Post-Industrial Urban Greenspace

An Environmental Justice Perspective

Jennifer Foster, L. Anders Sandberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317430674
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Post-industrial urban spaces typically include abandoned factories, disused rail lines, old pits and quarries, and de-commissioned landfills. In these places, different visions compete for dominance with respect to current and future land uses. Neighbours often view such urban greenspace as polluted, unkempt and weedy, harbouring undesirable biophysical features and people. These are spaces that often become the focus of some form of revitalization, reinvestment and restoration. From the perspective of civic authorities and urban planners, transforming post-industrial landscapes into disciplined and tended greenspace creates the urban conditions and signals of popular contemporary taste that attract investors, gentrifiers, and tourists. But post-industrial spaces are also places where unique and unpredictable human and ecological associations can emerge spontaneously. Such places may contain considerable ecological integrity and biodiversity and host human populations who find a home and respite in such ecologies. They also tell stories of an industrial and urban past that should be acknowledged, understood and (if suitable) celebrated. This volume explores the environmental justice and injustice dimensions of emerging urban post-industrial landscapes, including the ecological politics, cultural representations and aesthetics of these spaces.

This bookw as published as a special issue of Local Environment.

INTRODUCTION

Post-industrial urban greenspace: justice, quality of life and environmental aesthetics in rapidly changing urban environments

One of the most fascinating features of urban post-industrial ecologies is the opportunity they present for novel assemblage. As the social, cultural, economic and political merge in expired, disused and/or abandoned industrial infrastructure, they reconstitute into new successional forms and processes. This is a remarkable interface through which urban nature is formed. It most often evolves rapidly, thanks to human neglect and disregard, through spontaneous, uncultivated progression into new socio-ecologies, and then frequently becomes the subject of “rediscovery” and redevelopment. The new greenspaces that are produced, whether unintended or by design, are also a critical interface for the enactment of environmental justice and injustice.

The original special issue was inspired by three sessions of the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2012, in New York City, where fourteen presentations focused on the ecological formations and politics of post-industrial urban space. These were rich sessions that identified emerging dynamics and perspectives on post-industrial greenspace in a global context, focusing on both distributive and procedural environmental justice concerns. “Rediscovery” of urban space presents ample challenge to advancing justice concerns. But the AAG sessions also revealed that when former industrial spaces turn green, they not only induce outstanding and often unexpected ecological prospects, but can also function as frontiers for community rights to secure a self-determined quality of life.

The right to urban greenspace

While early developments in the field of environmental justice that focus primarily on the distribution of noxious materials remain foundational to exploration of post-industrial urban greenspace, much insight is drawn from recent contributions to the field that invests in a broader range of issues that include urban health, the Right to the City, accessible transit, affordable quality housing, economic opportunities and wealth creation related to the “green economy”, and local climate mitigation (Anguelovski 2013), as well as the ecological politics of new noxious constellations, such as e-waste (Pellow 2006). Moreover, concern for racialised people and low-income neighbourhoods is increasingly joined with analytical attention to structural processes of capital accumulation, deindustrialisation and gentrification. Much of the work uncovered in the AAG sessions confirms Stein’s (1998) and High and Lewis’ (2007) suggestion that green sentiments have numbed the American middle-class’ concern over urban industrial decline, and desensitised them to the significance of industrial physical ruins, toxic legacies and the deep painful history of working people who lived and worked in these environments.

Within this context, greenspace is increasingly being approached as a “right” of urban living, not only in terms of minimum standards for distribution, but also the quality of greenspace and targeting communities where it is most needed (Walker 2012). In these respects, as post-industrial environmental “bads” are stabilised and rendered into greenspace “goods”, a wide range of justice concerns emerge. Are these new greenspaces actually improving the urban experience of marginalised people, and if so how and for whom? Do they respect the industrial legacies and lives that they oft times displace? Do they provide opportunities for the development of spectacular places that attract attention in a world where cities increasingly compete for capital investments, skilled workers and tourists? Do they establish the conditions for gentrification, resurfacing signals of blight and contamination with vibrant green, the allure of sustainable adaptive reuse and a trendy post-industrial patina? Do these transformations reinforce (or even introduce new) forms of material and procedural exclusion, and/or are they capable of producing more just cultural politics of representation? These questions form central themes that help advance an understanding of the complexity of transforming post-industrial urban space into green terrain surfaced through the AAG sessions, and this collection of papers.

Greening urban industrial scars

The ecological authorship of historical legacies is a notable concern for environmental justice. Research here demonstrates the varied ways that nature and ecological assemblages function as “politics by other means” in articulating the circumstances, conditions and experiences that produce urban environments. Memory of industrial past is typically selectively invoked, and planned and designed greenspaces rarely reflect the scars of industrialisation, the health hazards associated with contamination or the displacement of livelihoods associated with industrial decline. In this respect, the staging of greenspace is overtly political in determining who may rightfully inhabit rediscovered urban space, and the lapses of time where these spaces escape popular attention (following disuse and preceding redevelopment) offer some of the most incisive accounts of vulnerable lives on the urban margins.

Urban preoccupations, ideals and displacements

As new potential spaces of capital and economic activity, the interface between public and private realms is also a critical juncture for negotiating environmental justice, particularly in terms of determining whose ideals and preferences inform decisions, how, and where these fit into civic preoccupations and global circuits of capital. The risk of gentrification was an immediate concern for almost all of the work of the AAG sessions and the papers in this special issue. Determining where, how much, and which nature to either disregard and allow to take its own course or remove and refabricate through planning and design processes is a central determinant of gentrification pathways. The specific conceptions of nature that are invoked, the types of access to nature and the extent to which local communities shape decision-making processes have a huge influence on the risk of displacement. It is now well established that brownfields are typically located in poor and minority communities (Ringquist 2005, Campbell et al. 2010), the pace of clean-up is the slowest in minority communities (Eckerd and Keeler 2012) and urban redevelopment that brings about clean-up tends to favour marketable sites in attractive locations over locales that experience “place stigmatization” (McCarthy 2009, Pearsall 2013). Meanwhile, the outcomes of decontamination and redevelopment of brownfields are not always just, often prompting an increased cost of living and vulnerability to contraction of social housing, raising deep concerns about how different communities experience urban sustainability initiatives such as conversion of “vacant” post-industrial land into greenspace (Essoka 2010, Pearsall 2010).

The political work of aesthetics and authenticity

One of the most under-explored themes of environmental justice features prominently in this collection of work: the socio-politics of environmental aesthetics. If ecology functions as both a refraction and agent of cultural change, emergent aesthetic forms play a critical role in determining the justice dimensions of post-industrial urban greenspace (Edensor 2005). As the ruins of industrial space are increasingly fetishised in urban design and Western consumer desires, narratives of “authenticity” are articulated not only by literal means, but also through integration of ecological qualities (such as native ecosystem types and species associations) that appeal to contemporary interpretations of urban sustainability but do not necessarily guarantee or even advance social justice or enhanced ecological quality. The aesthetic dimensions of post-industrial greenspaces – how they look, feel and the socio-cultural signifiers they produce and mobilise – are a strong foundation for the political work of these spaces. In this sense, ecological systems perform and bolster notions of authenticity, legitimising adaptations to former industrial sites with ecological accounts of belonging and consistency with previous circumstances. Yet there are also examples that promote aesthetic formations that run counter to the mainstream, marketable, cleaned up aesthetic by seeking to reveal their sordid and working pasts, as well as their connections to the creation of new production facilities elsewhere, often in third world locations with poor working conditions and environmental records (Edensor 2005, Fassi 2010), or by allowing terrain vague and other “hands off” aesthetic conceptions to flourish (Kamvasinou 2006, Gandy 2013, Foster 2014). The selection of which industrial artefacts, which ecologies and which stories to express through the aesthetics of greenspaces that emerge in the wake of industrial decline are politically poignant, situating these sites within the cities and networks within which they are embedded, but also with the people whose livelihoods intersect historically and in the present.

Greenspace through development, division, design and erasure

In the following, we present four papers that tackle the above themes. To begin with, De Souza provides a policy perspective based on pluralist assumptions of post-industrial landscapes. He describes urban greening as a positive development that provides the urban population with a respite from the everyday existence in the built environment and the potential role of former industrial sites or brownfields in this quest. He draws on extensive research on post-industrial landscapes in the USA and Canada to provide a record on the initiators of the greening of such landscapes, their characteristics, and the costs and barriers associated with their rehabilitation. He then explores three brownfield case studies: Elmhurst Park in New York City, the South Waterfront in Portland and the Menomonee Valley in Milwaukee. The rehabilitation of all areas, De Souza suggests, is the result of national and local actors taking on the role of raising money, securing land and overcoming the local pollution to establish green areas that now serve the urban population at large.

The three following contributions build on De Souza’s insights by asking questions about the social divisions and tensions and human–non-human interactions that surround post-industrial landscapes. These accounts rest on a broad politics informed by social and economic power as well as history and aesthetics of the non-human in influencing the shape of post-industrial landscapes.

Sandberg provides a case study of a phased out limestone quarry, the Limhamn Kalkbrott in Malmö, Sweden, and its current position as an internationally recognised nature preserve that contains several endangered and at-risk species. He argues that the greening of Kalkbrottet is part of two processes, one exclusive and exclusionary, the other democratic and inclusionary. On the one hand, Kalkbrottet is part of a process of neoliberalisation and gentrification of Malmö, a situation where the scenic properties of the quarry are part of the City’s efforts to attract capital and skilled and educated workers. The high-priced condominiums and rental housing developments that now surround Kalkbrottet, Malmö’s Grand Canyon, are part of that process. On the other hand, Kalkbrottet may also be a phenomenon that resists the neoliberalisation of the city. This is reflected in the roles played by rare flora and fauna that have unexpectedly appeared in the quarry and the strong voice of city ecologists in support of the designation of the quarry as a nature preserve. Sandberg also argues that the historical legacy of the quarry and its current use by legitimate and illegitimate visitors may have the potential to make Kalkbrottet a focal point for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable Malmö.

Schopf and Foster investigate a constructed post-industrial landscape at Leslie Street Spit in Toronto, Canada, which is world renowned as a bird sanctuary and a spontaneously emerging ecological reserve that is now a major recreational area for Torontonians. The Spit, jutting five kilometres into Lake Ontario, is composed of construction debris from the process of tearing down and re-building the city. Using an archaeological method, Schopf and Foster show that the Leslie Street Spit is composed of much more than the “clean fill” claimed by the City of Toronto. In fact, the Spit articulates the creative destruction of the city through the demolition of neighbourhoods that hindered the city’s advance into modernity. The rubble from one part of the Spit, for example, contains intact household items from the working class districts that were destroyed in the 1960s to make way for the concrete high-rise buildings attracting capital at the time. At another site, the authors expose a beach of bricks which were formerly the building blocks of single-family houses that comprised a community which the city allowed to be transformed into office towers in the 1980s. The material of the Spit, Schopf and Foster argue provides critical memory of lost and largely forgotten neighbourhoods that are part of the urban fabric, and can inspire new ways of thinking about, living in and re-imagining the city.

Langhorst finally uses the examples of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (in Duisburg, Germany) and the High Line (in New York City) as examples of different aesthetics or representational agencies of ecology in the context of post-industrial greenspaces. Duisburg-Nord of the Ruhr region is an expired steel and coal complex that is now an extensive green and recreational area with many of the old industrial buildings and structures intact, while High Line is a decommissioned elevated freight train line in Manhattan that has been transformed into a celebrated green area with a pedestrian walkway. Langhorst argues that Duisburg-Nord represents an aesthetic that favours the spontaneous interaction of humans and non-human nature, where p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Post-industrial urban greenspace: justice, quality of life and environmental aesthetics in rapidly changing urban environments
• 2. The greening of urban post-industrial landscapes: past practices and emerging trends
• 3. Environmental gentrification in a post-industrial landscape: the case of the Limhamn quarry, Malmö, Sweden
• 4. Buried localities: archaeological exploration of a Toronto dump and wilderness refuge
• 5. Re-presenting transgressive ecologies: post-industrial sites as contested terrains
• Index