Abstract
This paper deepens the conceptualisation of territory as a key dimension of the production of socionatures within Urban Political Ecology (UPE) in order to better understand the emerging citycentric politics and territorial projects to effect change at multiple scales. The industrial district, and Superfund site, the Duwamish River Valley in Seattle, is used as a space to examine how the production of territory plays an integral role in how people perceive cities as leading sites to address global and local socionatural problems, which will be called eco-cityism. Two vignettes are provided to illustrate these points. The first looks at the politics of Superfund cleanup, and the second looks at the attempt to build an Eco-Industrial District. The vignettes demonstrate that the contradictions of territorial politics give rise to both possibilities and limits to producing cleaner urban processes and landscapes. Additionally, they show how marginalised groups within the city engage with the politics of territory and place as they participate in the production of spatial relations.
Introduction
Call it the Emerald City or Metronatural,™ the City of Seattle is the quintessential green city in popular discourse, within and beyond the city limits. Liberal environmentalists have dominated mayoral and city council seats and since 2013 a socialist sits on the council. However, in response to a series of crises – a Superfund 1 listing in 2001, the growing concern of climate change, and the 2008 economic crisis – the City of Seattle (hereafter Seattle) has more specifically connected its environmental brand to the increasingly popular narrative that cities represent new agents of political change in an urbanising world. On the margins of other glitzy urban development projects, Seattle and King County have been working on urban industrial planning in the lower Duwamish River area that aims to address these crises simultaneously. In this paper, I use the industrial district, and Superfund site, the Duwamish River Valley in Seattle as a case study to examine the production of territory as an integral part of how people perceive cities as leading sites to address global and local socionatural problems, which I will call eco-cityism. This paper interrogates the narrative of eco-cityism as both an analytical concept and a political project in the context of North American urbanisation.
Some argue that urban political ecology (UPE) needs to move beyond the city (Rickards et al., 2016) and avoid what Angelo and Wachsmuth have called ‘methodological cityism’ (2014). Meanwhile, others argue for the de-centring of the city within urbanisation studies (e.g. Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Keil and Macdonald, 2016; see special issue introduction). They assert that planetary sub/urbanisation is a multi-layered process that defies the ‘city lens’ (Angelo, 2017). This paper acknowledges these interventions. However, rather than abandoning the city as a concept and object of inquiry, this paper clarifies the concept of the city as not so much an agglomeration of things in space, but rather a specific project of territory making and sovereignty claims. From this central assertion I make three sub-arguments: one, under-theorised within UPE, the production of territory is an important dimension of how city-based actors attempt to address socionatural crises; two, the contradictions of the territorial city and eco-cityism, related to the fixity and fluidity of space, give rise to possibilities and limits to producing cleaner urban processes and landscapes, as well as efforts to decarbonise the process of urbanisation; three, marginalised groups within the city engage with the politics of territory and place as they participate in the production of spatial relations.
Urban political ecology’s emphases on metabolism, flows, and hybridity, and its process-oriented theory, make it less equipped to understand the role of territory in the production of urban socionatures. UPE has privileged the city – and often conflates city with urban – and it tends to neglect the processes of industrialisation, as urbanisation is thought to supplant industrialisation as a defining aspect in the production of space (e.g. Lefebvre, 2003). In response, the emerging sub-field of political-industrial ecology (PIE) addresses UPE’s city gaze and its neglect of the processes and spaces of industrialisation with a focus on urban-industrial metabolisms (e.g. Newell and Cousins, 2015). However, both UPE and PIE have a lacuna with regards to the production of territory, as both a constitutive and contentious dimension of spatial development. Therefore, this paper deepens the conceptualisation of territory as a key dimension of the production of socionatures within UPE in order to better understand the emerging politics of eco-cityism and territorial projects designed to effect change at multiple scales.
This paper contributes to UPE and PIE with an eye towards everyday agency in the production of the urban, and of the city (Ruddick et al., 2017), and towards the ways the city remains an important terrain for spatial justice struggles (Davidson and Iveson, 2015). I situate this discussion using Brenner’s (2009) metaphor of a thousand leaves to describe uneven spatial development as multi-dimensional and layered by place, territory, scaling, and networks. Drawing from Elden (2010) and Sassen (2013), I define the territorial city as a sub-national entity with governance and legal structures, and a set of institutional and non-institutional actors organised around the production of territory, which is enmeshed with other dimensions of space. The term eco-cityism refers to a political project that extols the power of cities to address global and local socionatural problems at multiple scales.
Using two vignettes from the Duwamish River Valley, I illustrate how the production of territory is a key dimension of how global, urban, and industrial spaces and processes are constructed and contested. Drawing from a variety of public governmental records and official statements, organisation and institution websites as well as existing published scholarly data, I tell a chronological narrative of eco-cityism in the Duwamish from 2001 to 2015. The first vignette is about how the lower Duwamish River Valley is not just a global industrial space, nor just part of Seattle’s territorial space. As a federally listed Superfund site it is a multi-scalar environmental state space. Additionally, this vignette illustrates how otherwise marginalised actors within the city engage with eco-cityism and how they participate in the production of territory. The second vignette examines how the Duwamish became a space to imagine the simultaneous fix to global and local socionatural problems in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis through the proposed creation of an Eco-Industrial District, a version of a planned ‘green’ industrial ecology. At the end of this paper I reflect upon the territorial city and eco-cityism as both political projects and analytical concepts.
Urban political ecology and the city
Urban political ecology is insightful for debates on eco-cities because it has long attempted to replace the old dichotomies between nature/city, human/nature, etc. with a metaphor of metabolism. The metabolism metaphor provides urban studies with the tools to understand and analyse the urbanisation process as a hybrid socionatural relationship that is not static but rather dynamic, processual, and interconnected at multiple scales and multiple spaces (Heynen et al., 2006; Swyngedouw, 1996). In her groundbreaking work City of Flows, Maria Kaika writes, ‘Unfolding the constant material flows of commodified nature, labor power, technology, capital investment, and social relations … opens up the possibility of conceiving nature and the city not as separate entities, but as dialectically related to each other, as the outcome of a unified process – the production of space’ (2005: 10). Reflecting on 15 years of UPE, Heynen writes, ‘UPE scholarship has been working, in sum, to articulate urban metabolism as a dynamic process by which new sociospatial formations, intertwinings of materials, and collaborative enmeshing of social nature emerge and present themselves and are explicitly created through human labor and non-human processes simultaneously’ (2014: 599). The conceptual legacy left by the original UPE scholars has been metabolism, flows, and hybridity, despite the heavy use of ‘the city’ in original UPE scholarship, which I will return to momentarily.
Additionally, from its inception, UPE scholars have worked to elucidate who gains, who benefits from, and who suffers from particular manifestations of socionatural processes. As a result, UPE makes the call for a democratic production of space. For example, Heynen et al. define the potential of UPE as a praxis that ‘explicitly recognizes that the material conditions that comprise urban environments are controlled, manipulated and serve the interests of the elite at the expense of marginalized populations. These conditions, in turn, are not independent from social, political and economic processes and from cultural constructions of what constitutes the “urban” or the “natural”’ (2006: 6). UPE scholars, through documentation of urban struggles and social movements, have explored strategies to achieve a more equitable distribution of social power and a more democratic production of socionature.
Despite its successes, first wave urban political ecology has come under increasing criticism for its ossification of the city as the form and site of primary research (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014; Keil and Macdonald, 2016; Newell and Cousins, 2015; Rickards et al., 2016). Angelo and Wachsmuth (2014), for example, show that UPE scholars have tended to privilege the city object rather than the urbanisation process as the focus of UPE scholarship, leading to what they call ‘methodological cityism’ (2014). They write, ‘the bulk of empirical research in urban political ecology has been tethered exclusively to the city, in both its site selection and analytical framework. The global socionatural dimensions of urbanization that span city and countryside, and whose insufficient investigation was apparently one of the main motivations behind the research program in the first place, have, in practice, remained largely unexplored’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014: 20).
Urban political-industrial ecology
One area of concern that UPE has left mostly unexplored is the variegated and unequal industrial ecologies of capitalist globalisation (Huber, 2010; Newell and Cousins, 2015). Huber (2010) goes so far as to say that critical urban geography has been overly concerned with the nature–society dualism, read as nature-urban within the city lens, such that spaces of industrialisation and the global processes of industrialisation have been ignored or subsumed into conceptualisations of urbanisation, particularly in the Global North. Recent papers have been charting the path for a new subfield called political-industrial ecology (Cousins and Newell, 2015; Newell and Cousins, 2015; Newell et al., 2017). These works build upon and critique Industrial Ecology (IE), highlighting the strengths of IE’s methodology of material flows analysis (MFA) and the quantifying of stocks and flows of industrial processes, but critiquing the relative absence within IE of how political and economic power produce and shape these processes. Borrowing from UPE, Cousins and Newell define PIE as ‘analys[es] of the broader historical, political, social, technological and economic mechanisms shaping the relationships between a product, commodity or material process, its primary inputs and outputs, and the relevant social and ecological implications’ (2015: 41).
Despite the centrality of the metabolism metaphor in UPE, Newell and Cousins (2015) argue that UPE has largely failed to conceptualise its theoretical framework as well as design methodologies appropriate to understand a dynamic, interconnected, and processual conception of urban-industrial socionatures. They argue that UPE scholars’ repeated use of the city as a hybrid socionature metaphor has reached its useful limit (Newell and Cousins, 2015: 3). What is needed and what PIE can provide, they argue, is ‘the development of political–industrial ecology through the creative infusion of ideas and approaches from the other two ecologies. Industrial ecology offers a suite of untapped methods, such as material flow analysis (MFA) and life cycle assessment (LCA), with which to map out and quantify the networks of flows that circulate within and beyond the city’ (Newell and Cousins, 2015: 3). Breetz synthesises their call to action into a research agenda with three possible, but not mutually exclusive, foci: ‘(1) Integrative research that incorporates social, political, institutional, or spatial factors into IE analyses; (2) Complementary social science research that “speaks to” or “builds on” IE frameworks, concepts, or findings; and (3) Critical research that examines how values, norms, groups, political relations, or institutions shape the production, interpretation, and use of IE knowledge’ (2017: 392). Rather than sitting on the margins of UPE, these authors suggest that processes of industrialisation, and existing political industrial ecologies, need to be incorporated into urban political ecology.
The actually existing territorial city
While UPE and PIE provide a productive analytical framework with the concepts of metabolism, flows, and hybridity, in this paper I take on the dimension of territory that is largely absent within these fields. It is important to note that the city is not a bounded container in which urbanisation unfolds, nor is scale a place. 2 Rather, to return to Brenner’s (2009) metaphor of a thousand leaves, space is multi-dimensional and layered by place, territory, scaling, and networks. Therefore, much is gained by pealing back each layer, understanding it, while keeping the larger totality in focus. Much of the literature on the potential for cities to act on global and local socionatural issues is highly focused on scale (e.g. Bulkeley and Betsill, 2013; McKendry, 2015), as well as global city networks (e.g. Betsill and Bulkeley, 2004). However, I want to reframe the question ‘what can cities do’ from a question of scale to a question of territory and territorialisation within the global capitalist economy and global environmental governance.
Territory and borders are often thought of as the sole domain of the nation-state, but as Saskia Sassen argues, there is productive work to be done on understanding ‘the making of non-national jurisdictions inside the [nation-]state’s territorial jurisdiction itself’ (2013: 22). Territory additionally implies questions of sovereignty. Elden writes, ‘territory is the space within which sovereignty is exercised: it is the spatial extent of sovereignty … Politics, state, and space come together in the concept of territory’ (2013: 329). Drawing on the work of Stuart Elden (2010), I define the territorial city as a territorial entity with non-national jurisdiction and legal structure. The territorial city is comprised of a set of institutional and non-institutional actors organised around the production of territory, which includes the production of land (property relations) and terrain (techno-scientific control of geologic and ecological things and processes) but encompasses both in a larger dimension of space (Elden, 2010). Territory is not ontologically given; rather, it is socially produced (Boelens et al., 2016). Therefore, territorial cities are often organised around the political project of cityism, which is constructed, and should be understood, from above as well as below (see also Angelo, 2017). As a political project, eco-cityism extols the power of cities to address global and local socionatural problems.
Although territory conjures notions of static and fixed space and of borders, territory is a dynamic process constantly in the making. Edlen writes: ‘Territory is a word, concept, and practice, and the complicated relation between these three terms can only be grasped with historical, geographical, and conceptual specificity’ (2013: 328). Angelo and Wachsmuth’s (2014) critique of methodological cityism is an important intervention; however, I reaffirm that the territorial city is a largely unexcavated site to understand the politics of space, the limits and potential of eco-cityism, and the ways that the production of territory enables and constrains the democratising of the production of space (see Davidson and Iveson, 2015). By doing so, I avoid the nebulous idea of the city that is ubiquitous in urban studies and non-academic conceptions of the city within the urban age trope (see special issue introduction). Those conceptions of the city are best understood as a sociological object, an idea. And as an idea, we can understand it as an ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s sense (Anderson, 2006). In this paper, I am only concerned with the territorial city and eco-cityism, as defined above, and their contradictions.
Brief history of the lower Duwamish River
Just south of downtown Seattle, officially known as both the Duwamish Manufacturing and Industrial Center and the Duwamish Waterway (see Figure 1), the Duwamish River Valley is part of a critical urban metabolism that facilitates the flow of global commodities through one of the largest ports on the West Coast, employs about 100,000 people, circulates capital with an annual economic output of US$13.5 billion (King County, 2015), and it is an integral source of tax revenue for Seattle, producing about 24% of the city’s Business and Occupation taxes and 32% of its taxable sales (City of Seattle, 2013). Furthermore, ‘the Duwamish M/IC provides the largest concentration of family wage industrial jobs in the Puget Sound region, generating enormous tax and export revenues’ (City of Seattle, 2013). The valley sites the largest and oldest concentration of manufacturing and industry in Seattle, home to the Port of Seattle, a Boeing airline centre, and a myriad of other industries. In fact, it is the largest contiguous industrial space in the USA. This is not a post-industrial landscape. A key aspect of Seattle’s dominion over this space is the fact that 42% of land in the Duwamish is publicly owned, and there are few large privately owned properties (City of Seattle, 2013). For these reasons, the City of Seattle and King County actively maintain the Duwamish industrial district because it is a key component in their tax collecting and higher than average wage job base, as well as a key means by which the City of Seattle helps facilitate the global economy.
Duwamish Manufacturing and Industrial Area in context.
The Duwamish River has another storied history. It was the home of the Duwamish tribe, led by Chief Seathl who the Euro-American founders of Seattle used as their inspiration for the name of the city. The descendants of the Duwamish tribe still live up the river beyond the city limits, fishing the polluted waters for part of their subsistence. The lower Duwamish is also home to some of Seattle’s poorest and ethnically and racially diverse residents (Gould and Cummings, 2013). The residents of Georgetown and South Park neighbourhoods live amongst a Superfund site and the immense concentration of industry. Georgetown and South Park residents ‘have up to a 13-year shorter life expectancy (at birth) than wealthier parts of Seattle’ (Gould and Cummings, 2013: 2). The Duwamish River is also one of the few sites of an urban Endangered Species Listing, since in 1999 the federal government listed Puget Sound chinook salmon as endangered. The lower Duwamish River, with its tensions between urban-industrial metabolic flows on one hand and material infrastructure and territory on the other, provides an ideal space to understand the contradictions, as well as the possibilities, of the territorial city and eco-cityism.
Vignette 1: Superfund cleanup as a multi-scalar state space
The first vignette outlines how the lower Duwamish River Valley is a contested multi-scalar environmental state space. This vignette additionally highlights how marginalised residents within the city engage with eco-cityism and how they participate in the production of territory. In 2001, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listed a five-mile stretch of the river as a Superfund, and in doing so set in motion a multi-scalar and contested politics of space in the Duwamish. Throughout the 20th century, economic growth had come at a cost to the local socio-ecology of the Duwamish. In particular, Boeing’s Plant 2, along with the various other industries along the river, left a legacy of waste and toxicity in the soil and water all along the industrialised river. With the listing of the Superfund site, the EPA recognised this legacy, but also named the City of Seattle, King County, Port of Seattle, and the Boeing Corporation as the responsible parties legally obliged to pay for and direct the cleanup process. In response, the four entities formed a public–private entity named the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group (LDWG). Furthermore, and underscoring how state spaces often operate within multi-scalar and multi-jurisdictional frameworks, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the EPA act as the joint oversight agencies, while the LDWG acts as the single responsible party within the cleanup process.
The Superfund cleanup is a multi-decade process. The EPA listed the site in 2001, and designated the primary responsible parties that year, but it was not until 2013 that cleanup work actually began on a few critical ‘early action’ sites, those sites ‘that may become a threat to people or the environment before the long-term cleanup is completed’ (Environmental Protection Agency, 2016). In the years between 2001 and 2013, the LDWG commissioned and paid for the Remedial Investigation and Feasibility Study, as required by the Superfund law. After over a decade of scientific and technical studies, the EPA released its final Cleanup Plan in January 2015. Citing that half of the contamination had already been cleaned up in the early action activities, the EPA said that the final half would take about 17 more years (seven years of actual cleaning up, and ten years of monitoring) and cost about US$342 million dollars (Environmental Protection Agency, 2015). The EPA said, in the end, that ‘these measures reduce risks to people’s health and the environment from toxic chemicals while ensuring that commercial activities continue in this important industrial area’ (Environmental Protection Agency, 2015). This, however, is only one part of the Duwamish Superfund story.
Environmental justice and the multi-scalar territorial city
Throughout the nearly 15 years of Superfund cleanup planning, the process has been contested and shaped by a coalition named the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition (DRCC). The DRCC was formed as a 501(c)3 non-profit at the outset of the Superfund process in 2001 by a myriad of tribal groups, community groups, environmental groups, small businesses, and others, all sharing a concern for the health, safety, environment, community, and future of the lower Duwamish River. The group utilised a provision of the Superfund law that allows for the formation of a Community Advisory Group (CAG), which has legal access to reports and is included in the cleanup planning process. The DRCC used its official status to participate in EPA public meetings and hire its own experts to review technical reports, and it also engaged in a multi-scalar politics by using the weight of federal law to push local institutions to further address the needs of marginalised residents and stakeholders.
Throughout the cleanup planning process, the DRCC has doggedly challenged both the EPA and the LDWG technical and scientific findings and assumptions, as well as their discourse and vision of a cleaned-up Duwamish River (see McKendry and Janos, 2015; Purcell, 2008). On the technical side, the DRCC has co-produced two Health Impact Assessments (HIA). The purpose of the first assessment ‘is to examine potential unintended and under-considered health impacts – desirable or undesirable – of the’ official proposed Duwamish superfund cleanup plan (Daniell et al., 2013: 5). The assessment focused on four distinct populations – local residents, tribes, non-tribal subsistence fishers, and workers in local industries – and the potential effects cleanup would have on each group. Each population was assessed on the potential hazard because of the cleanup process and eventual post-cleanup state of the lower Duwamish. In another Health Impact Assessment, Gould and Cummings (2013) compared other areas of the City of Seattle with the lower Duwamish and found that the lower Duwamish has higher levels of negative environmental impacts (health and disease indicators), as well as lower levels of positive environmental amenities (parks and canopy cover). As a result of these inequalities, they argued that the lower Duwamish needs specific attention from government and health planners, as well as community stakeholders. The DRCC and its allies have used these assessments in their efforts to push the LDWG and the EPA to address environmental inequalities that exist alongside and because of the Superfund.
The DRCC has also worked to make the cleanup process more transparent and democratic, with the goal of empowering the communities that make up the DRCC. There are two particularly notable examples. The first is the publication of the 2009 participatory planning and visioning project the DRCC conducted beginning in 2007 (DRCC, 2009). The project’s purpose was to ‘[Have] a clear, community-supported vision [that] allows us to see, or visualize, how all of our needs and aspirations will shape our community in the future. It also gives the community an important tool for self-determination: instead of outside influences (developers, investors, government agencies) deciding what comes in and what goes where’ (DRCC, 2009). The methods of the participatory visioning project involved three parts in order to achieve as representative a sample as possible. The methods included a scoping survey in order to understand what elements and attributes community members value. The results of the scoping survey produced four categories of concern: (1) Environmental features, (2) Community amenities, (3) Transportation, and (4) Economic development. The DRCC then held a series of workshops to conduct participatory visioning in a communal manner. A total of 260 people participated in the workshops. Lastly, 99 one-on-one interviews were conducted to enlist the participation of individuals and stakeholders who were unable to participate or from communities not easily reached by formal workshops. Participatory mapping was then done to produce specific stakeholder maps, as well as produce a map of all participants’ input in a final DRCC Vision Map, which was published with the report in 2009 (see Figure 2). The Vision Report and Map represent the strength of the DRCC and its allies in engaging in the politics of territory to further the objectives of spatial justice in the Duwamish Valley (see also McKendry and Janos, 2015).
DRCC 2009 Vision Map.
The second example of the DRCC altering the process of the cleanup is their 2014 social media #RiverForAll campaign. The immediate objective was to ask ‘the City of Seattle and King County for a more comprehensive, health-protective river cleanup’ (DRCC, 2016). The larger objective was to build a sense of belonging and place for the diverse people who live and work along the Duwamish, as well as for 43,000 people who commented during the campaign, from all 50 states, to envision the river as a democratic space. The campaign also aided the DRCC in pressuring the EPA to extend the public comment period on the 2014 final Proposed Cleanup Plan from 30 to 105 days (DRCC, 2016). This extra time resulted in 2300 comments, in ten different languages, that collectively made the case for a stronger and more comprehensive cleanup than the one the EPA had released (DRCC, 2016). The DRCC asserts that because of these advocacy efforts, they were able to work with the EPA to include what the EPA calls the first-ever ‘environmental justice analysis’ of a Proposed Cleanup Plan for a Superfund site (Environmental Protection Agency, 2016). Between data gathering, participatory mapping, and place making, all within the multi-scalar politics of Superfund, the DRCC constructed a politics of place, territory, and scale that engaged the territorial city and pushed discourse and planning towards spatial justice.
Vignette 2: The territory of the proposed eco-industrial fix
The second vignette describes how the Duwamish became a space to imagine simultaneous solutions to global and local socionatural problems during the 2008 global economic crisis. The lynchpin of this win-win scenario was the proposal to create a planned ‘green’ urban industrial ecology under the name Eco-Industrial District (EID). The EID project exemplifies how the territorial city mobilised its jurisdictional purview to organise land and terrain (Elden, 2010) in order to address socionatural problems at multiple scales.
Like municipalities across the country, the 2008 global economic crisis impacted Seattle and King County by constraining tax revenue, increasing unemployment, and ultimately destabilising Seattle’s business climate (City of Seattle, 2009). Seattle City Council passed a resolution in May 2009 that focused on rehabilitating Seattle’s business climate to make Seattle a better place for capital to invest and operate in. The resolution also contains a paragraph on allocating resources within the Office of Economic Development to ‘encourage the creation of green businesses’ (City of Seattle, 2009). This became the basis for the 2010 economic recovery strategy that ‘includes developing an Eco-Industrial District program, among other efforts to support green industries, ensure a supportive regulatory structure for business, and support transportation, job training and education investments along with new public safety and urban development strategies’ (King County, 2010b). Following Seattle’s economic recovery strategy, and particularly the idea of the Eco-Industrial District, King County passed a resolution of its own in support of the creation of Eco-Industrial Districts.
The creation of the Eco-Industrial District headlined the leading narrative for a post-crisis triple-win as it simultaneously boosted job creation, economic development, and environmental responsibility. Then Council member Richard Conlin championed the original idea of creating the EID. 3 On Conlin’s city council blog, he argued that an EID in the Duwamish could accomplish a tripartite win for economic development, job creation, and environmental restoration. Describing the macro framing of the EID, Conlin wrote that the plan was to ‘develop an environmental infrastructure for new industries. Industries that are part of the “climate economy”, providing green jobs building wind machines, processing local food, recycling wastes by turning them into resources, and creating sustainable products’ (2011). More specifically he ‘propos[ed] that [the City] create an Industrial Development District (IDD) in the Duwamish. The IDD will provide stormwater and drainage infrastructure and sustainable energy and water systems that new businesses can buy into. Rather than each business inventing its own environmentally responsible practices, we can create an Eco-Industrial Park, where environmental responsibility is built into the fabric’ (Conlin, 2011).
In September 2010, the EID idea took a more formal shape when Seattle and King County announced that they were partnering on the creation of multiple Eco-Industrial Districts, with the largest district to be in the lower Duwamish industrial core. With their press release and the subsequent passing of King County Proposal #2010-0480 on 13 September 2010, Seattle and King County made their clearest articulation of the rationale for the EID and its eventual governance procedures and the physical shape of the EID in the Duwamish. The summary of the press release reads: ‘Turning waste into resource to benefit communities’ (King County, 2010a). EID is based on the idea of industrial ecology: creating integrated industrial ‘communities’ in which resources and inputs are shared to create energy and resource (metabolic) loops, rather than linear chains, and to create a holistic framework to eliminate or reduce both localised industrial impact, as well as global impact (Gibbs and Deutz, 2005: 453).
In their joint declaration to create the EID, Seattle and King County highlighted three unique opportunities to make EIDs a reality in Seattle. One: because the vast majority of industrial activity is concentrated in the Duwamish Industrial Corridor, policies to create an EID could be concentrated in a geographically proximal space. The concentration of industry could be used as a strength. Two: the partnership could leverage their jurisdictional domain over managing regional utilities, including solid waste and wastewater treatment, as well as transit, and these utilities could ‘be viable commodities for eco-industrial districts that manage and use a variety of resources’ (King County, 2010a). Three: Seattle and King County identified that a joint partnership could enhance the success and overcome obstacles in the planning, regulation, funding, and implementation of an EID. The partnership, they wrote, could ‘hope to identify opportunities for innovation and collaboration within Seattle’s industrial center, provide public sector support for those innovations that may face legislative barriers and partner with industrial companies to support existing businesses and attract new business to the region’ (King County, 2010a). The strengths that Seattle and King County officials highlighted fit within the eco-cityism idea that sub-national entities can leverage their territory to address local and global problems.
Superfund and the eco-industrial district
Although the Duwamish EID was developed in the context of the 2008 global economic crisis, it always was connected to the federally mandated Superfund cleanup process. The Superfund did not mandate the EID, but it did require that the LDWG clean up the lower Duwamish, and Seattle connected the two projects together. Conlin wrote, ‘We must stay the course on the Superfund cleanup, and at the same time use it as a way to provide jobs, training, and careers for the people of the adjacent communities’ (2011). As it was conceived and pitched by its proponents, the Duwamish EID was the ultimate win: it proposed to reconcile the contradictions between the local economy/global economy, between economic growth/good paying jobs, between local/global solutions to climate change, and between Seattle’s ‘good’ urban planning/Federal government’s Superfund mandate. Concerning the environmental justice aspects of the EID, the DRCC’s Cari Simson, who headed the 2009 Vision Project, said in 2010 of the EID proposal, ‘There’s so much room for more habitat, more parks, better transportation, bringing more jobs to the Duwamish – not cement plants, but solar panel factories or wind turbines or something like that’ (McClure, 2010). She added, connecting the EID to the Superfund, ‘It’s a great story about Seattle and a great tangent and parallel to what’s going on with the Superfund site’ (McClure, 2010).
From eco-industry to industrial development district
It turns out that building an actual existing Eco-Industrial District is easier said than done. In 2012, Seattle issued a press release in which they acknowledged that the grand vision EID from 2010 had ‘been challenging to implement due to regulatory, policy, or financial issues’ (City of Seattle, 2012). In the press release, the partnership between Seattle, King County, the Port, and the State of Washington issued a Request for Proposals that would seek innovative measures to overcome the barriers to the EID idea. At the same time, the partnership changed the name, and one might argue the scope, of the Eco-Industrial District to the vaguer and broader term Industrial Development District.
The rebranding of the Eco-Industrial District acknowledged that the original scope of building a new local and regional industrial ecology had more than regulatory, policy, and financial issues. Here we see limits to the territorial city as it comes up against a territorial barrier in its attempts to harness the various industrial flows of energy and waste beyond its territorial borders. They wrote,
Eco-Industrial Districts, which have been pioneered in perhaps a dozen areas around the world, are designed to foster the growth of mutually dependent industries that integrate economic development and environmental stewardship. The classic example is Kalundborg, Denmark, where a set of businesses maximize energy efficiency and minimize solid waste by using one firm’s waste energy and by-products as inputs to another process. Since the mid-1990’s this example has been cited as a model. (City of Seattle, 2012)
Seattle is not like Kalundborg they argued. They wrote of their pivot,
The experience of the last decade has shown that, while the concept of integrating environmental and economic factors in industrial development makes eminent sense, there are a number of important factors that need to be taken into account. First, the Kalundborg district grew organically – it was a set of decisions by businesses, not a government led initiative. Second, even Kalundborg is not self-sufficient – there are internal and external transactions – and the volatility of the business environment suggests that a balance over time is difficult to maintain. Third, there are many ways in which environment and economy can be brought together besides the exchange of energy and waste products. And fourth, the experience of other cities suggests that creating a new eco-industrial district works best when there is a significant amount of unused land that can be assembled and dedicated to the purpose. (Italics added, City of Seattle, 2012).
The partnership’s pivot highlights how actually existing financial constraints, regulatory jurisdictions, zoning, built environment and industry as well as wider flows of energy, resources, commodities, and capital formed barriers to the idealised vision of eco-cityism introduced in 2010.
The rebranding and the changing scope of the newly coined Industrial Development District was an abandonment of the original idea. The partnership was intent on framing it as an expansion, but they made it clear that ‘rather than trying to bootstrap a new set of companies focused on the relatively narrow goal of sharing energy and waste exchange, we are looking for new development and innovation that will lead to better environmental results’ (City of Seattle, 2012). They offered some examples of where innovation could take place: ‘Redevelopment of an existing industrial facility to increase efficiency and capacity; Allowing an industrial/commercial mixed facility not currently permitted if it increases industrial jobs; Innovative ways to manage stormwater or salmon mitigation that will deliver a better environmental result; Renewable energy systems or reuse of waste energy; Shared resource use by a group of companies’ (City of Seattle, 2012). The list of possibilities is about tinkering, piecemeal, with things in space, rather than the larger vision of re-imagining the space and the flows of energy, commodities, waste, and labour. The 20th century industrial ecology is a stubborn system. They ended their press release by circling back to the Superfund cleanup, and they re-articulated that this cleanup, at the end of the day, ‘has special promise in the Duwamish, where the environmental cleanup can be leveraged for economic development’ (italics added, City of Seattle, 2012).
Redevelopment and investment capital at the gates
By 2013 and into 2015, rather than re-imagining the territory, Seattle officials were making a more basic case for the continued existence of the Duwamish Manufacturing and Industrial District. Seattle affirmed that the whole of the Duwamish Industrial District ‘is a regional economic asset at the center of a vibrant industrial eco-system’ (City of Seattle, 2013). Published in 2013, the Duwamish Manufacturing and Industrial Policy Land Use Study (M/IC Study) made three recommendations aimed at solidifying the territorial boundaries and articulating the district’s raison d’être. Broadly, the report recommended that Seattle enact policy in order to ‘reinforce the M/IC as a place designated for industry’ (City of Seattle, 2016) and protect industry and port operations from capital development pressures from commercial interests. In this vein, they wrote that Industrial Commercial zoning has ‘produced large single-use office buildings, since industrial uses cannot compete with commercial uses on rent. Industrial Commercial (IC) zoning has not resulted in production, distribution and repair type uses’ (City of Seattle, 2013: 13). Real estate rents are greater for commercial buildings, and the pressure of real estate capital on the fringes of the M/IC has resulted in the conversation of M/IC into rent seeking investment development, which is a hallmark of capitalist sub/urbanisation.
In 2015, the City of Seattle published a draft of A Comprehensive Plan for Managing Growth, 2015–2035, which is the city’s comprehensive urbanisation plan as required by the State of Washington Growth Management Act of 1990. To manage ‘sprawl’ (suburbanisation), Seattle adopted an Urban Village Strategy and identified six regional growth centres (intensified urbanisation) (City of Seattle, 2015: 8). The latter includes the Duwamish M/IC as one of the growth centres. Nowhere in the report is there mention of an Eco-Industrial District or language about an intentionally designed urban industrial ecology. The Comprehensive Plan, in fact, reiterates similar recommendations from the M/IC Study: preserve the M/IC boundaries, support and protect existing industry, and promote ways to attract new industrial businesses. The language around ‘environment’ is limited to ‘restrict[ing] industrial activities that – by the nature of materials involved or processes employed – are potentially dangerous or very noxious to appropriate locations within industrial areas’ and industrial landscape guidelines, and noise and building height restrictions (City of Seattle, 2015: 58–59). By 2015, the EID and industrial ecology language had disappeared from Seattle discourse.
The contradictions of the territorial city and eco-cityism
In this paper, I have shown that the production of territory is an important, yet overlooked, dimension of how city actors attempt to address socionatural crises. In vignette two, we saw how Seattle mobilised its subnational jurisdiction in the Duwamish. With the Eco-Industrial District, the territorial city leveraged its purview of the production of land and terrain (Elden, 2010) within its jurisdiction, in order to manipulate fixed capital development (zoning, permits, environmental impact statements) and rates of capital flows (labour, regulating investment, zoning, capital development projects). The EID was supposed to be a win-win multi-scalar climate change and green economic development fix. In the end, the project did not materialise because Seattle and King County did not build enough political power to control capital, energy, and waste flows that are polymorphic socionatural relations, spanning locally, regionally, and globally.
Consequently, the limits of the territorial city as an independent and coherent political institution that has the capacity to address socionatural problems at multiple scales is apparent. While eco-cityism holds that the territorial city supersedes other scales of political power, actually existing enmeshed scaled state relations demonstrate that the territorial city is not a coherent political place or scale. As illustrated in vignette one, what looked like the territory of the city, the Duwamish, is in fact a polymorphic, multi-dimensional state space (Brenner, 2009; Jessop et al., 2008), an interrelational (and uneven) space comprising the federal government, Washington State, a public–private partnership (Lower Duwamish Waterway Group), and a grassroots social movement (DRCC). For example, it was the federal Superfund law and EPA that forced the cleanup and had the provision that allowed local stakeholders to insert themselves into the cleanup process. The Duwamish may be under the jurisdiction of Seattle, but it is a multi-scalar state space, underscoring that sociospatial relations are not always as they appear.
Despite the limits of top-down eco-cityism, marginalised groups within the city engage with the politics of territory and place as they participate in the production of spatial relations (Ruddick et al., 2017). Davidson and Iveson write, ‘The city is a key domain in which subjectification (i.e. fighting against inequality through the enactment and inscription of equality into the existing police order) becomes contestation. It also serves as the space whereby this contestation can be staged, where claims are articulated and the legitimacy of criteria for allocation is tested’ (2015: 660). The Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition provides examples that both demonstrate that the territorial city is not enough and yet remains critical as a territory of struggle to change actually existing political and urban-industrial sociospatial relations, as well as to craft and promote an imagined community of a socially and environmentally just Seattle. In their attempts to fight against uneven development and environmental inequality within Seattle, the DRCC has co-opted the eco-cityism already present in Seattle and extended it to marginalised communities and residents within and beyond the territory of the Duwamish River. Additionally, the DRCC attempts to negotiate the local trap (Purcell, 2006) by engaging with a multi-scalar politics. This suggests that a politics of territory can serve as a means to build capacity for a more democratic production of space.
Conclusion
In this paper, I argued that new narratives about the power of cities to address socionatural crises at multiple scales, which I call eco-cityism, represent new spatial politics organised around specific territorial projects. In the vignettes, I detailed the discourse of actors who perceived, conceived, and designed a politics of territory in efforts to address the legacy of urban industrial pollution and engaged in spatial justice work, as well as work to decarbonise the process of industrial urbanisation. In particular, for marginalised groups within the city the politics of territory and place emerged as an important strategy as they participated in the production of new spatial relations. However, the contradictions between fixity and fluidity of both material flows and multiscalar political relationships of the territorial city and of eco-cityism gave rise to limits to producing cleaner urban processes and landscapes. Ultimately, territorial strategies are important though not sufficient for addressing socionatural problems and inequalities that are in fact composed of additional spatial flows and scalar processes and things. For these reasons, conversations about eco-cityism should maintain a focus on a politics of space, as Elden (2007) argues, rather than a politics of territory or a politics of scale.
Additionally, this paper deepened the conceptualisation of territory as a key dimension of the production of socionatures within the process-oriented urban political ecology framework. I asserted that UPE and PIE require a deeper conceptualisation of the city as the practice of territory making and sub-national sovereignty claims in order to better understand the emergent politics of eco-cityism and the politics of territory. The vignettes outlined this point with examples from the multi-scalar politics of environmental remediation and the spatial justice implications of Superfund cleanup, and the territorial politics of building an actually existing ‘green’ industrial ecology in the Duwamish River Valley. While process-oriented theory is critical, it neglects the ways in which territory, itself more fluid and dynamic than traditionally understood, is a key dimension of the production of space. This suggests that the production of territory is not wholly restrictive in its implications, and that it is a generative, if contradictory, site of inquiry for understanding socionatural crises and building a more democratic production of space. UPE and PIE’s further exploration of the production of territory could open up research into how recent fights over carbon commodity chains, and other aspects of decarbonisation, are shaped by struggles over territory and sovereignty, including sub-national sovereignties, for example.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual Association of American Geographers conference, 31 March 2016. I would like to thank Corina McKendry, Laura Sparks, and Nathan Heggins Bryant, and the three anonymous reviewers who took their time to help make this a better paper.
Funding
Support for this paper was also provided by the California State University Chico Office of Faculty Development.
