Daniel Trudeau

Politics of belonging in the construction of landscapes: place-making, boundary-drawing and exclusion

Issues of belonging, exclusion and the creation and maintenance of boundaries have surfaced in recent considerations of the production of space, yet the relevance of boundaries and belonging for understanding the construction of landscape has remained largely implicit. In this paper, I wish to explore more explicitly the connection of boundaries, belonging and landscapes by thinking about how landscapes become spatially bounded scenes that visually communicate what belongs and what does not. My focus is on understanding how landscapes are, in part, constructed through a territorialized politics of belonging-the discourses and practices that establish and maintain discursive and material boundaries that correspond to the imagined geographies of a polity and to the spaces that normatively embody the polity. To explore this relationship, I consider a controversy surrounding the operation of a slaughterhouse in Hugo, Minnesota, which was used extensively for Ua Dab-a Hmong tradition of ritual animal sacrifice. The discourses and practices surrounding efforts to remove the slaughterhouse from Hugo, on the one hand, and to have it remain in Hugo, on the other, offer a case through which to explore the politics of belonging and the boundaries that this creates in constructing landscapes.

Suburbs in Disguise? Examining the Geographies of the New Urbanism

Critics of the New Urbanism assert that it contributes to sprawl and produces exclusive enclaves. However, these assertions have not been carefully evaluated. We address this critique by examining neighborhood-scale New Urbanist projects in the United States. Our research suggests these critiques oversimplify the New Urbanism in practice, yet they have some basis in reality. Most New Urbanist projects represent infill development and therefore contribute to increased regional density. At the same time, some metropolitan regions have a high proportion of greenfield development. Our case study of New Urbanist projects in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region also suggests that the exclusivity critique applies to some, but not all projects. Some projects in our sample have built environments that support a social mix well, others do it poorly, and others fall between these extremes. We therefore argue for seeing a continuum of New Urbanism in practice.

The Persistence of Segregation in Buffalo, New York: Comer VS. Cisneros and Geographies of Relocation Decisions Among Low-Income Black Households

Debates about the causes of segregation continue to consider the role that own-race preferences have in understanding the persistence of racial residential segregation in American cities. In this paper, I offer an alternative to the own-race preference model. I argue that segregation of low-income Black households from Whites persists in Buffalo, New York, because the spatial rootedness of Blacks survival strategies leads households to choose housing in the central city, where their social networks and most Black households live. I illustrate this argument by exploring the multiple reasons for why a group of African American households, who were prompted to move through the settlement of a high-profile housing discrimination lawsuit, chose to relocate to neighborhoods in the central city in Buffalo. I adopt a context-sensitive perspective in making the argument and further argue that such approaches are ultimately useful in capturing the complex reasons that underlie the persistence of segregation.

A typology of New Urbanism neighborhoods

This paper describes a framework for understanding the diversity of New Urbanism (NU) in practice in the United States. The framework is based on a nationally representative survey of NU developers that inventories characteristics of NU projects’ built environments across categories of urban design, land use, street configuration, and size. Using cluster analysis, the paper resolves the diversity of NU in practice into three types: Mainstream Urbanism, Dense Urbanism, and Hybrid Urbanism. The paper elaborates on each type, including geographic and temporal aspects of constituent projects. It also considers the ways in which the framework contributes to scholarly understanding of NU and advances the discussion of NU in practice.

Empowerment by Design? Women’s Use of New Urbanist Neighborhoods in Suburbia

This paper investigates the potential of new urbanism (NU) to serve as a new neighborhood strategy for women. Survey and interview research examines the ways women in suburban NU neighborhoods of Minneapolis–St. Paul interact with the built environment to effect divisions of household labor and social isolation. The analysis shows that women use pedestrian-accessible mixed-use centers and neo-traditional design features (e.g., porches) to lessen the burden of domestic labor and foster social interaction. Despite these affordances, the paper argues that NU neighborhoods do not ultimately serve as resources in breaking patterns of social segregation or women’s isolation in suburbia.

IRBs as Asset for Ethics Education in Geography

This article frames the research ethics review process conducted by institutional review boards (IRBs) as an opportunity to enrich the education of geographers. Student participation in the IRB process enhances the education of geographers at the undergraduate and graduate levels in two key ways. Geographers can use participation in this process to demonstrate the relevance of a disciplinary code of ethics to professional practice. More important, such participation helps learners, particularly novices, conceptualize research as an ongoing process of intentional inquiry, in which the protection of research participants is vigilantly observed.

THE HOUSING BOMB: Why Our Addiction to Houses Is Destroying the Environment and Threatening Our Society

THE HOUSING BOMB: Why Our Addiction to Houses Is Destroying the Environment and Threatening Our Society. By M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu. viii and 212 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog., index. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Towards a relational view of the shadow state

29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421410654. In The Housing Bomb, M. Nils Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Jianguo Liu argue that continuing the contemporary patterns of housing construction will fundamentally undermine the environmental and economic foundations of the global era. The concern here is with the inefficient ways people consume energy in and through their dwellings, as well as the ways in which sprawling development further amplifies inefficient use of resources. In addition to these inefficiencies in technology and infrastructure, the authors present data clearly showing that the rate of increase in number of households is rising even while the population rates are tapering off. The proliferation of households compounds inefficiencies in the way people consume, to create a situation that is wholly unsustainable--the overconsumption of energy and the production of climate-changing greenhouse gases portends disaster. Ultimately, the authors are sounding the alarm for the entire globe, though they give the situation in the United States special attention. At the same time, they believe adopting new technology, changing the configuration of infrastructure, shifting how society values housing, and modifying households behavior can avert disaster. Indeed, the books title is a play on Paul Ehrlichs The Population Bomb (1968), which they cite as a model for raising awareness of a problem and motivating action sufficient to solve it. The Housing Bomb is an ambitious project. The books argument describes the nature of the problem and then offers potential solutions. The authors use the introduction to impress upon the reader the significance of households as essential drivers of energy consumption. Moreover, they argue that the desire for householders to locate close to nature and travel long distances by automobile is leading to a dangerous combination of deforestation and increases in C[O.sub.2]. The principal cause of this is a cultural fetish with housing, which the authors term housaholism--an especially pernicious condition that feeds our voracious consumption of energy. Indeed, Americans fixation with building increasingly larger single-family homes, which are treated as a form of investment and placed far from urban cores and closer to nature, is placed at the crux of the problem. An important aspect of the book is to show that how Americans live is fundamentally unhealthy for the places in which they live. The first chapter addresses the extent of housing addiction, while the second demonstrates how various institutions in the United States have enabled and encouraged housaholism. National-level data is deployed for several countries to show how housing proliferation continues even as population increase slows. The authors explore how aging processes, the division of single households (through divorce, progression through the life cycle) into multiple households, increasing size of homes, and sprawling construction contribute to overconsumption even while population growth is reigned in. They then describe the ways that governments and private interests work to incentivize and protect homeownership and frame it variably as a right or the fulfillment of making it in America. This deftly links racist thought and fear with regulative institutions and the demand for housing at the urban fringe. It illustrates how the government has institutionalized the factors that created the housing bomb. The next two chapters offer case studies of housing development--one in the United States and a second in China--which tell compelling stories of how geographical communities experience and react to the destructive forces of household proliferation and overconsumption. …