Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

Grassroots Resistance in the Sustainable City: Portland Harbor Superfund Site Contamination, Cleanup, and Collective Action

How does progressive change happen in so-called sustainable cities? In this dissertation, I present findings from a three year-long ethnographic investigation of grassroots organizing in Portland, Oregon, a city at the leading edge of the green urbanism movement. This research centered on an extended case study of the Portland Harbor Community Coalition (PHCC). PHCC is an alliance of grassroots groups working to ensure that cleanup of the Portland Harbor Superfund Site benefits those who have been most impacted by pollution. In this dissertation, I develop three main empirical findings. First, despite depoliticized (sustainability) discourse permeating the harbor cleanup planning process, which excluded impacted communities from and minimized disparate impacts resulting from contamination and cleanup, there has not necessarily been a green growth machine operating in the way that we would expect. Instead, a classic status quo growth machine has indirectly pushed depoliticized sustainability discourse, and benefited from it at the expense of vulnerable residents -- even in a paradigmatic sustainable city. Second, in contrast to the just green enough strategies put forth in previous research, there are, in fact, grassroots groups who are demanding robust environmental improvements as part of broader social and environmental justice outcomes. PHCC takes an oppositional community development approach in attempting to transcend the green development-displacement dialectic. This approach has entailed being strategically confrontational some of the time, and engaging through more established participation channels at other times. Third, individual and collective historicized learning has played a key role in PHCC\u27s efforts to re-politicize the cleanup planning process in three ways: it helped coalition members connect their personal experiences to the harbor; it helped coalition members build a political analysis of the cumulative and inter-generational ways that harbor pollution has impacted different groups; and a collectively produced historical narrative ultimately contributed to the coalition\u27s moderate success in pushing public agencies to be more responsive to impacted communities. More broadly, this research draws attention to the historical contingencies, organizing approaches, challenges, and transformations experienced by ordinary people coming together to fight for a more just sustainability. It suggests that in order to develop a fuller understanding of urban socio-ecological change processes--and to make meaningful contributions to change in an era of environmental crisis, extreme housing instability, racial violence, and other forms of oppression--scholars must pay attention to those working on the front lines of change, themselves, in broader historical context

The Community Watershed Stewardship Program: Experiments in Engagement and Equity in Portland, OR

The Community Watershed Stewardship Program (CWSP) is a long-running city–university partnership between the City of Portland\u27s Bureau of Environmental Services and Portland State University, with the goal of improving watershed health. CWSP has recently focused its efforts on addressing equity, exploring how community watershed stewardship can be generated by low-income and minority communities.This paper provides a case study of CWSP, exploring its genesis; how it leverages community support and engagement; and, its leadership in analyzing the equity implications of its work and how it can improve. CWSP, which received the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Foundation Campus Community Partnership Award, serves as an excellent example of an innovative university–city partnership that is able to leverage a relatively small amount of funding by fostering bottom-up community engagement. Most importantly, CWSP demonstrates how university–community partnerships can explore innovative ways to merge environmental and social equity goals and outcomes

Sustaining Future Environmental Educators: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Students

Scholars of environmental studies and sciences must work across disciplinary boundaries, especially in politically charged contexts with clear race and class-based inequities. Sustainability-focused programs are confronted with the task of creating opportunities for interdisciplinary, experiential learning to incorporate such complexities into undergraduate teaching. Yet, despite being the next generation of environmental science and sustainability faculty, graduate students have limited opportunities to learn how to develop interdisciplinary curriculum that incorporates real-world learning in courses for undergraduate students. This paper examines the development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course at Portland State University that provided space for graduate students to build their interdisciplinary teaching and pedagogical capacities, while introducing undergraduate students to environmental planning and environmental justice concepts crucial to understanding large-scale urban river restoration projects. Using the methods of translational and action research, the authors developed a pedagogical praxis in a co-facilitated course, via reflection on their own training in an interdisciplinary program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The paper presents a model for graduate student teacher training that equips graduate students—and the undergraduates they will teach throughout the course of their careers—to address today’s most pressing socio-ecological challenges

Uneven Development of the Sustainable City: Shifting Capital in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon is renowned as a paradigmatic sustainable city . Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland’s sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning documents, and secondary-source histories, we attempt to elucidate the structural origins of Portland’s uneven development , exploring how and why the urban core of this paragon of sustainability has become more White and affluent while its outer eastside has become more diverse and poor. We explain how a sustainability fix – in this case, green investment in the city’s core – ultimately contributed to the demarcation of racialized poverty along 82nd Avenue, a major north-south arterial marking the boundary of East Portland. Our account of structural processes taking place at multiple scales contributes to a growing body of literature on eco-gentrification and displacement and inner-ring suburban change while empirically demonstrating how Portland’s advances in sustainability have come at the cost of East Portland’s devaluation. Our 30,000 foot perspective reveals systemic patterns that might then guide more fine-grained analyses of particular political-socio-cultural processes, while providing cautionary insights into current efforts to extend the city’s sustainability initiatives using the same green development model

Social Justice-Oriented Interaction Design

In recent years, many HCI designers have begun pursuing research agendas that address large scale social issues. These systemic or "wicked" problems present challenges for design practice due to their scope, scale, complexity, and political nature. In this paper, we develop a social justice orientation to designing for such challenges. We highlight a breadth of design strategies that target the goals of social justice along six dimensions -- transformation, recognition, reciprocity, enablement, distribution, and accountability -- and elaborate three commitments necessary to developing a social justice oriented design practice -- a commitment to conflict, a commitment to reflexivity, and a commitment to personal ethics and politics. Although there are no easy solutions to systemic social issues, a social justice orientation provides one way to foster an engagement with the thorny political issues that are increasingly acknowledged as crucial to a field that is not just about technological possibility, but also about political responsibility