As one of the first major U.S. cities to have a separate Department of the Environment (the CDOE), Chicago has been able to achieve many notable outcomes: the iconic green roof on City Hall, more certified green buildings per capita than any other U.S. city, the first green airport guide, and so on. Former Mayor Daley’s explicit if vaguely defined goal of making Chicago the greenest city in the country was underpinned by this institutional setting and the individuals who worked there. While I was preparing for fieldwork to study the conditions under which Chicago’s many sustainability programs were established, how their effects have been measured, and how equitably those effects have been distributed, I learned that the new mayor was disbanding the CDOE. The plan was to disperse environmental activities among multiple departments instead of “siloing” them in one office. As a result, the top people within the department mostly chose to leave, while the rest moved to different departments and were largely reluctant to respond to requests for interviews once I did start my fieldwork.
Australia’s 2011 implementation of a carbon emissions tax made the country a logical point of comparison on urban greening, as did Melbourne’s recurring ranking as the world’s most livable city. I wanted to see how existing environmental and sustainability policies at the local level might either be adapted or promulgated more widely with this new national scheme to reduce carbon emissions, and what the implications might be were the U.S. to ever follow a similar route. While preparing for fieldwork, I learned that the newly elected Liberal government had declared its victory was because of voter opposition to the carbon emissions tax and that the abolition of that program would be its highest priority. There would be no interaction of local government policies with a national carbon tax; simultaneously, the newly conservative state and federal governments began rolling back environmental and sustainability programs, including some of those I had planned to study.
On the one hand, these experiences provide a cautionary tale about conducting research on up-to-the-minute, ongoing topics. Nearly everyone who has studied contemporary social, political, economic, or environmental processes has experienced a similar moment when fieldwork plans have to be reworked or new sets of interview questions have to be devised. However, both examples also illustrate the difficulties faced by the people whom we are studying: those doing the work and enacting the practices within systems of governance that make social, political, economic, and environmental change happen. Civil servants and non-governmental workers who want to improve the socio-environmental conditions of their localities are already working with limited budgets, lack of broad political support, and a skeptical or uninterested public. Trying to effect positive change in the socio-environment is made even more difficult by the dynamism of the political economy within which they are operating. How can agents of local governance enact sustainability policies and programs that can successfully be accepted and implemented, while ensuring they will have lasting effects beyond the current political administration? In the process, what kinds of socio-environments are produced and reproduced?
1.1 Environmental actors within local governance systems
In this book, I approach these questions through the development of the sustainable imaginary as “a society’s understanding and vision of how resources are being used and should be used to ensure socio-environmental reproduction.” The concept of an imaginary has many different incarnations: economic, environmental, urban, sociotechnical, and so on. What all of these variations have in common are two components: (a) an imaginary describes the collective understanding of a society about the world around it, and (b) the imaginary provides tools for that society to change that world. For the purposes of this book, I focus on actors within local government and related governance organizations operating within a metropolitan region. These are the people who produce official documents and develop programs and policies that shape municipal action regarding environmental issues. Their imaginaries inevitably overlap with those of their municipalities’ residents, whom they are supposed to represent and respond to. At the same time, their understandings of what can be done about the environment are shaped by their roles within a specific governance structure. Local government staff therefore serve the role of metonymy, standing in for both their municipality and its residents as a whole.
It has become clear since the 1990s that as national governments have failed to meet or even make commitments regarding climate change and other important environmental issues, local governments have been key sites of sustainability activity (e.g., Bulkeley and Betsill 2005). It is also clear that governance systems are wider than elected or appointed governments: increasingly, actors in the private and nonprofit sectors are the ones determining what a green building is, how social housing should incorporate water- and energy-saving devices, or where public transit should be provided (Bulkeley et al. 2014). In considering how actors within local governance systems retain the ability to make positive socio-environmental change as regimes shift around them, I draw on John Allen’s Lost Geographies of Power and Topologies of Power (Allen 2003, 2016) to understand how these actors use different modalities of power (e.g., seduction versus authority) to achieve their goals. Incorporating Allen’s modalities of power into the framework of the imaginary enables a more explicit approach to the second part of the definition above: how an imaginary can bring about change in the world.
Rather than setting up a standard comparative study between two cities, I draw on Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction (Barad 2007). I consider diffraction not between different disciplinary approaches as Barad does, but between different case studies, reading Chicago through Melbourne and vice versa. Using diffraction as an analytical framework reminds us that it is not only a matter of pointing out differences between places, but understanding why those differences matter. For example, a comparative study of two cities such as Chicago and Melbourne could start like this: both cities were founded as gateways to the interior of their respective continents in almost exactly the same year (1836 for Chicago and 1837 for Melbourne). Both had celebratory international exhibitions soon after in the middle of exponential growth to demonstrate their arrival on the world scene. Both evolved into major manufacturing centers which later experienced massive deindustrialization and attempts to renew the economy via tourism and services. Both have a chip on their shoulder about being the “second city” within their respective national networks and aim to be known as global cities. Melbourne is the “City of Gardens” and Chicago’s motto is “City in a Garden,” suggesting similar environmental imaginaries. Despite these similarities, however, there are a variety of differences between them: different colonial and racial histories that have left their mark on the social and cultural landscape; different power structures in terms of the roles of state and local government; different levels of authority accorded to their mayors, both de jure and de facto; and different levels of privatization of services and public goods. Each of these differences will presumably make urban environmental sustainability policies and ideas more or less comparable, more or less prone to being excluded from consideration because “that’s not how things work here.”
Such a traditional study might then compare and contrast the sustainability plans of each city government, including: the discourses they each use to define sustainability; what is included and excluded as a result of those discourses; what programs have been proposed and/or installed to meet the goals of the plan; how funding works in each place and how acquiring it (or not) has enabled certain things to happen (or not); if outcomes of policies and programs are tracked and what they have been; and so on. Conclusions from such a study would likely be along the lines of: cities that have x-style government can employ these types of power to do these things more easily, cities with y-type of government and z amount of public–private partnerships can do these other things more easily; both are variants of the neoliberalizing city and the project therefore demonstrates how place and context matter in implementing urban environmental policy.
What a diffractive approach would do is different. First, a diffractive approach would not assume that “Chicago” and “Melbourne” and their “environments” are pre-existing entities that need to be discovered by the researcher, their characteristics and outcomes refined into data and projected into the written word. Rather, a diffractive approach would start from the point of view that “Chicago” and “Melbourne” are being produced through research, analysis, and writing, and the way in which that production happens matters. Differences and similarities are produced through this research project, from initial conception to the final written words, and the knowledge that has been produced may change the material-discursive practices in these places and others like (or not like) them. Second, a diffractive approach would explicitly acknowledge the role of the researcher in producing the data, the analysis, and the knowledge that is the outcome of the project; conversely, it would show the role of those entities in producing the researcher, or “intra-action” as Barad terms it. Like Allen’s relational concept of power, Barad’s approach emphasizes the contingent nature of knowledge, both in the academic and “real world” contexts.
Understanding how differences are made and their effects is key to the diffractive approach. For example, one element of urban sustainability—green roofs—has become a hallmark of Chicago’s efforts. What does it mean to say that Chicago has a strong mayor and to explain the city’s established leadership in green roofs as one man’s desire to replicate what he saw on a trip to Europe? What does it mean to say that Melbourne is “behind” Chicago with regard to green roofs and has to “catch up,” including scientific studies to understand which plants will be successful in their different climate? In the process, what kinds of narratives are being produced about the following: the material environment of the city; the authority that one man has to make something happen (and the subsequent diminishing of the work that other men and women put into making the garden on the roof of Chicago’s City Hall become iconic enough that it can appear on an introductory slide at a public presentation in Melbourne); and the competitive–cooperative nature of inter-urban intra-actions more generally? What material-discursive practices in Chicago and in Melbourne enable and encourage green roofs? How are different outcomes achieved through explaining green roofs as a deliberate strategy to reduce the urban heat island effect and thus save lives rather than as Richard M. Daley’s vacation souvenir and/or a highly visible emblem of greenery?
A diffractive way of doing analysis, then, is not about a researcher interpreting what the data means, where the analysis is supposed to be “out there” to be studied, reflected upon and deriving meaning/knowing from (Barad 2007, 29, 81). Rather, a diffractive analysis can be understood as an enactment of flows of differences, where differences get made in the process of reading data into each other, and identifying what diffractive patterns emerge in these readings.
(Lenz Taguchi and Palmer 2013, p. 676)
Using this diffractive method of analysis in combination with the framework of the sustainable imaginary and Allen’s modalities of power, I analyze the patterns that arise from considering local urban environmental governance in Chicago and Melbourne. The remainder of this chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by explaining three components of the analysis. First, there is the concept of the imaginary and the sustainable imaginary in particular, along with Allen’s modalities of power, particularly their spatial components (section 1.2). Barad’s concepts of diffraction and intra-action follow along with additional details of the research methodology, including how the qualitative data for this project were gathered and analyzed (section 1.3). Finally, section 1.4 provides some background on the histories of Chicago and Melbourne and existing understandings of these cities in the research literature from geography and related fields.
One of the most crucial points of comparison between these two cities is in their physical environments. Chapter 2 explains the first part of the sustainable imaginary: how the existing socio-environment has been produced based on available resources. This includes what might traditionally be described as a natural history of each region (section 2.1) and an explication of the institutional setting (section 2.2) as a means of setting the stage. The chapter then describes recent, abrupt changes in both the experience of natural hazards (section 2.3) and governance structures (section 2.4) and how those have shaped the sustainable imaginary. While Melbourne’s sustainable imaginary might be more strongly influenced by Australia’s recent drought, both cities are working through the effects of deindustrialization, most intensely in Chicago. The work that sustainability staff do on their environments is therefore not about preservation so much as tending or restoration. I therefore name the sustainable imaginary as seen in both places to be that of the city as garden.
The sustainable imaginary is also about what kind of socio-environment should be produced (keeping in mind that maintaining the status quo is always an option). Chapter 3 considers how the imaginary of the city as a garden incorporates future visions. This includes, quite literally, visions and images of what the socio-environment is and should be (section 3.1), along with the balance between dealing with disamenities from past decisions and providing amenities for the future (section 3.2). Specific responses to the natural hazards discussed in section 2.3 are discussed here as well (section 3.3), along with whether the sustainable imaginary is about reproducing the existing environment or imagining dramatically different futures (section 3.4).
After establishing how natural and human resources have been used to achieve an existing socio-environment, and what visions there are for a future environment, Chapter 4 considers how existing resources should be brought to bear to produce that vision. How should the garden be tended? This is where the various modalities of power are most important, from considering the proper relationship between citizens and government/governance (section 4.1) to developing and implementing creative ideas about how to govern and fund activities (section 4.2). Creativity concerning the concept of sustainability is also important: how are new arenas or topics developed to engage and encourage more people to take action (section 4.3)? Finally, the dual meaning of sustainability matters as well: how can actors within and adjacent to local government sustain the work of the imaginary through political change (section 4.4)? Finally, I return to Barad’s notion of diffraction to emphasize “why different differences matter” and how the concept of the sustainable imaginary can be employed more broadly (Chapter 5). Though I focus only on two cities here, I conclude with outlining the possibilities for further comparison within and across national contexts.
