Winifred Curran

Just green enough: contesting environmental gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

While sustainability and green urbanism have become buzzwords in urban policy circles, too little analysis has focused on who gets to decide what green looks like. Many visions of the green city seem to have room only for park space, waterfront cafes, and luxury LEED-certified buildings, prompting concern that there is no place in the “sustainable” city for industrial uses and the working class. We will use the case study of Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, New York, to explore how different visions for the green city are enacted through activism and policy-making. Neighbourhood residents and business owners seem to be advocating a strategy we call “just green enough”, in order to achieve environmental remediation without environmental gentrification. Following the crash of both the financial and real estate markets, attempts to construct a sustainable city that is economically diverse and socially just seem to be taking hold. We interrogate how urban sustainability can be used to open up a space for diversity and democracy in the neoliberal city and argue that there is space for interventions that challenge the presumed inevitability of gentrification.

'From the Frying Pan to the Oven': Gentrification and the Experience of Industrial Displacement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

This paper explores the effects of gentrification on industrial displacement. Although urban manufacturing centres are not as central to the urban economy as they once were, they still house a vibrant and varied manufacturing sector that serves urban niche markets and provides employment for a less-educated and largely immigrant and minority workforce. As urban neighbourhoods gentrify, these manufacturers are faced with displacement because their space has become attractive to developers who convert lofts into residences. This paper looks at the process of gentrification and the experience of industrial displacement in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, in order to challenge existing theories on the impacts of gentrification and thus help to make clear the processes and interests at work. Through buy-outs, lease refusals, zoning changes and increasing rents, small manufacturers are being actively displaced, endangering the diversity of the economy and the employment outcomes of unskilled and immigrant workers.

From “Five Angry Women” to “Kick-ass Community”: Gentrification and Environmental Activism in Brooklyn and Beyond

In this article, a new conceptual framework is advocated to evaluate the range of environmental activism in already-gentrifying neighbourhoods and to recognise the agency and resilience of long-term residents. The category of gentrifier-enhanced environmental activism is meant to account for attempts to forge coalitions (however uneasy they may turn out to be) between long-term residents and gentrifiers. This includes attempts by long-term residents to mitigate environmental gentrification by ‘schooling’ gentrifiers in communities’ longstanding concerns and needs, framing these concerns as a common cause rather than allowing for the takeover of local environmental politics often associated with environmental gentrification. The example is used of the fight to clean up Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as a case study in how environmental veterans made strategic alliances with gentrifiers who brought new resources to the area in order to achieve political pressure for change and to promote more just sustainabilities.

‘Mexicans love red’ and other gentrification myths: Displacements and contestations in the gentrification of Pilsen, Chicago, USA:

This article uses experiences from a decade-long community-based research project in the Pilsen neighbourhood of Chicago, a Mexican-American neighbourhood whose residents are both experiencing and resisting gentrification, to show how displacements and contestations evolve in conversation with each other in an iterative process we could call ‘actually existing’ gentrifications. I analyse a series of ‘moments’ in 13 years of research in Pilsen to illustrate the constantly shifting terrain of gentrification politics, covering not just housing affordability, but the nature of identity, democracy and belonging. As communities develop resistance strategies to gentrification, so too do city planners, policy makers and developers adapt to these community strategies to reframe their vision of the community. In highlighting both the success of community resistance in mitigating some of the worst effects of gentrification and the co-optation of some of these same strategies in the reframing of gentrification, my goal is to show that gentrification is rarely ever done or complete but is continuously enacted and resisted, challenging the idea that gentrification is somehow inevitable.

Measuring Community and University Impacts of Critical Civic Geography: Insights from Chicago

Geographers have increasingly adopted community-based learning and research into their teaching and scholarly activities since Bunge and Harvey called for an applied public geography that is both useful and challenges societal inequalities. With few exceptions, however, there has been little discussion of methods for measuring this work. Many published assessments focus on the impacts of projects on students but overlook the impacts on community partners. Impacts on faculty and the larger university community are also often ignored. This article discusses literature on the evaluation of community–university research and service learning from a critical perspective. A discussion of service learning and community-based research (CBR) projects at two Chicago universities, DePaul and Chicago State, is presented. In both cases challenges were encountered to achieve full evaluation of projects, yet both included an evaluation of university and community partners that allowed for assessment of the projects’ value to all partners.

Working Feminism and Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space

ing, and exposing projects of critical theory are both narrow and cynical, and that they attack the foundation of his ‘‘extensible self.’’ He suggests that the cynicism of critical theory prompts disengagement (p. xii). I would like to counter this by suggesting that the notion of Adams’s extensible self may be found as far back as the writings of Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), who is acclaimed as one of the principal architects of contemporary critical theory. Spinoza’s notion of extensional interrelationships between nature and life very much highlights the kinds of things Adams suggests. Moreover, when I read the experimental writings of Gilles Deleuze and others who draw on Spinoza (such as Marcus Doel in geography or Brian Massumi in comparative literature), I see little of the cynicism that Adams suggests is pervasive. Rather, I see contexts of whimsy and pleasure, of desire and jouissance (in the Lacanian sense of bliss from merging with others). Unfortunately, when engaged at all, Adams’ readings of these writers is partial at best. For example, he dismisses Deleuze and Guattari’s antiOedipus project in two paragraphs (one on pp. 49–50 and one on p. 98) as misleading and overdrawn, and he completely misrepresents what these authors are doing by taking their notion of schizophrenia literally. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘nomadic thinking’’ is what Spinoza calls ‘‘ethics,’’ Nietsche calls ‘‘gay science,’’ and Foucault (whose work I think Adams quite likes) calls ‘‘outside thought.’’ In their experimental way, Deleuze and Guattari do not pretend to have the final word, or any word at all; rather, they suggest that you listen to their work like a phonograph record and skip what you don’t like. Adams, I think, craves the final word and, by so doing, misses their whole point when he suggests that their project is a ‘‘model’’ (p. 50) of reality. Moreover, as he raises criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of rhizomic spaces, he misses the way these authors use this term to promote Spinoza’s notion of extensionable relations between nature and self. Rather, the totality of Adams’s notion of extensibility comes to light in his metaphor of a pseudopod as ‘‘a temporary appendage extended by a single-cell organism to engulf its food’’ (p. 98), which to me fits all too comfortably with the ways neoliberal theories extend and expand the machinations of capital. I am afraid that I found The Boundless Self frustrating in its scope and divisive in its manner. Although I hugely applaud the book’s intent, I wonder about how much and to where it moves the discipline. Possibly other geographers with other readings will find Adams’s work refreshing when set against a corpus of critical geography that is sometimes convoluted and impenetrable. As I grapple with critical theory I do not find Adams’s cynicism tragic, but rather an opportunity to move forward in emotive and emancipatory ways. I wish that Adams had engaged with critical geography in a less distillatory and more conciliatory way. If he had been more open, he would have found that he was not alone with his heartfelt agenda.

Being and Becoming in Urban Geography

Within the very esteemed group of academics participating in this symposium, I am surely the only one of whom you have never heard. So let me begin by placing myself within the discipline. I have just completed my dissertation and, while a student, was also a teacher of undergraduates. I have also just survived the trials and tribulations of the job market. I therefore find myself at the intersection of many of the issues and trends important to geography and urban geography in particular, such as what we learn, what we teach, and how we present ourselves. I am an urban geographer who came of age in the 1990s but, in many ways, I was an urban geographer long before I ever took a course in urban geography. As a New Yorker born and bred, my interest in and research on the city has always been driven more by my experience of the urban than by trends or debates within the discipline. It is in some way ironic that I am participating in this symposium, because one of my least favorite activities as a geographer is the constant reflection on who we are, what we do, and how we make ourselves relevant within the academy. In my experience, these debates are often divisive and never conclusive. In trying to define the next model, coin the new phrase or pick the next definitive city, we frequently lose the complex experience of the urban. Yet having said that, I now will proceed to opine on some of the issues I consider important for urban geography and offer some suggestions for future research. One of the directions for which I would argue most forcibly is for participation in and appreciation of mixed methods and, within this, a particular attention to qualitative research. There are two issues at play here. The first is the insufficiency of quantitative data. We obviously do not have the resources to measure every quantifiable phenomenon and frequently must rely on data collected at a scale or for a purpose that does not always suit our research needs. Census tracts may not match neighborhoods. Commuting data may not be broken down by gender. This data issue has less to do with any inadequacy of quantitative methods than with the fact that there is much that no one has yet thought or attempted to measure. What we measure is as important as how we measure it. The questions we ask will determine the data available to policy-makers and the issues that make it onto the urban agenda.