Yonn Dierwechter

Effects of Urban Growth Boundaries on Residential Development in Pierce County, Washington

Abstract Although the literature on growth management is extensive, few researchers have explored policy-oriented evaluation methodologies. This article develops a new methodology to measure urban sprawl in order to evaluate the geographical effects of urban growth boundaries in Pierce County, Washington. The methodology utilizes residential building permit data from 1991 to 2002 that were put into a geographic information system and geocoded to the Pierce County street centerline file. The results of our study indicate that since the establishment in 1995 of urban growth boundaries there has been a substantial increase in the clustering of residential permits inside those boundaries. The implications of these findings are important for planning practitioners and the evaluation of growth management policies throughout the United States and elsewhere.

Metropolitan Geographies of US Climate Action: Cities, Suburbs, and the Local Divide in Global Responsibilities

Planning for climate change is now occurring at multiple, sometimes interlocking scales of ecological governance and policy formulation. Within the context of this journals past calls for fresh work on the ‘spatialities of (un)sustainability’, particularly around climate action, this paper examines new geographies of local climate policy within six major US metropolitan regions located in six different smart growth states. The methodological assumption of the paper is that these putatively pro-planning states in the USA should provide a particularly fertile legal and policy arena within which metropolitan-scale action might emerge. Focusing empirically on the US Mayors Climate Action Agreement, though, the discussion highlights an uneven local geography of planning for global climate change, with central cities apparently accepting responsibility and, in general, suburban municipalities concomitantly free-riding. Policy and research implications of these metropolitan geographies of (in) action are discussed in light of the extant literature on cities, planning, and the governance of climate action.

Dreams, Bricks, and Bodies: Mapping ‘Neglected Spatialities’ in African Cape Town

This paper deploys several propositions from Amin and Thrifts recent theoretical work to map emerging geographies of the postapartheid city. Using Cape Town as a case study, the focus is on urban planning and informal sector retailing. After a discussion of the informal food sector, three parameters of urban space that are often apprehended separately are held together: an imagined geography of planning for the efficient and postapartheid city (‘dreams’); a material geography of marketplaces for the developmental transformation of informal retailing (‘bricks’); and a socioeconomic geography of what local officials call “pre-entrepreneurs” (‘bodies’). The author argues that these three geographical features of the postapartheid city are of an emerging and mutually dependent piece; that is to say, they are cocreating each other across scales and domains of reality. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications for understanding the prospects of the postapartheid city.

The spaces that smart growth makes: sustainability, segregation, and residential change across Greater Seattle

Sometimes interwoven in metropolitan practice, the discourses of sustainability, smart growth, and New Urbanism (NU) share a number of policy assumptions about the appropriate geographical anatomy of regulatory regimes and infrastructure investments. An important research question is how these policy assumptions relate empirically to extant geographies of racial and economic segregation within specific metropolitan regions. This paper addresses this question with empirical reference to Greater Seattle, one of the country’s most important “containment” regimes in which sustainability, smart growth, and NU are each valorized public policy agendas. Using residential permit data in the 1990s and 2000s, the analysis highlights the heterogeneous nature of the emergent landscapes of smart growth. In the new morphology of smart growth landscapes, density, (de)segregation, class, race, land recycling, regional-scale compactness, and other key dynamics appear to be combining in complex and at times surprising ways.

Geographical Limitations of Neo-liberalism: Urban Planning and the Occluded Territoriality of Informal Survival in African Cape Town

Abstract Urban political geography lacks theoretical work on the territoriality of the informal economy, notwithstanding the empirical significance of informal city-building all around the world. With reference to the hypothesis of growing neo-liberalism in post-apartheid cities, this paper explores the territoriality of informal-sector governance in Cape Town, using a theorisation that foregrounds place/space dialectics. An analysis is offered of informal-sector practices and the administrative strategies of the local state, particularly the urban planning system. While support for the neo-liberal hypothesis is presented, the paper argues for the geographical limitations of neo-liberalism as a territorial strategy of the post-apartheid state.

The Problematic Potential of Universities to Advance Critical Urban Politics

Recent research has explored the connections between universities and the cities/places in which that are located. Increasingly, emphasis is placed on the economic role of the university and on universities as urban stabilizers that can mobilize investment and advance development goals. This article explores a different charge for the university: as a space for the advancement of critical urban politics. Drawing from our experiences teaching hybrid student/citizen courses on urban government and politics at a US university, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities associated with situating the university as an institutional agent in critical urban politics.

Assessing the effects of neighborhood councils on urban policy and development: The example of Tacoma, Washington

Abstract Neighborhood councils form an important and sometimes problematic layer in the governance system of many cities across the USA. The literature on these institutions has focused mainly on their hypothesized role in facilitating citizen participation in neighborhood and city planning. Less work has explored the experiences of neighborhood councils as placed-based institutions theoretically embedded within, and therefore ostensibly reflective of, the overall social and political geography of the city. In particular, little research documents the actual local development priorities, fund-raising capacities, project achievements and scalar tensions associated with neighborhood councils operating in different neighborhoods of the same city. Using a perspective based on extant literatures in urban politics and public administration, this paper offers an analysis of the neighborhood council experience in Tacoma, Washington, USA. While these councils are still “segmented” from the core of urban politics, the paper argues, certain institutional reforms could unlock their long term potential as more “transformative” spaces of local governance.

Smart City-Regional Governance: A 'Dual Transition'

This paper introduces the concept of ‘dual transition’ in relation to the notion of ‘smartness’ in city-regional governance. This consists of two intersecting dimensions, a broader change in political-economic and societal circumstances which surround city-regions, and a more detailed, local change towards ‘smartness’ in policy practices. Although ‘smart’ seems to have become a somewhat ubiquitous adjective in urban policy, it seeks to project policies that seek to go beyond a one-dimensional ‘growth agenda’ by addressing also the multifaceted quest for social, economic and environmental sustainability. The underlying shift in discourse, rationality and suggested policy responses in both dimensions may be captured by the concept of ‘transition’ in relation to policies and governance. Originally developed in conjunction with broad political-economic regime change, such as post-authoritarian democratisation, the idea of ‘transition’ has also been applied to the more specific concept of sustainability as ‘sustainability transition’.

History: An (Un)sustainable Geo-History of Intercurrence

The “Greater Seattle” area is built originally upon a process of land alienation from indigenous populations. Original dispossession led over time to new processes of (industrialized) urban-based accumulation, while ongoing modes of class, gender, and race segregation, concerted efforts in public organization (e.g., engineering, planning, services, war-making, institutional reforms), and continuing private innovations in product development (e.g., Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon) critically reshaped nature and society into an altered metropolitan space by the mid- to late- twentieth century. Now well into the twenty-first century, “Greater Seattle” is, following Alan Scott (A world in emergence: Cities and regions in the 21st century. Edward Elgar, Cheltonham, UK, 2012), an increasingly “digitized” and highly dynamic global city-regional economy of some four million people spread over four major counties, albeit still anchored around the core city of Seattle in King County. New efforts to build a new city-regional order around a more just resiliency, however, are shaped strongly by past orders constituted by both ideational and institutional forces.

Introduction: Cities, States, Global Environmental Politics

The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics has stimulated remarkable debates about sustainable urban development and the geopolitics of a changing world order no longer defined by tightly bordered national regimes. This book explores this major theme by drawing on approaches that document the diverse histories and emergent geographies of “internationalism.” It is no longer possible, the book argues, to analyze the global politics of the environment without considering its various urbanization(s), wherein multiple actors are reforming, reassembling, and adapting to nascent threats posed by global ecological decay. The ongoing imposition and abrasion of different world orders—Westphalian and post-Westphalian—further suggests we need a wider frame to capture what the critical theorist of internationalism, Josep Antentas (Antipode, 47: 1101–1120, 2015), drawing on Daniel Bensaȉd, calls the “sliding scale of spaces.” The book will therefore appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in global sustainability, urban development, planning, politics, and international affairs. Case studies and grounded examples of green internationalism in urban action presented later in the discussion ultimately explore how select city-regions are trying to negotiate and actually work through this postulated dilemma.