Birdwatching on Brownfields: Contradictory Contexts and Ambivalence in the Neoliberal City

INTRODUCTION

On a windy Earth Day, I joined a group of Southeast Chicago birdwatchers on a walk through a marshland. My companions pressed binoculars to their eyes, pointing out a green heron there, a gull here—and could that be a rare least bittern in the distance? The National Audubon Society considers this 3000-acre patchwork of marshlands on the Southeast Side of Chicago an “Important Bird Area” vital for songbird and waterfowl migrations across the highly urbanized southern region of Lake Michigan. ¹

However, the land we cross is hardly wilderness as commonly conceived. A gangly great blue heron glides past stationary tugboats posted outside warehouses and new industrial buildings. Birdsong is interrupted by the distant din of an interstate highway and the clatter of nearby railroad tracks. Rubble of long-closed steel mills punctuates the horizon. We stand on liminal landscapes haunted by the twin ghosts of industrial pasts and contemporary brownfield transformations (Fig. 1).

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FIG. 1.

Fieldwalk in April 2017. Photo by author.

Before these landscapes, were nesting grounds for waterfowl, they held steel mills and their ancillary industries (Fig. 2). For a century, tens of thousands of local residents walked to work from millgate neighborhoods. With the late-twentieth century collapse of the industry, dozens of former industrial properties eroded into “abandoned, idled, or under-used” brownfields where “expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. ²

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FIG. 2.

City of Chicago, Illinois, with the Southeast Side in box. © OpenStreetMap contributors.

In the 1970s, federal rules established in the wake of multiple cases of industrial waste contaminating drinking water or seeping into houses required that the redevelopment of brownfields for residential use be preceded by thorough remediation. The soil of formerly industrial properties must be tested, cleaned, sealed, retested, and, in some cases, left fallow before being reused for houses, schools, or commercial businesses. ³ Because remediation can take decades and cost millions of dollars, properties can lie vacant for years and drive down property values. ⁴

In Chicago, deindustrialization's bankruptcies brought the transfer of private property ownership—and liability—to the public sphere. An amalgam of federal programming and city bureaucracies took responsibility to either clean up or limit access to polluted properties. Ironically, due to systematic defunding of city government agencies, the remediation and reuse of these brownfields relied once again on private capital through public–private partnerships (PPP)—“cooperative ventures between the state and private business” that leverage capital's interest in competition and capacity for investment to solve public problems. ⁵

When this cost-sharing approach is applied to brownfield remediation, proponents argue that public incentivization of private investment in marginalized land allows governments to transform liabilities into revenue-building opportunities. Critics suggest that such formal relinquishment of decision-making processes to capital exacerbates environmental injustices. To maximize profit, and without regulatory counterbalances, capital will always seek to externalize its risks to minimize costs. ⁶ Public incentives, such as PPP, can encourage industrial capital's race-to-the-bottom search for efficiency, thus reproducing environmentally overburdened neighborhoods.

In Southeast Chicago, the opportunities and tensions of PPP delimit two possible reuses of brownfields. First, the City of Chicago offers publicly funded tax breaks, loans, and grants to attract new, “lighter” industries to claim cheap and vacant brownfield properties on the Southeast Side. ⁷ This intentional reindustrialization of already polluted properties by landfills, recycling plants, storage depots, and fertilizer manufacturers, also known as circular land management, addresses the dual challenges of mass deindustrialization and increased environmental regulations constraining how postindustrial properties could be reused. ⁸

Since the 1980s, reindustrialization has offered bureaucrats an avenue to transform vacant land into taxable and job-producing businesses while keeping more financially valuable “greenfields” from entering a city's brownfield cycle. ⁹ In a ward where 23% of families earn an income below the federal poverty level and the pre-COVID-19 unemployment rate was more than three times that of the city average, new employment is a shared goal for policy makers and residents.

And yet, as every year brings new proposals for more polluting companies to move to the neighborhood, many Southeast Side residents are resisting, finding that the cost–benefit balance of circular land management falls short. ¹⁰ In this majority Black and Brown community, activists identify their community as a site of environmental racism rendered a sacrifice zone—a location that has been permanently impaired by environmental damage and economic disinvestment. ¹¹

Recently, an alternative reuse of brownfields has emerged: the renaturalization of vacant properties into public parks, sites for outdoor recreation, and habitat restoration. ¹² In 2010, the Chicago Park District (CPD) announced a goal to administer more than 2000 acres of nature space on the Southeast Side, framing their goal in terms of reclaiming vacant lands and resisting harms of reindustrialization. The city has since acquired and completed initial remediation on eight brownfield properties that today comprise one quarter of the 8800 acres of land owned or managed by the CPD. ¹³

Brownfields developed into parks are often those with characteristics that would be challenging to develop into other uses—vacant lands with rising marsh waters, tricky land tenure arrangements, or immovable remnants of steel mill building foundations. And yet, the hiking paths and public benches are scattered around these properties are just as contingent on neoliberal logics of private partnership as are new industries. ¹⁴ On the Southeast Side city parks website, the CPD acknowledges 30 private donor organizations. ¹⁵ The CPD might organize the logistics of remediation and lawn mowing, but funds to create and maintain parks require significant investment from companies, philanthropists, and volunteers.

At face value, parks and industry seem binary: Vacant fields tend to be transformed into either green spaces or new industries, with one of those options obviously more aligned with environmental justice than the other. However, using the case of one of the most popular—and privately funded—park development projects on the Southeast Side, this article explores the sentiments of ambivalence regarding the transformation of brownfields into parks.

Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, I find that Southeast Chicago stakeholders—volunteers, staff, and political leaders directly involved in brownfield redevelopment—offer brutally honest assessments of both costs and benefits of park building in a neoliberalized city. I suggest that, since both reindustrialization and park building employ similar funding schemes and exist in the same context, they share in common an incapacity to solve fundamental problems characterizing disinvested, deindustrialized cities.

To make this argument, I leverage the sociological concept of ambivalence. Rather than an individualized, psychological malaise, ambivalence is a sentiment “built into the structure of social statuses and roles,” according to Robert Merton. Roles, interests, and values collide with contradictory social structures to “result in mixed feelings and compromise behavior.” ¹⁶

Michael Carolan's application of this concept to environmental issues offers an apt link to brownfield redevelopment in neoliberal cities. Ambivalence, in Carolan's view, is a “product of our sociological and ecological embeddedness” and thus “an unavoidable condition of being a social actor” in modern environmental and socioeconomic contexts. ¹⁷ Complex forms of land ownership, liability, and private investment characterize Southeast Chicago. On these neoliberal landscapes, private capital often controls the fates of marginalized lands and the neighborhoods that surround them. Thus, stakeholders experience a complex relationship with neoliberalism and environmental justice. Neither green spaces nor polluting industries can exist without coordination between private capital and public governance.

METHODS

As part of a broader project on placemaking in long-deindustrialized communities, I collected ethnographic, interview, and historical data applicable to this paper over two stages. First, while living in Chicago from 2015 to 2017, I attended union meetings for retired steelworkers, community nature walks, and public park events. I traversed landscapes with participants, inviting them to show me places of significance to their identities and experiences of place and economic change.

During the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021), I conducted follow-up research focused on park development through digital methods. I attended seven public meetings in Chicago via Zoom and analyzed social media posts regarding contemporary conflicts over land use and development, and I drew from profiles, quotes, and interviews by community leaders and residents highlighted in Chicago-area newspapers. I collected and analyzed dozens of city reports, policies, and proposals about PPP, park development, and brownfield remediation.

In both original and follow-up research, these ethnographic interactions and secondary source material seeded my access to 50 interviews with residents and community leaders, of which ∼20 discussed park development. I consider this subset of interviews for this article. These studies were reviewed and exempted by my universities' Internal Review Boards.

These data allowed me a multifaceted approach to understanding perceptions of park development from stakeholders invested in brownfield repurposing—community members attending public meetings, non-profit leaders and members, and political representatives. Although the centrality of private capital for reuse of brownfields is invisible to park visitors, the neoliberal logics of land use costs and benefits emerged in interviews and participant observation.

RESULTS: THE CASE OF BIG MARSH

In the early 2000s, two companies had a vision for a philanthropic investment in the city of Chicago (Fig. 3). Recreational Equipment, Inc (REI), the outdoor recreation gear cooperative, and SRAM, a bike part manufacturer, approached the CPD expressing interest in funding the creation of a car-free park for recreational cyclists to coast along several miles of asphalt trails with jumps and a pump-track—a circular paved path with artificial hills that mountain bikers and skateboarders use to gain speed and practice jumps.

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FIG. 3.

Big Marsh Park is surrounded by wetlands (blue dots), roads, and railroad tracks. © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Company representatives initially proposed a park located in the center city, but city planners instead offered them a property on the Southeast Side. This 300-acre plot of land was once a waste and slag dumping site for Acme Steel, a company that went bankrupt in the 1990s. The city had struggled to manage this land for decades, as rising marshland waters surfaced a high level of chemical seepage. As de facto owners of this abandoned property, the city shouldered liability for residual pollution until the 2000s when it capped and sealed the waste with topsoil.

In 2015, the philanthropic branches of REI and SRAM took over this large plot of land from the city. Organized through the companies' coordinated nonprofit Friends of Big Marsh Park, these two firms paid for the construction of off-road bike tracks, a hiking trail loop, and access roads over the next 2 years. Funding and management structures for Big Marsh Park reflect the increasingly privatized models of urban governance. Big Marsh Park's total budget—including salaries for two paid staff and costs for construction and programming—is 95% funded by private companies. The remaining 5% comes from maintenance work completed on an as-needed basis by the CPD.

Even land tenure and asset ownership are navigated across public and private lines. The full-time head of Friends of Big Marsh formed by the park's founding companies is Paul^*, ¹⁸ a white man in his late 30s. In a phone interview, he said:

The way the bike park development works right now is that when we built the asphalt pump tracks last year, Friends of Big Marsh built the pump tracks—we applied for and received access permit from the Park District, and we hired the contractors. Any plans for what we want to build need to be approved by the Park District, you're going to ask the landowner. And then, when we build it, we then donate it to the Park District.

Likewise, the environmental education center located on CPD-owned land in the park is also partially privately funded. The Ford Calumet Environmental Center was initially enabled through a grant from the City of Chicago, but its buildings were completed through donations by a nearby Ford factory as part of a community benefits agreement. ¹⁹ The Environmental Center, which opened in fall 2021, offers birdwatching excursions, a gallery of local artist's nature-themed paintings, and educational programming for local public schools (Fig. 4).

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FIG. 4.

White-tailed deer graze between bike jumps in Big Marsh Park.

When reflecting on this ongoing park project, residents and community leaders did express enthusiasm that parks such as Big Marsh might, challenge the practice of circular land use. In 2011, a local environmental leader told a journalist, “here on the Southeast Side of Chicago, all we get is more industry. So, what we're hoping is that by preserving these ecological gems that eventually they become our assets. Perhaps we could do eco-tourism here, bring people from outside of the community to our community.” ²⁰

Similarly, in public meetings that I attended and in half of the interviews that discussed park development, residents voiced hope that eco-tourism might contradict the trend of reindustrialization by turning properties “where there's nothing” into destinations for outdoor recreation. Perhaps the Southeast Side could become known for outdoor activities ranging from “heart-pumping adventures like rock climbing and mountain biking, to more passive activities like fishing, birding, or trail walks,” as pitched by the website for Chicago parks on the Southeast Side. ²¹

I heard similar themes from Roy, a stocky white man more at ease with binoculars than on a bike. Each year, he joins hundreds of members of the Chicago Audubon Society for its annual Calumet Marsh Bird Survey to count breeding marsh birds in protected wetland habitats. He told me in a one-on-one interview that he liked the new bike park even though “it wasn't my idea having a bike park there,” being “in that category” of naturalists who would be more inclined to leave vacant lands untouched in an urban region where “there's such little habitat left anymore.” He held up his hand in a caveat.

“But we have been—for 20 years!—endeavoring to get it cleaned up and more inviting to members of the community. You see other areas of the city getting all the benefits, like up on North Side,” he pointed his chin northward, toward the skyline barely visible in the distance. “The 606 and the Lakefront and downtown and everything,” he said, referring to a multi-million-dollar investment in several new park projects in the city center. “And, we're saying, ‘Hey, look at this remote area out here. Look at how degraded it has been,’ and, ‘Don't we deserve something out here? At least clean things up.’ So, I think it's a good thing in that regard, that we're finally getting some attention down here.”

Further, Roy argued, the development of public green space countered the dominant narrative of the region as industrial. “We no longer have to just look at ourselves as a polluted end of the line for everything that the city wants to get rid of. [We want] to rebrand ourselves, to be the playground of the city instead, and a place where people can come out and camp, fish, and hike and bike ride, and things like that. Why not?” ²²

By mid-2021, Big Marsh Park came to represent that alternative vision of the Southeast Side for which Roy and many of his fellow community members had expressed hope. According to the data provided by Friends of Big Marsh, the number of cars entering the park increased by 400% between 2019 and 2021—from an average of 30 cars a day to 122 cars per day. In August 2021, the park had a peak day of 349 cars. ²³

Park popularity offers evidence that this park is attracting visitors excited to use this former brownfield as a “playground” rather than a dump. Doubtless, this form of neoliberal brownfield redevelopment offers greater opportunities for equity, access, and new narratives of environmental goods rather than another generation of environmental sacrifice. However, those who discussed green spaces often stopped short of offering enthusiastic support for new outdoor recreation sites.

DISCUSSION: AMBIVALENCE AND THE NEOLIBERAL CITY

Neoliberal relations condition ambivalence over land uses. Land use on the Southeast Side of Chicago has always been contingent on capital's presence or absence: steel mill properties were organized and then abandoned, remediated and reinvested in, or left vacant based on the availability of private investment.

My interviewees may not have explicitly linked their assessments of park developments to neoliberalism, but PPP were always a taken-for-granted context undergirding the limited menus of options for brownfield redevelopment. Capital might reproduce environmental harms by siting a new, polluting plant on already polluted lands, or it may enable brownfields to be cleaned and returned to the community. Local residents have few avenues for meaningful engagement in much of these initial land use decisions, rendering ambivalence the dominant sentiment.

Once underway, park development can be a blunt weapon against the pervasive residues of decades of economic displacement, austerity, and spatial marginalization within the city. Big Marsh Park remains in a polluted area, with access limitations and an incapacity to directly solve the pervasive problems of economic depression. Outdoor recreation and habitat restoration do not provide jobs or infrastructure, nor are local property values or commercial avenues benefiting from the economic “goods” of gentrification.

However, to riff on Margaret Thatcher's famous quip about there being “no alternative” to neoliberal trade policies, stakeholders in my case feel that, given the disinvestment of their neighborhood, there is no good alternative for brownfield reuse that exceeds the harm reduction potentials of parks. For these reasons, park development calls forth neither open-handed acceptance of nor active resistance to the continued centrality of private actors in renovating public spaces. ³⁴

Beyond the case of park development, an emerging body of literature suggests that across rural and urban contexts, ambivalence is characteristic of and conditioned by the paradoxes inherent to neoliberalism. Mullenbach et al. note contradictions entangling responses to survey questions about possible park development in St. Louis neighborhoods. ³⁵ Respondents simultaneously supported symptoms of gentrification while also supporting preserving neighborhoods from displacing effects. Land uses in rural settings similarly reflect contradictory preferences. Stephanie Malin observes how, because experiences of environmental injustice were emmeshed in economic benefits from unconventional oil and gas drilling in Colorado, stakeholders felt confused and powerless. ³⁶ Colin Jerolmack demonstrates how rural Pennsylvanian landowners who were initially enthusiastic to allow fracking on their land grew disillusioned as they observed capital's infractions on their privacy and personhood. ³⁷ These disparate studies hold in common a thread: a grim acknowledgment that private capital holds tremendous power over land uses in contemporary America.

CONCLUSION

If ambivalence is a consequence of a neoliberal context of constrained options, what is the potential consequence of collective ambivalence to land use? Sentiments of disenfranchisement from the decision-making process about what to do with local brownfields or alienation from green spaces ostensibly created for all residents may make the neoliberal basis for land decisions even more taken-for-granted. However, let us flip the framing.

A recognition that ambivalence is not merely a symptom of neoliberal decision making but might further exacerbate inequality calls for intentional inclusion of local stakeholders in the process of not only reusing brownfields but also diagnosing larger-scale structural problems that might limit access to those properties. In turn, outdoor recreation that builds on existing landscapes can challenge those both inside and outside a community to reimagine what a deindustrialized place can become.

Already, more attention seems to be encouraging the city to pay attention to environmental justice concerns, to send funds to repair crumbling infrastructures, and to infuse new grant money into a “forgotten part of the city,” as Louisa told me. In turn, perhaps more car traffic to Big Marsh or newspaper editorials about the tensions between industries and wild lands will lend a megaphone to the roots of ambivalence that characterize park development. Even with its limits, leveraging private funds may yet allow locals to emphasize why certain places are special, sacred, and worth rendering visible once again.