justice in these approaches remains highly controversial (see Chapter 10). For example, Landscape Urbanism is a relatively recent planning approach that advocates for native habitat designs that include diverse species and landscapes that require very low resource use. However, critics claim that Landscape Urbanists prioritize aesthetic and ecological concerns over human needs (see Chapters 3 and 9). In contrast, New Urbanism is an approach that was popularized in the 1980s, promotes walkable streets, compact design, and mixed-use developments. But Landscape Urbanists find that these designs do not prioritize the natural environment and often involve diverting streams and disrupting natural wetlands. Still others, such as those advocating for “just sustainabilities” or “complete streets,” find that both approaches are overly idealistic and neither pays enough attention to the realities of social dynamics and systemic inequality.8 Such debates have practical implications and often surround contemporary urban sustainability projects. For instance, New York City’s High-Line park, which opened in 2010, was guided by principles of Landscape Urbanism and has won numerous awards for its sustainable features. Built atop an unused and crumbling elevated railway line, the park features mostly native plants and functions as a state-of-the-art green roof, requiring minimal supplementary 7 It should be noted that the history contained in this section is highly abbreviated. For more in-depth and complicated accounts of the topics touched on here, including urban green space planning, suburban sprawl, the growth of the suburbs, etc. see Index and Bibliography. 8 www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/ 9 10 Sustainability in the Global City watering. For some, the project showcases an inspiring blossoming of nature amid urban detritus. But others question its ramifications for social justice and read it as a sign of gentrification and, in its special financing, the harbinger of a “two tier” system of urban parks across New York (Morenas 2013). Contemporary iterations of sustainability discourse also reflect longstanding discussions and concerns about the environmental and social repercussions of postwar sprawl. For example, the growth of North American suburbs can be traced to post–World War II public policies that privileged home and car ownership as well as highway creation. By encouraging and enabling middle class, white urbanites to live outside the city limits and experience the benefits of more “natural” surroundings, these policies also fomented divisions of class, race and gender across metropolitan landscapes (see Chapters 11 and 12). Such patterns of escape have since echoed in peri-urban and second-home development in Europe, gated communities in Latin America, and new suburbs in China (Sugrue 1996; Fleischer 2010). But as suburbs and satellite cities sprawled farther and farther from urban cores, they encroached on rural areas and required suburbanites to commute vast distances to the jobs, shopping, and cultural venues that the cities offered (Bruegman 2005; McDonogh 2013). In the 1980s, Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements reacted to the negative environmental and social ramifications of sprawl by calling for the creation of compact, transit-oriented communities with walkable commercial districts and mixed-use developments (even if many such projects end up in suburban venues). These ideas also appear in future-oriented narratives of urban sustainability, which try to balance natural and cultural resource preservation and enhancement, development, and public and economic health. Such ideas (often framed as some form of sustainable, smart, or low growth) have now become normalized in urban planning. Yet they remain difficult to operationalize, and are often ensnared by the competing agendas of local businesses, zoning boards, civic organizations, and environmental groups (Farr 2012; Duany and Talen 2013). More recently, with growing awareness of climate change predictions and in the wake of recent disasters, such as the Kobe Earthquake and Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, sustainable urban development concepts have spawned another subset of discourses, known as “resiliency” or the ability of urban populations to withstand and recover from environmental disturbances and disasters (Vale and Campanella 2005; see Snapshot 2 and Chapter 5). This perspective draws on a biological phenomenon – population recovery after stress – to talk about human actions and natural events. Emphasizing a systems approach to recovery, resiliency can include an array of ecological resources that Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice help protect people from disasters. However, some argue that this approach is more subjective than it seems because “systems” behave in unpredictable ways. Moreover, demarcating a system’s boundaries is an arbitrary process (Hornborg 2009; Peet and Watts 2011). For instance, seven months after Hurricane Sandy, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg released “A Stronger, More Resilient New York,” a comprehensive plan for protecting the city from future storms. The plan included a wide variety of measures, such as building sea gates and walls, levees, and other built and natural flood barriers. Nonetheless, questions remained about whether some of these initiatives would protect lower Manhattan but exacerbate flooding in outlying areas of the city or the Jersey Shore (City College of New York 2012). Moreover, critics argue that the “gospel of resilience” avoids political questions about the commons and the larger structural changes, such as greater industrial regulation, that are needed to avert disasters in the first place (Nadasdy 2007: 208; Hornborg 2013). In sum, resilience-based discourse and policies can become a way to compensate for the effects of unregulated economic growth. Whether referencing a greenfield development, a political initiative, a new office building, a farmer’s market, or a plan to raise coastal building heights, urban sustainability and its associated discourses speak to change on two levels: institutional and policy and individual choice. This poses yet another paradox. Without institutional change, individual urban residents can only exert so much control over their resource decisions. Nonetheless, the collective impacts of these individuals’ myriad daily choices are far-reaching. Simultaneously, while many sustainable actions are locally based, even at the level of neighborhood, sustainability also implies, indeed demands, a global consciousness that speaks profoundly to issues of society and justice. The authors in this volume make such paradoxes the center of their analyses – we believe that confronting the contradictions and inconsistencies that exemplify sustainability can only strengthen its potential as a beacon for this and future generations of urban planners, professionals, and citizens. Anthropology offers important tools for exploring and making sense of these complexities through a traditional disciplinary emphasis on cultural myths and a methodological immersion in the stuff of everyday life practices. In the following section, we elaborate on both of these foundations. SUSTAINABILITY AS MYTH Myths impregnate physical and social landscapes, shaping the way we think, question, and act, even – or especially – in our turn to industrial and 11 12 Sustainability in the Global City postindustrial modernities. Decades ago, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski described how the Trobriand Islanders read the natural world through a mythological prism: Here we must try to reconstruct the influence of myth upon this vast landscape, as it colours it, gives it meaning, and transforms it into something live and familiar. What was a mere rock now becomes a personality; what was a speck on the horizon becomes a beacon, hallowed by romantic associations with heroes; a meaningless configuration of landscapes acquires a significance, obscure no doubt, but full of intense emotion . . . This power of transforming the landscape, the visible environment, is one only of the many influences which myth exercises upon the general outlook of the natives. (1932:298) Although Malinowski’s lyrical tone separates the mythic thinking of the “native” from a presumed European “us,” we find that his framework is as applicable to the modern streets of Kraków or factories of Gdansk as it was to the natural Melanesian landscape. In this volume, we follow Malinowski’s lead as we seek to understand and explore the implications and significance of urban sustainability for everyday citizens. We find that the meanings of contemporary cities are infused in the multiple media of everyday life, from conversations to movies, news stories to memorial plaques, abandoned rail lines to renewed forests, gardens to farmer’s markets. Treating the city, in part, as a “discursive realm” (Low 2005:4; see also Low 1996), we argue that by exploring how seemingly “meaningless configuration[s]” of the urban landscape acquire significance, we can obtain crucial insights into the ways in which people know, live, and change cities. For myths do more than imbue the landscape with meaning; as fundamental parts of our worldview, they transform it. In Myth Today, Roland Barthes explains the subtle process by which myths become naturalized: In the second (mythical) system, causality is artificial, false; but it creeps, so to speak, through the back door of Nature. This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden – if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious – but because they are naturalized. (1972:131) As they become part of our consciousness, our collective myths provide the parameters within which we define both truth and falsehood. As Stephanie Clifford (2013) has noted, for example, “green” food options do not necessarily equate with objectively healthier choices, but consumers do believe that in buying them, they have achieved a healthier lifestyle. Similarly, the “sustainable” efforts of urban governments, global universities, or elite corporations (see Chapters 3 and 4) may speak more to questions of common belief (and manipulation), than they do to scientific paradigms or systematic assessments. Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice In this volume, we argue that as a naturalized myth, sustainability is particularly potent in that it references scientific rationality and nature but remains ambiguous in its meaning (see Chapter 13). As social scientist Dick Richardson acidly observed in a 1997 essay entitled “The Politics of Sustainable Development”: Sustainable development is a political fudge: a convenient form of words, promoted, though not invented, by the Brundtland Commission, which is sufficiently vague to allow conflicting parties, factions and interests to adhere to it without losing credibility. It is an expression of political correctness which seeks to bridge the unbridgeable divide between the anthropocentric and biocentric approaches to politics. (1997:42) For Richardson, sustainability crystallizes contradictory perspectives about humans and nature. On one hand, some myths of sustainability link it to biocentric concepts of Eden (see Chapter 9), to an unspoiled nature in a distant past, a wilderness before humans or outside of cities, to which we must return (see Chapter 7; Cronon 1995). On the other hand, Edenic spaces are rarely free from human influence and intervention, especially in urban contexts. Inevitably, biocentric conversations about regaining more harmonious relationships with nature converge with discussions of constraints and limits on the natural resources that supply anthropocentric human needs for energy, food, and water. Although they reference past Edens, myths of biocentric sustainability are thus also quite often anthropocentric myths about the future. As a result, we find that myths of urban sustainability seek to balance human demands with increasingly limited natural resources – that is, valuing mass transportation over private cars, or favoring local and organic foods over industrial agricultural products. Indeed, as a naturalized discourse, sustainability trains us to think in certain ways and shapes our ideas about what the future looks like (Giddens 1998). Sustainability thus intersects with modernity in projecting both a sense of urgency about the future of the planet and a scientific rationale – an idea of stewardship for future humans and optimism about the power of technology and urban planning to effectively implement and organize that stewardship (see Chapter 1). In so doing, myths of sustainability privilege an exclusive (and Western) system of environmental knowledge associated with dominant paradigms of rationality. These associations then legitimize sustainability as a scientific concept, even in non-scientific contexts, and they mask the degree to which sustainability discourses actually rely on interpretations of scientific data. As Barthes pointed out, the more naturalized myths become, the more they both reveal and conceal power relations. In particular, as sustainability 13 Sustainability in the Global City 14 myths converge with both modernism and the neoliberal paradigms discussed in the previous section, they can become a powerful force that facilitates the management, control and manipulation of both people and natural resources (Hornborg 2001). In this volume, for instance, both Chapter 2 and the Afterword illustrate how dominant models of sustainability can conceal the easy off-shoring of environmental and social costs and burdens onto marginalized communities. For this reason, we raise concerns about the remarkable vocabulary of highly charged, yet positive terms like “resilience,” “landscape urbanism,” or “complete streets”9 that are associated with urban sustainability. By offering powerful images of nature, restoration, wholeness, and even temporal transcendence, these terms obscure the day-to-day struggles and costs of such complex changes. Moreover, the power of such language is not lost on the analysts, activists, corporate greenwashers, and politicians that employ sustainability discourses.10 An important aim of this entire collection is therefore to illustrate how myths of sustainability can come into conflict with – and sometimes conceal – concerns about social and environmental justice. In other words, how do different variations of sustainability measure the needs of some against the needs of others in the present as well as in the future? Crucially, while the answers to such questions can be found in master or mythic narratives of sustainability, things look very different in everyday contexts. That is, the ways in which sustainability is enacted and practiced is shaped by history as well as divisions of class, race, gender, age, immigration status, and other forms of difference. Thus, as our individual essays seek to understand sustainability in all its broad, mythic dimensions – as a modernist discourse, a naturalized idea that can facilitate neoliberal projects, a political concept, or as an inchoate set of images and feelings about nature – we also describe the specific social and cultural factors that shape the ways those myths play out in everyday life. Taken together, the vast array of perspectives presented in this volume underscore the unique place and the ambivalent power of sustainability in contemporary global discourse. 9 The Complete Streets concept is promoted by Smart Growth advocates. According to the National Complete Streets Coalition, Complete Streets are those that are “designed and operated to enable safe access for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities.” See www. smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/complete-streets-fundamentals/ complete-streets-faq/ 10 www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/11/18/language-sustainability-why-words-matter; www.futerra.co.uk/blog/there-is-a-language-of-sustainability-but-is-it-english/ Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice ETHNOGRAPHIES OF PRACTICE Considering the diverse reactions to and interpretations of sustainability described above, how do individuals, social movements, businesses, local governments, and states articulate and negotiate sometimes competing myths of sustainability, and how do they choose their strategies for shaping the future? We answer this question by working in an ethnographic tradition. That is, we offer close readings of material culture, the built environment, language, and the everyday views and practices of urban residents. We also pay attention to how social identities marked by class, gender, age, and other factors inflect the ways in which people perceive and enact a seemingly globalized sustainability discourse. In so doing, we demonstrate how myths of sustainability converge with and diverge from individual and collective practices, with variegated and uneven effects. We explore positive examples as well as the experiences of failure and incompletion that also underpin the actual lives of citizens worldwide. If sustainability is to be the hallmark of the ideal future city, researchers, policymakers, and students must also understand un-sustainability as policy, practice, and as belief. Throughout this volume, we show how practice works on multiple levels. In many chapters, we define it through the individual actions and interpretations that are the stuff of participant observation. Several authors, for example, examine how individuals link their consumptive choices to ideas about nature and social responsibility (see Chapter 8). At the same time, collective practice becomes a forum in which ideals and goals for social change are tested and debated. Advocating for bike paths that traverse racially divided neighborhoods or making claims about equitable access to resources reframe ecological questions in terms of politics and contestation. Indeed, practice is never simple or straightforward. Always, we are reminded of how poverty, citizenship (as in the case of Argentina), race, or even political regimes (as in China) can constrain both collective and individual action. Although separated for heuristic purposes in this introduction, we do not intend to suggest that practice and myth are independent. Rather, all human actions – whether discussing and debating sustainability, making choices about consumption, or assuming responsibility for the future – are framed by the many mythic paradigms that shape our worldviews. In turn, it is through actions and practices that people challenge and reshape myths of unlimited energy and progress, or of potential technofixes, or even of palliative or “feel-good” environmentalism reduced to weekly recycling or LED light bulbs. Through these interdependent perspectives, we establish a stronger presence for comparative ethnographic data and analyses in debates 15 16 Sustainability in the Global City about sustainability and urbanization – both of which will certainly be central to twenty-first-century thought and innovation. Indeed, we argue that ethnography offers an important vantage from which wider goals for developing more sustainable urban futures may be defined, tested, and realized. ORGANIZATION OF THE COLLECTION Several themes unify the chapters in this collection: the politics of environmental knowledge; exclusion and inclusion; governmentality; neoliberalism; and technocracy. To organize the volume, we have divided essays into the four sections. Importantly, within each section, we have included snapshots – short, less academic, and less theoretical essays that offer insightful, timely accounts of sustainability in cities not covered in our primary essays. Our snapshots diversify the geographical reach of the collection as well as the authorial perspectives represented here – they include essays by planners, environmentalists, architects, and activists who are deeply involved in actualizing sustainable plans and policies in specific places. In addition, through non-theoretical prose, snapshots model the kind of pointed and personal reports that we hope our readers could imagine creating themselves, based on their own cities and in dialogue with the larger issues of the volume. Our opening section, entitled “Building the Myth: Branding the Green Global City,” tackles the ubiquity of sustainability in contemporary urban dialogues, as it has become not only an area of policy but also a label for modernity and global competitiveness. These internationally shared visions of sustainability are adopted by cities all over the world – from Stockholm to Hong Kong, New Delhi, and Shanghai – in spite of significant localized diversity. Appealing to vague notions of globalism and environmental concern, cities work to develop their “green credentials,” positioning themselves to attract investment, tourism, international prestige and a cosmopolitan workforce. Whether through a mega-event such as the Shanghai World’s Fair (Chapter 1) or the greening of riverscapes in New Delhi (Chapter 3), these efforts are intended to build “world-class” cities that shine like emeralds in a globalized market. The chapters included here push beyond public statements to critically examine the mythical dimensions of globalized discourses and identify sustainability as a discourse of difference and contention. Collectively, these pieces raise questions about how governments, which have much less control over the perceptions and practices of their citizens than they do over the city’s image, foster ideal forms of citizenship consistent with their modern, cosmopolitan vision for the city and state. Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice In Chapter 1, Jennifer Hubbert clearly illustrates this interplay between globalized, mythical notions of sustainability and the realities of social structures and citizenship. Her examination of the Shanghai World’s Fair disentangles how this mega-event acted as a means for the government to build a green international identity while simultaneously creating and disciplining a certain type of domestic environmental subject. She argues that while the state presented ecological problems as essentially those of technology and innovation, the educational and promotional materials presented at the Shanghai World’s Fair construct a picture of the “proper citizen” – as educated, urban, cultured, and wealthy enough to afford to consume alternative living technologies. Cindy Isenhour builds on these themes with her research in Stockholm – the European Union’s first “Green Capital.” Although the city and the Swedish state have long been internationally known for progressive environmental policies and programs, Isenhour draws on several recent studies to suggest that the city’s focus on energy and transportation efficiencies have painted a misleading picture of urban sustainability. The efficiency-based rhetoric of ecological modernization has led many to argue that economic growth is fully compatible with environmental protection; however, Isenhour’s research shows that urban environmental improvements and efficiencies often come at the expense of ecological degradation outside the city’s limits. Our first snapshot, written by Gary McDonogh, looks at unsustainability in Hong Kong, “a city built on excess.” McDonogh suggests that while the sustainable city can be an elusive title and goal, we can still learn from those cities that remain unsustainable but continue to strive to improve stewardship both through governance and changing civic attitudes. In contrast to these more affluent cities, Varsha Patel explores the greening of traditional laundries in New Delhi and reminds us that environmental impacts are functions of consumption, technology, and population. In an effort to brand New Delhi as a world-class city, politicians have partnered with development agencies to “green” the city’s traditional laundries. Patel argues that while many of the modern technologies being imported for the laundries will create a more attractive riverscape, they will displace human labor and potentially use more natural resources (e.g. water and electricity) than the traditional technologies. Patel’s case illustrates the irony of programs that prioritize sustainable asset management – in terms of capital and infrastructure – and green branding over human potential in a city with a significant labor surplus. Miriam Greenberg focuses on sustainability planning in New York City between 9/11 and the failed 2012 Olympic bid and on planning for New Orleans between Katrina (2005) and the Gulf Oil Spill (2008). Greenberg argues that city entrepreneurs seek to establish what she calls “the sustainability edge,” 17 18 Sustainability in the Global City a brand that has opened new pathways for private influence on public planning, thus solidifying the dominance of market-based sustainability discourse. Greenberg cautions that this brand of sustainability, while portrayed as a postpolitical win-win, favors market-based governance and, ironically, some of the same growth strategies that caused environmental problems in the first place. Greenberg’s chapter transitions the collection into the second section, entitled “Planning, Design, and Sustainability in the Wake of Crisis.” These chapters explore the temporal dimensions of sustainability through the lens of planning for and recovery from distinct moments of crisis. As we rebuild from technological or natural disasters, or from economic or social crises, to what extent are sustainable models invoked and actually applied, and what do we learn from these tests by fire? Our contributors raise the possibility that these moments enable a “reboot” of sorts, providing opportunities to envision more sustainable futures, or, too often, to establish and solidify inequalities and imbalances. For example, Daniel Slone, a partner with McGuire Woods LLP, draws on years of experience helping communities to plan for and respond to disasters to present a snapshot that discusses the tough choices communities must make following a disaster. His forthright assessment of the challenges associated with ensuring social, economic, and ecological sustainability does not present any easy solutions but does draw our attention to the need for predisaster planning and visioning to increase social capital and community resilience. Ana Servigna and Alí Fernandez expand on these themes and make them concrete in their discussion of a Venezulan program that provided post-flood replacement housing for the indigenous Añu of Simiaca Lagoon. While the Venezulan state iterated a version of sustainability that was highly focused on social equity and invested significantly in social programs designed to ensure inclusion and the right to “inhabit,” the Añu were not consulted in the design of their homes. The authors conclude that the state overlooked important cultural and practical considerations, leading to an ongoing struggle for environmental justice, indigenous recognition, and political accountability. In a second study of environmental justice, Melissa Checker examines the collision of economic and environmental priorities on Staten Island, New York’s north shore before and after Hurricane Sandy. Checker describes how long before the storm, the area’s low- and middle-income residents lobbied city officials to mitigate local flooding and widespread industrial contamination. But the city’s main strategy for addressing contamination was to incentivize private developers to redevelop - and clean up –toxic properties. Not only did this approach allow real estate values to dictate which properties were cleaned, it also limited opportunities for public input and oversight. Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice Ultimately, Checker argues that market-based approaches to environmental remediation and sustainability contradict environmental justice principles and goals. Samuel Shearer’s snapshot from Kigali, Rwanda, also examines the issue of collective opposition to unequal redevelopment in the aftermath of crisis. In this case, Shearer questions why Kigali residents did not oppose a new master plan that included the destruction of a vital urban market. He finds that the acceptance of the master plan was part of a collective drive for post-genocide reconciliation and hope for a post-ethnic, cosmopolitan future that would transcend Kigali’s recent violent past and its transitional present. The third section of the collection, “Everyday Engagements with Urbanism and Nature,” draws together research on the everyday practices of urbanites and their engagements with and perceptions of socio-ecological systems. Patrick Hurley and his colleagues remind us that the benefits of urban forests and green spaces are now well recognized as an important part of a sustainable city. Access to these resources contributes to sustainable livelihoods and enables the formation of local communities of practice. Nonetheless, dominant conservation ideologies and management practices prioritize the needs of natural systems and, in many cases, prohibit human resource use, essentially perpetuating “a mythic notion that cities, in particular, no longer contribute to natural resource livelihoods” (see Chapter 7). Brad Rogers, a practicing conservationist, provides a Baltimore snapshot, which illustrates how engagements with urban nature and sustainability are sometimes less intentional. Written from the viewpoint of a citizen who is also experienced in multiple venues of green development, this snapshot shows how in postindustrial Baltimore, abandoned lots and rail lines quietly and unexpectedly gave way to urban forests and how new varieties of grassroots environmentalism have organically sprouted throughout the city. In Chapter 8, Kathy Bubinas resonates with Rogers’ concern for local urban renewal and reinvention. Like many Midwestern towns that saw significant population declines with deindustrialization and suburbanization, sustainability takes on a slightly different meaning in the two midsized Wisconsin towns Bubinas profiles. In Waukesha and Kenosha, Wisconsin, hopes for urban revitalization were pinned, in part, on the establishment of downtown farmers’ markets that will draw residents back into the city center and create vibrant social and economic spaces. Bubinas observes that in addition to bringing significant business to the downtown, the farmers’ markets have also helped to support more localized and ecologically appropriate food production and have helped local communities to reimagine themselves as environmental stewards and “reweave the social webs necessary for creating common spaces” (see Chapter 8). 19 20 Sustainability in the Global City Next, María Carman shows us how sustainability narratives and programs can authorize certain groups to be “spokespeople for a silent nature.” In her analysis of Villa Rodrigo Bueno, a human settlement within a Buenos Aires ecological reserve, Carman illustrates how concerns about ecological conservation and biodiversity protection were used as a means of exclusion. Those who sought to evict the settlers living in the reserve claimed that the settlement was damaging the ecosystem and threatening wildlife. Yet, ironically, the villa was constructed on a city landfill and car dump. In an effort to save their community, villa residents shifted sustainability discourse away from the purely ecological to include social and economic goals. As a whole, Carman illustrates how nearly all the actors involved in this dispute (from the city to the settlers, judges, and the staff of the ecological reserve) employed environmentalist discourses, despite radically divergent views on human relationships with nature. The final section of the book, entitled, “Cities Divided: Urban Intensification, Neoliberalism, and Urban Activism,” examines efforts to improve urban density and achieve “smart growth.” By carefully tracing the historical and contemporary development of sustainability plans in locations from Paris and Ottawa to Los Angeles and Austin, the authors in this section bring to light the dominance of market-based approaches to urban planning and the results of policies that prioritize market needs above those of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Too often, without adequate participation and ways of ensuring social and environmental justice, sustainability programs can result in gentrification, stratification, and divided cities. François Mancebo carefully traces the development of sustainability planning in Paris over the last several decades. Ironically, Mancebo observes that the city has become increasingly segregated along both ethnic and class-based lines – and that “this spatial separation coincided temporally with the rise of sustainable policies in the Paris region” (see Chapter 10). In a city where housing prices were already quite high, sustainability projects in many areas of the city created new upward pressure on housing prices, essentially driving lower-income families out. In another highly divided city, Memphis, Tennessee, authors Mathew Farr, Keri Brondo, and Scout Anglin describe how a legacy of racial segregation has complicated efforts to create more sustainable transportation infrastructure. While biking infrastructure has long been seen as a key component of sustainable urbanism, activists and organizers in Memphis ran into significant barriers when a proposed bike corridor sought to connect inner-city neighborhoods to some of the wealthiest suburbs in a highly divided southern city. Despite the fact that suburban residents used popular tropes about fear and safety to contest the project, Farr and his colleagues argue that the biking movement has the Introduction: Urban Sustainability as Myth and Practice potential to recreate spaces that can break down social and geographical segregation and contribute to broader, shared cultural ideals. Adonia Lugo, scholar and biking activist, also examines the potential for biking to reduce environmental impact and build “human infrastructure.” She contrasts the development of biking movements in Seattle, a city known for institutionalized sustainability programming and a highly homogenous biking movement, with Los Angeles, where sustainability programming is weaker but the biking movement has taken on significant undertones of social and environmental justice. Lugo explains this difference, in part, as a function of the spatial distribution of affordable central neighborhoods and community diversity. Gentrification and the division of cities are also central concerns of Donald Leffers’s chapter about urban intensification, smart growth, and market-based development in Ottawa, Canada. Pointing out the highly diverse conceptualizations of sustainability in both planning and practice, Leffers observes that for many, intensification is much less about reducing the environmental impacts of suburban sprawl than maximizing the tax revenue associated with a given parcel of land. This is not to say that intensification cannot be sustainable and highly positive, but rather that when converted to the techno–rational and economistic language of zoning and private development, holistic, fluid, and dialogic visions for inclusive intensification are often lost. Eliott Tretter details a service learning and civic engagement project in Austin, Texas. In the face of rising real estate values (and thus property taxes) in neighborhoods targeted for urban redevelopment and intensification, students helped to map the incidence of tax delinquency among residents who could no longer afford to keep up with tax payments. In many cases, these community members were long-term residents threatened by sustainability planning that prioritized green development over maintaining ethnic-, income-, and age-diverse communities. Trettter illustrates how student-produced data assisted the community in raising funds for tax assistance. In addition, the course dramatically redefined student notions of sustainability. Gary McDonogh brings this section to a close with his snapshot about sustainability planning and practice in Barcelona. While many of the city’s “glossy” top-down, high-budget projects crashed with the Spanish economy, McDonogh takes great interest in the grassroots sustainability efforts that have taken their place. Drawing on community ties and social identity, residents began cooperatively planting community gardens on abandoned lots. McDonogh suggests that “grassroots changes in practice [were] already more interesting than the glossy programs and endless urban exhibitions of top-down models” (see Snapshot 5). 21 Sustainability in the Global City 22 The collection concludes with an afterword by the distinguished anthropologist and human ecologist, Alf Hornborg. Hornborg uses the opportunity to respond to the volume’s contributions and its gaps, and to provide a perspective on sustainability that challenges readers to think about what we must do next. His provocative essay underscores the degree to which this volume offers a jumping off point for discussion and action, rather than neat analyses or pat answers. CONCLUSIONS In her recent examination of greening cities in America, Joan Fitzgerald concludes with an appropriate warning: The larger conclusion is one that should be familiar to students of ecology: the parts are linked to the whole, and to each other. We must only connect them. Renewable energy, energy efficiency, green buildings, recycling, waste reduction, fewer cars, more trains, walking, and biking are not individual policies but parts of the whole of how cities must be transformed. As impressive are the efforts of many American cities, they will realize their full potential when the exercise is understood to be comprehensive and only when federal and state policy is working to support them. (2010:184) In assembling this collection of ethnographic approaches to urban sustainability, we hope to shed light on both the parts and the wholes. That is, we bring attention to the myriad, complex, and conflicting voices and actions that constitute the city’s lived environment. In addition, we demonstrate how comparative examinations of sustainability’s mythic dimensions provide a deeper understanding of the perceptions, ideals, and understandings that define the city as an imagined whole. We also argue for more holistic studies of sustainability that integrate action and belief, practice and myth, and individual and collective commitments. If cities are to be crucibles of change for nation, and state, then such comparative and holistic understandings are essential. Finally, along with Fitzgerald, we extend our holism further to emphasize that these analytic essays are themselves practice, part of a dialogue with planners and policy makers and ordinary citizens who will create more sustainable cities. If the collection at times deconstructs and critiques urban sustainability movements, it does so in the spirit of improvement. The volume’s collective argument is that the sustainability discourse must be critically analyzed, improved, and democratized in order to ensure broader movements for change and more just forms of sustainability. As urban ethnography helps us understand who we are and what we do, we would hope these essays spark discussion about what we might do and might be as we move toward more sustainable futures. Introduction Take a deep breath and hold it. Do you know that when you breathe in your lungs absorb billions upon billions of air molecules? Now breathe out. Breathe in. Along with air, each lungful you inhale contains the detritus from our indoor environments: fibers, vapors, tiny airborne insects and their excrement, viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Breathe out. Breathe in. Do you realize that chemical fumes from the objects around you escape into the air, are drawn into your lungs, dissolve across your alveoli membranes and into your blood? Breathe out. Breathe in. The air you just inhaled has already passed through ducts encrusted with a grimy, gray, microbe-infested fuzz of debris, hair, dust, and fiber particles released by decaying building materials. Breathe out.—Classroom exercise from the Environmental Protection Agency designed to teach children about indoor air; paraphrase of Tchudi, ‘‘Lesson Plan on Indoor Air Quality’’ (1993) Imagine an office building at the end of the twentieth century. One worker typing at a desk rubs an eye. Working in a nearby cubicle, a second blows a congested nose. Standing at the photocopier, a third passes a lozenge to a fourth. A fifth begins to feel dizzy as a coworker’s perfume wafts by. A sixth, a seventh—a crowd of complaints begins to form. Dispersed in far-flung corners of a building, these workers in the information economy at the end of the twentieth century may never have thought twice about their irritations. But sometimes they began talking to each other. Latent connections may already have been in place: maybe they were neighbors, or parishioners in the same church, or ate at the same table during lunch. Perhaps a first worker complained about an aspect of their work environment, and others chimed in—Me too, me three! Complaint comparison became a conversational buzz at breaks— 2 Introduction Me four, me five! Repetitions accumulated, and someone began asking questions, gathering in others: Do you feel unwell, too? Perhaps repetitions were recorded in a notebook, turned into signs that together gained new weight. Irritations absorbed into the crowd became symptoms, a collective pattern. Compelled by the din of complaints, other workers might also ask themselves questions about their own bodies. One can easily imagine prying open a ventilation grate and peering inside. Suddenly a threshold was passed, and now many noticed that they felt unwell. A threshold was passed, and what yesterday had gone by without remark was today intolerable. The multitude continued to grow, giving work in the o≈ce building a new rhythm. Workers, mostly women, staged meetings, collected signatures, filed grievances, conducted informal surveys. What had been unconnected, diverse bodily occurrences cohered into an event. Individual symptoms joined the crowd of similarities and became linked in a chain of repetition: in the building . . . in the building . . . in the building. At other buildings, in other cities, strangely similar chains of events occurred. Though many miles apart, they heard news of each other through short newspaper articles or on tv. Workers in one building pointed to workers in other buildings. The crowd, linked by symptoms, declared an occupational health problem. A name circulated, under which all these di√erences coalesced: sick building syndrome. Becoming Sick Building Syndrome Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist. In order to become ‘‘sick,’’ a certain kind of o≈ce building had to come into existence. In the 1970s, o≈ce buildings became architecturally ‘‘airtight’’ for the sake of energy e≈ciency, while internally they were arranged in ‘‘open’’ floor plans. Work inside was governed according to novel, cybernetics-inspired techniques of design and administration. New kinds of materials —plastics, solvents, adhesives, synthetic carpet, particle board, dry wall, acoustic tiles, and so on—made up the surfaces that in turn housed computers, printers, and fax machines that were mechanically kept cool and dry. Air-conditioned and carpeted, o≈ce buildings stood in striking contrast to the treacherous factories, pitiless sweatshops, and deadly Introduction 3 mines of industrial work. O≈ce buildings, constructed to house the vast extension of information work in booming postwar America, relied on a middle-class ambiance to delimit them as di√erent from industrial workplaces, even if wages for many were comparable. Sick building syndrome was a problem only possible in conditions of relative privilege and luxury that characterized Reagan-era America. It captured those minor health complaints only foregrounded when larger dangers receded. It expressed an expectation of comfort and safety as conditions of daily life for the beneficiaries of the privileges of race and class. At the same time, sick building syndrome expressed the sense that privilege was imperfect, even threatened. Chemical dangers could not be cordoned o√ to out-of-the-way neighborhoods or distant countries; on the contrary, they lurked nearby in the most unexpected places. The very materials and technologies of postwar comfort and success might themselves be sources of subtle and stealthy chemical exposure. Even the most innocuous products could contribute to the constant background of chemical stimuli. At mid century, glass-box architecture was accompanied by rhapsodic optimism. Yet during the 1970s, a resurgent feminism and a newly articulated environmentalism spawned an o≈ce-workers movement that made occupational health, and particularly chemical exposures, one of its concerns. O≈ce workers gathered complaints about their workplace with simple photocopied questionnaires. Surveys collected the many ways relatively privileged people understood their health as a reaction to possibly hidden chemical dangers in their daily environment. Bodies signaled the possible presence of hazards through common, minor ailments such as headaches and rarer, serious diseases such as cancer. The new physical space of o≈ce buildings, combined with anxiety over the buildup of tiny toxic hazards, led to protests that in turn triggered government investigations of o≈ce buildings. Occupational health investigators who traditionally investigated factories or acute chemical spills—engineers, toxicologists, and industrial hygienists—were now called on to inspect nonindustrial, seemingly comfortable o≈ce buildings. Once in o≈ce buildings, their equipment almost never registered a chemical exposure. No overpopulous molecule, no errant fume, no physical cause could be found. To make matters more complicated, complaining o≈ce workers did not even share a common disease, which could then be tracked to an o√ending germ. 4 Introduction Instead, investigators were confronted with a messy litany of runny noses, scratchy rashes, endless fatigue, burning inhalations, and queasy stomachs. In the early 1980s, these occupational health events acquired the name sick building syndrome. What exactly the name referred to, or if it even referred to anything, was highly contested. In the absence of a definitive cause, some experts claimed that women, who made up the vast majority of o≈ce workers, were experiencing ‘‘mass hysteria’’ triggered by stress and facilitated by a feminine coping style or even by menstrual irregularities. Workers’ compensation administrators and health insurance companies, in turn, balked at covering a health problem that could not be made to fit traditional explanations. Despite such hesitation, worker protests kept repeating and proliferating during the 1990s, making sick buildings one of the most common types of occupational health investigations in the United States during that decade. A new kind of chemical exposure— indoor pollution—had been identified, not from a discovery in a medical laboratory or clinic but from changes in the ways ordinary people created knowledge about and experienced their everyday environment.∞ Yet not everyone believed that indoor pollution was a real menace. Some scientists, environmentalists, and doctors, bolstered by representatives from chemical manufacturers, held that slight exposures emanating from the commodities of daily life were not a significant worry. In contrast, other scientists, doctors, and activists, joined by experts sponsored by the tobacco industry, held that indoor pollution was in fact a significant worry, perhaps even more so than industrial pollution. They argued that tiny exposures accumulated in otherwise unremarkable interiors and that these exposures, in their sheer multitude, were impossible to untangle from their specific sources. Thus no single product or company could be blamed. Vapors seeped from the abundant and ubiquitous accoutrements of comfortable postwar culture. Was it the new carpet at work? Or the particle board cabinets at home? As a history of the inside of ordinary o≈ce buildings in the twentieth century written at the opening of the twenty-first, this book seeks to capture the ways relatively privileged twentieth-century Americans resided in a world filled with possible chemical exposure. Indoor exposures were possible because the material landscape of privilege had changed in the twentieth century. Yet, unlike the nineteenth century, indoor spaces were no longer filled with smoke and soot from heating, Introduction 5 lighting, and cooking flames; they were no longer coated with leadbased paints, no longer lacking in basic plumbing that could flush away organic waste. Of course, even before the twentieth century the objects and materials that formed and populated interiors could emit potentially toxic molecules. In fact, in many ways the indoors had dramatically improved. So why in the late twentieth century did indoor chemical exposures become a serious environmental health concern? Indoor pollution became not just materially present but also a perceptible, definable, knowable object that both experts and laypeople sought to detect and alter. Historians of medicine have paid important and considerable attention to how microbes have become objects of fear, management, and regulation since the advent of germ theory, shaping the habits of popular culture as well as the practice of medicine for over a century.≤ We understand far less about how chemical exposures similarly came to populate the twentieth-century world as cultural objects of attention and practice. Sick building syndrome exemplifies the ways exposures became part of everyday American life. The historical scholarship concerning chemical exposures has tended to concentrate on the production of industrial pollution, tracking the uneven distribution of environmental hazards across class and race lines. The history of nonindustrial pollution in comparison, for which there is almost no scholarship, brings into focus how chemical exposures and environmental hazards were also gendered. O≈ce buildings in the twentieth century were deeply gendered spaces: they had become sites for the articulation of a gendered division of labor and a landscape of privilege in which most menial o≈ce work was designated a kind of ‘‘women’s work.’’ Unlike the experts called to investigate their unrest, the bulk of low-status o≈ce workers were women with aspirations of benefiting from the privilege and safety of nonindustrial work. Beginning in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s—the decades when sick building syndrome erupted—o≈ce workers could draw on resurgent feminisms to challenge this gendered division of labor. Thus, protests over the environmental conditions in nonindustrial workplaces happened contemporaneously with accusations of gender oppression and clashes over women’s appropriate place. In debates between experts over the reality of sick building syndrome, the fact that women made up the majority of complainants opened up the 6 Introduction possibility of using the diagnosis of hysteria to explain worker unrest. For complainants themselves, practices of feminist organizing, as well as gendered performances of health care and detailed empathetic attention, could be drawn on to produce counter-narratives that argued for the reality of oppressive and unsafe conditions. Whether in ventilation engineering, o≈ce management, or worker activism, gender was a generative ingredient in the physical arrangements of the built environment, in the kinds of authority marshaled in debates, and in the explanations used to argue for the existence or nonexistence of chemical injury. This book highlights the versatile and volatile work of gender in twentieth-century practices of rendering environmental health hazards perceptible and knowable. In the 1980s, gender and chemical exposures both generated controversy and uncertainty. Sick building syndrome was a postmodern health problem, in form as well as time. Not only did it emerge in the information workplaces of the late twentieth century, its definitions encapsulated a conundrum that was postmodern in form: What are we to make of an object with no essence? As a syndrome, it was recognized only as a constellation of symptoms, not by an underlying mechanism.≥ A typical definition of sick building syndrome depicted it as a diversity of ill health e√ects, mostly minor and associated with a building, for which no specific cause was found. Di√erence expressed itself in workers’ health complaints and in each building’s complex conditions. Though many investigators and labor activists hoped that a cause would someday be found, sick building syndrome came to be defined formally through its very lack of causal explanation. In fact, once a specific exposure was detected, an episode was no longer diagnosed as a sick building. Sick building syndrome was thus a doubly troublesome phenomenon to a≈rm: it was found in spaces expected to be safe, even comfortable, and it was nonspecific and multiple both in its cause and expression. The words ‘‘sick building’’ signaled a confusion of boundaries between buildings and the bodies in them—how can a building be sick?—and an attempt to make sense of complexity by making buildings the unit of analysis. It was the mantra ‘‘in the building . . . in the building,’’ repeated in cities across the country, that lent sick building syndrome its coherence. Most discussions in the late twentieth century of sick buildings, and transient or low-level exposures more generally, were caught in a debate Introduction 7 about the very existence of these events: Were they real or not? Did a toxic exposure occur or not? The controversies around the ‘‘reality’’ of sick buildings provided me, as a historian, with an opportunity to study how laypeople and experts have struggled to prove or disprove an environmental health problem. In this book, I do not employ history to judge in favor of one side or the other. Nor do I set out to explain sick building syndrome as the history of an idea. Such analyses can too easily be interpreted as arguing that indoor chemical exposures were and are not ‘‘real.’’ They can be too easily used against current claims of chemical injury, too easily plugged into antilabor arguments that assert sick building syndrome was simply a phantasm of illness, that it was only the medicalization of labor problems by disgruntled and hysterical women. Writing about the historicity of chemical exposures in the recent past is treacherous when one’s arguments are always in danger of being reframed as a≈rming the unreality of exposures. In this book, then, I take a step back from this controversy by using sick building syndrome as an entry point into historicizing the practices by which chemical exposures were granted or not granted existence. That is, I am concerned with how exposures were materialized.∂ Though an empirical study of the past, this is not a straightforward chronological account of the rise of sick building syndrome; instead it is a juxtaposition of histories, each delineating how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. Instead of resolving the factualness or fallacy of any given case of exposure, I am concerned with historicizing the techniques through which ‘‘exposure,’’ as an e√ect between buildings and bodies, became a phenomenon people could say, feel, and do something about. Moreover, I want to understand the history of how chemical exposures were not only materialized but materialized as uncertain events. How were exposures imbued with uncertainty? This book treats these as historical questions that necessitate thinking about the historical ontology of exposures. Historical ontology is a term developed by historians and philosophers of science to describe historical accounts of how objects, such as germs, immune systems, subatomic particles, diseases, and so on, came into being as recognizable objects via historically specific circumstances.∑ Studies of historical ontology typically hold that what counts as truth is the result of historically specific practices of truth-telling—laboratory 8 Introduction techniques, instruments, methods of observing, modes of calculating, regimes of classification, and so on—and, importantly, that the objects that are apprehended through that truth-telling are also historical.∏ Examining the history of how objects came into being does not imply a claim that the world only a√ects us in ways that humans can perceive. Chemical exposures do not only happen when we know about them. Instead, attention to historical ontology underlines that it was only in the eighteenth century, when humans found ways to detect and manipulate entities called molecules, that we could assert that molecules had always existed even before we knew about them. Now that we have molecules we need them and do things with them; they are things we cannot live without. Molecules now have atoms, bonds, polymers, and other properties that we study, manipulate, and even manufacture. At the same time, attending to historical ontology allows the possibility that in the future other objects and properties that do not exist for us now may come into being for us, and in doing so perhaps even make the object ‘‘molecule’’ a less useful description for truth-telling. Thus, attending to the historical quality of existence is a way to hold onto the concreteness of things in the world in a given moment, while at the same time allowing for the possibility that other, yet undeveloped, ways of registering, slicing up, and bringing into being the complexity of the world are, were, and will be made possible by new instruments, techniques, social movements, and so on. This book makes two main arguments about the historical ontology of chemical exposures. First, I argue that exposures were brought into existence in multiple, often conflicting circumstances—the result of not just specific environments but also new arrangements of technologies and practices through which laypeople, scientists, and corporate experts apprehended the health e√ects of buildings on bodies.π Second, I argue that any given way of materializing chemical exposures as perceptible and real also sets the terms of what was imperceptible and unreal. Indoor chemical exposures, I argue, came into being through multiple histories that did not all agree on the terms by which an exposure could be shown to have happened or not.∫ Invisible to our eyes, chemicals wafting from carpet, ink, and adhesive are starring protagonists in the story of sick building syndrome. Environmental historians and historians of science have often debated how best to include nonhuman actors—such as buildings or molecules—in Introduction 9 historical accounts.Ω Environmental historians have included mosquitoes, prairie grass, weather, geological processes, and microbes as actors that have had important, often deadly, consequences for human history. To grant such actors specific agency in their narratives, environmental historians have tended to turn to contemporary scientific findings in order to characterize their actors’ qualities, habits, and consequences. When it comes to chemical exposures, however, contemporary scientific findings, often originating in corporate laboratories, are contested by other communities of experts or by laypeople claiming to suffer chemical injury. The science on chemical exposures is simply unreliable by our contemporary standards of scientific truth. Moreover, no scientific studies exist for a vast number of chemicals used in industry. Thus there is a dual uncertainty when it comes to chemical exposures: first, any incidence of chemical exposure is di≈cult to pinpoint, even with scientific best e√orts, because of the complexity of the phenomenon itself; second, contemporary experts disagree about the import and even the existence of widespread, low-level exposures. This dual uncertainty is thus an important problematic for environmental historians, prompting increased attention to questions of how ‘‘unknowing,’’ ignorance, and imperception were not just accidentally but purposefully generated in the history of knowledge practices.∞≠ Perceptibility and imperceptibility are this book’s central concerns. Not only was the ability to register chemical exposures as existent the result of specific historical practices and technologies, but so too was the inability to register them. The history of how objects were rendered perceptible was in the same gesture intrinsically linked to a delineation of what was imperceptible.∞∞ The history of how things come to exist is intrinsically linked to the history of how things come not to exist, or come to exist only with uncertainty or partially. In other words, seeing necessitates the designation of the unseeable, knowing the unknowable, and so on. Domains of imperceptibility were the inevitable results of the tangible ways scientists and laypeople came to render chemical exposures measurable, quantifiable, assessable, and knowable in some ways and not others.∞≤ Domains of imperceptibility were produced by limits in the capacities of knowledge practices, limits that were inevitable—every discipline of knowledge studies some things and not others; every scientific instrument can detect some things and not others; every experiment includes 10 Introduction some variables and not others. These material limits in knowledge production were and still are at stake in debates over the existence of chemical exposures. By juxtaposing di√erent, sometimes conflicting traditions of knowledge production—toxicology with popular epidemiology, for example—one can throw limits into relief. I have layered and contrasted a select, and by no means exhaustive, set of histories in which scientific disciplines and lay communities rendered chemical exposures as events that one could or could not do something about. I will call the way a discipline or epistemological tradition perceives and does not perceive the world its regime of perceptibility.∞≥ Chemical exposures are contentious events. They involve litigation, blame, neglect, and su√ering. Chemical corporations, tobacco companies, manufacturers, and employers, as well as government administrations with antiregulation ideologies, have been deeply invested in producing science that minimizes or denies exposures. Such actors have developed techniques that maintain chemical exposure and their health e√ects as uncertain, that is, as events that one cannot do something about. Over the course of the twentieth century imperceptibility itself became a quality that could be produced through the design of experiments or monitoring equipment in order to render claims of chemical exposures uncertain. Other groups of laypeople and experts have nonetheless developed their own practices and technologies to produce evidence for the reality of harmful chemical exposures. Through their e√orts domains of imperceptibility have become populated with all sorts of qualities, such as multiplicity, nonspecificity, complexity, and so on. It is possible to track the production of imperceptibility because what was generated as imperceptible in one place could be generated as perceptible elsewhere. It is precisely by tracing the confluence of di√erent histories for apprehending o≈ce buildings that I have tried to throw domains of imperceptibility into relief. I show that imperceptibility was not only accidentally and inevitably produced, it was also at times purposefully generated and maintained, particularly, but not exclusively, by industry-sponsored science. In either case, this book suggests regimes of perceptibility actively participated in making chemical exposures the phenomena they are today. In order to throw imperceptibility into relief through juxtaposition, this book makes a second argument about the historical ontology of exposures: objects are many things at once. Introduction 11 Multiplicities and Assemblages A useful way to begin thinking about the historicity of chemical exposures in ordinary buildings, like the one you may be sitting in right now, is to see them as one of the ways buildings are physically connected to bodies. We can then ask about the buildings themselves. What is an o≈ce building? It is a real estate venture, built to maximize the developer’s profit. And at the same time, a building has a mechanical physicality; it is a structure of steel and concrete, walls and ventilation ducts that mechanically delivers an indoor atmosphere. It is a structure for e≈ciently organizing the work of late capitalism, giving material form to economy, and dividing people into function and rank. Its potted plants, logos, and design are symbols of a company’s prestige. O≈ce buildings are repetitious, using the same mass-produced elements over and over, so that one becomes disoriented in a built space that seems to be the same no matter what the particularities of its location. Once an o≈ce building is launched into the world, it becomes its own unique hive of activity, bringing people together, spawning meetings, hierarchies, friendships, and sexual encounters both wanted and unwanted, worn out in one area and neglected in another. There is this o≈ce building I work in, and the one I used to work in, and the one next door, and . . . and. . . . In short, o≈ce buildings, like all objects, are multiplicities composed of many histories, of ‘‘ands,’’ that link in ways intended and unintended, drawing out some attributes and not others, thereby setting the conditions of possibility for buildings.∞∂ The multiplicitous building connects with the bodies inside in myriad ways: guiding movement through space, indicating appropriate behaviors, demarcating privilege, segregating by race and gender. The first refinement of my question, then, is how did buildings, in all their concrete multiplicity, a√ect the health of bodies? Not just any bodies, but the bodies of women o≈ce workers in the late twentieth century, who numerically predominated in the grunt labor of American information work. Which is not to say that they were only laboring bodies; they were also gendered and raced bodies dressed in middle-class clothes, differentiating themselves from factory workers. Which is not to say bodies were only social; they were also organic, composed of flesh and bone, organ systems, biochemical cycles, and immunological reactions, an organic body deciphered and anatomized by the practice of biomedicine, 12 Introduction that in turn drew on instruments, laboratories, and clinical practices to apprehend and monitor sickness and health. All of this is to say that bodies, like buildings, can concretely be many things at once—they are also multiplicities. Instead of a simple is, they are made possible by ands: woman and worker and flesh and . . . and . . . and. . . . Put simply, objects are constituted through their manifold material relationships, and these relationships have di√erent histories.∞∑ This is not to say that a sum total of ands can add up to a full understanding of a building. Multiplicities are not like the interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which fit together to reveal a single picture. Histories may overlap and contradict each other, have varying intensities, durations, and stabilities. Instead of asking, What is a building? I will be asking, What are its ands? What did its historical relations make possible? Buildings and bodies were often connected. A building was built with bodies in mind; it became a prosthesis of the body, extending its functions. The body, in turn, became a mobile part of the building; it was vulnerable without the shelter of the building, which supplied the milieu that organized its movements. Buildings and bodies were caught up in one another, sharing themselves in each other’s conditions of possibilities, tracing each other’s contours.∞∏ They were in a relationship of mutual presupposition, a mutual capture in which they altered one another. Each was an integral element in the chains of ‘‘ands’’ that made up the other. A building is derelict without bodies inhabiting it. It is very di≈cult to be a body without the shelter of a building. I use the term assemblage to describe the historically specific patterns through which buildings and bodies were connected, or assembled, to each other and to the objects and practices around them.∞π I define ‘‘assemblage’’ as an arrangement of discourses, objects, practices, and subject positions that work together within a particular discipline or knowledge tradition. It is not the list of elements that make an assemblage consequential, it is what they made possible by the ways they articulated each other.∞∫ In describing the assemblages within di√erent traditions of knowledge production, I have tried to attend to how arrangements of words, things, practices and people drew out and made perceptible specific qualities, capacities, and possibilities for buildings and bodies. In other words, how an assemblage created a regime of perceptibility. To get at a given assemblage, I have ‘‘cracked open’’ the archive of Introduction 13 technical guides, minutes of meetings, questionnaires, instruments, and body parts that made up a scientific discipline or lay epistemological tradition. By cracking open, I am looking for an abstract regularity to the way objects, subjects, practices, and words articulated each other. What I am trying to describe by writing about assemblages are historical regularities.∞Ω Regularities are not simply a set of objects or phrases that appear often in the historical record. What I am calling regularities are not hidden, though historical actors may not necessarily recognize them. Regularities are the pattern of arrangement that is repeated, congealed, and constitutive of a scientific discipline or epistemological tradition. I use the abstraction of the assemblage as a means to investigate these congealed conditions of possibility for an archive, what was and was not sayable, perceivable, doable, natural, possible, and so on about buildings and chemical exposures in a particular historical circumstance. To get at these regularities, I examined archives belonging to ventilation engineering, feminist labor activism, and toxicology (to name a few examples) and sought to describe the assemblage of practices, technologies, and words that governed what was historically possible. I find the idea of the assemblage a very useful concept to talk about the historically specific ways chemical exposures were apprehended, that is, became events that one could or could not say something and do something about. When I used the concept of assemblage, it became clearer to me that objects existed by virtue of their historically specific and yet very tangible and material circumstances. Assemblages are formed of organic and inorganic objects, technologies, bodies, and architecture, and not just of words. In this way, I wish to convey that chemical exposures in the twentieth century were materialized as events with particular kinds of qualities—and not others—by virtue of concrete technical and social arrangements. I therefore use the concept of the assemblage to describe the material and yet relational way things came to matter. An assemblage materializes an object by placing it in a specific social and technical constellation, making it perceptible, outlining form, drawing out possi...
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