Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
Transcript of Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
1/40
1. The Political Ecology of Transportation and the
Ideological Terrain of Urban Nature
If, as suggested, the politics of the people is a politics of movements notalways progressive or democratic, but potentially so the implications for
political theory are profound. It suggests that the key considerations of
democratic theory ought not to be the traditional matters of the state, but therelations within and between social movements. Indeed, it suggests that,
insofar as political theory has become simply the theory of the state, it
serves as a legitimating ideology that obscures the very possibility ofpolitics of, by and for the people
Warren Magnusson (1996: 70-71)
If you ask me what is the object of my work, the object of the work is toalways reproduce the concrete in thought not to generate another good
theory, but to give a better-theorized account of concrete historical reality.
This is not an anti-theoretical stance. I need theory in order to do this. Butthe goal is to understand the situation you started out with better than before
Stuart Hall (quoted in Nagar 2002: 184).
Other Voices: Environmental Narratives and Articulating Landscapes
Walking through the Red Hill Valley in the summer of 2008, I was struck first by the
dramatic changes in the landscape. I had last been in the valley almost five years ago,
observing and participating in the efforts to prevent construction of the Red Hill Creek
Expressway. The places in my memories where people had camped and picketed day
and night, where an Aboriginal roundhouse and longhouse had been constructed, and
where others had chained themselves to trees or constructed platforms high in the
branches above had been erased by the road, now humming with automobile and truck
traffic. Alongside the road I found new paths, lined with pine needles and surrounded
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
2/40
by rows of saplings, planted during the construction of the expressway. As I walked
south, following the Red Hill Creek upstream towards the escarpment, the noise of the
traffic began to fade behind the hills of the valley and I found myself in Kings Forest,
surrounded by a more familiar atmosphere. While the creek had been significantly
altered, realigned and rebuilt by engineers and construction crews, the area still
provided a welcome sense of stillness and grandeur with a vibrant canopy of leaves
above and the soothing sound of the creek guiding me further along the trail. Still
further south, I came to Albion Falls, where the creek flows over the rock face of the
escarpment. I had come to this place with my stepfather many times as a child and
remembered the joy of walking along the edge of the escarpment with him and gazing
down into the valley. Here, I could still find a familiar sense of peace and connection to
the flora and fauna around me, even with the drone of traffic in the distance.
Leaving the valley, I found myself sifting through memories of the tumultuous,
inspiring and painful events that I had witnessed in the valley a few short years before,
when citizens of the city of Hamilton had gathered together to try and protect the area
from what they saw as a destructive and unjust development project. As I detail in the
pages that follow, the Red Hill Creek Expressway had become a pivotal debate over not
simply the fate of this river valley but the identity and future of the city itself, stretching
across five decades. Proponents envisaged the expressway as a road to prosperity,
opening up new lands for development and improving traffic efficiency and safety by
diverting cars and trucks from other roadways. They argued that the road would
enhance the Red Hill Valley, making it more accessible and cleaning up the refuse
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
3/40
and pollution that had accumulated over many years of alleged neglect. Many
opponents saw the expressway as nothing more than a subsidy for new residential and
commercial development on the escarpment lands south of the valley and argued that
the road would irreparably destroy an area of great ecological, aesthetic and
recreational value. Others saw the road as an exemplary case of environmental injustice,
increasing air pollution in a region of the city with many low-income neighbourhoods
and a concentration of polluting industrial sites, and diverting funds away from the
maintenance of existing infrastructure, under-funded social programs, and a declining
downtown core in an industrial city still reeling from the globalization of steel
manufacturing. Still others saw the road as a classic example of colonial dispossession,
built through an area with particular significance to Aboriginal people as both a site of
indigenous artifacts, burials and ancestral connections, and as a place for the assertion
of hunting and fishing rights guaranteed by a long-standing treaty with the British
Crown.
The primary aim of my dissertation research is to explain how and why these counter
narratives developed, in a dialogical relationship with the dominant narrative of growth
and progress, various political ideologies, and an industrial imaginary that valorized the
productive transformation of nature through technology and infrastructure, expert
management, and the compartmentalization of urban space.My analysis considers how
and why the politicalframingof language and ideas in this particular debate changed in
response to shifting political economic conditions, larger ideological discourses, and
urban environmental imaginaries: established regional visions of the relationship
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
4/40
between urbanization and nature articulated through representations of the Red Hill
Valley.
I argue that environmental discourses or narratives should not be treated as static
political positions but must be understood through the interplay between competing
narratives as they draw upon and influence each other, including attempts to modify or
co-opt particular ideas and symbols. My case study demonstrates the prevalence of a
pro-growth discourse that gradually adopted elements of ecological modernization,
but this case also provides a rich and perhaps rare example of the development of
counter-hegemonic narratives of urban sustainability and transportation that eventually
succeeded in transforming the citys dominant industrial imaginary the prevailing
normative vision of the relationship between urbanization and nature.1 I place particular
emphasis on how this conflict over urban transportation and land development
responded to and gradually altered the structure of urban governance in the city of
Hamilton. Values and norms shaped by influential political ideas and local conceptions
of place and community often remain implicit and unexamined by the actors engaged in
a particular conflict, and differences may be obscured by the use of vague and
ubiquitous terms such as sustainability, development and democracy.
Examination of these differing normative positions can reveal weaknesses and
1 Following the theories of Antonio Gramsci (1971), I understand hegemony as power relations
that promote and protect the interests of dominant social groups by means of coercion and
consent rather than brute force. I find more recent interpretations of the struggle for hegemony
as contestation between political discourses (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Scott 1985) very usefulbut caution against a perspective that reduces all political phenomena to discursive phenomena.
As I discuss below, hegemony is produced and challenged in and through spatial relations,
involving symbolic and material relations of power (Joseph 2002).
4
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
5/40
oversights within a given narrative, explain how and why particular narratives become
more widely accepted than others, and provide a basis for suggesting ways to more
effectively encourage democratic dialogue and debate over the meaning and
implementation of urban sustainability.
My research seeks to suggest ways thatmore inclusive conceptions of environmentalactivism and governance could be advanced. I am drawn to this particular struggle
because of its complexity, its longevity, and the diversity of interests involved, but even
more so because of my own involvement in this debate over the future of the city where
I was born and where I have spent most of my thirty four years. Conducting research
into this environmental conflict thus posed the difficulty of locating myself within my
own study and abandoning an easy recourse to the familiar academic role of the
objective observer. Encouraged by recent work on activist scholarship (Hale 2008;
Frampton et al. 2006) and participatory research (Reason and Bradbury 2001;
Rocheleau 1994), I began to recognize that my involvement in the expressway debate
and the connections I had already established with other participants could provide
insights and research opportunities that might otherwise be unavailable to me, even as it
also raised the challenge of striving to understand and fairly represent positions and
arguments which I was already predisposed against. During my research, I drew upon
my personal experiences and observations, but also endeavoured to take a critical
distance from the local environmental and social justice organizations with which I had
been involved, including groups opposed to the Red Hill Creek Expressway. At the
same time, I understand and present my research efforts as committed to promoting
5
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
6/40
environmental justice and more responsible and inclusive approaches to urban
governance and development, and the critical analyses of urban planning and social
movements presented here are intended as a small contribution towards these goals.2
Like the urban spaces that surround it, the Red Hill Valley is composed of layers of
material and symbolic history a socio-ecological palimpsest. My dissertation research
traces the historical transformations of the valley, a landscape on to which various
groups projected their vision of Hamiltons past, present and future. For some, it was a
wasteland and garbage dump; for others, a pristine wilderness; a recreational retreat; a
transportation and infrastructural corridor; a sacred burial ground; a symbol of an
alternative urban future. With its rich ecological and cultural history, the valley became
a kind of blank slate on to which people wrote their particular narratives of nature and
the city. The valley and creek functioned as an articulating landscape (Desfor and
Keil 2000) that was used to represent particular relationships between nature,
urbanization and development. The various representations and narratives articulated by
the groups and individuals involved in this debate were developed in a reciprocal
relationship with this place, drawing upon popular perceptions of the valley as a
2I am employing Warren Magnussons definition of social movements as movements that take
people out of their daily routines and away from ordinary conceptions of themselves as passive
subjects (1996: 10) and therefore extending this term to include any collective of people taking
action to promote a cause with political implications, including business coalitions. In
Magnussons words (ibid: 67),
If we begin with popular political activity, rather than from the enclosure imposed upon
it, another dimension of reality emerges. Politics might be defined as purposive social action
directed at the conditions of social existence. From this perspective, social movements are
the politics of the people and government is the politics of the state The fact thatmovements can and do burst the enclosures of the state is evidence not of their prepolitical
but of their political character of their capacity to found or create new forms of political
community, identity and action.
6
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
7/40
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
8/40
the protection and preservation of nature, primarily through technological innovation
(Hajer 1995; Christoff 1996; Mol 2001; Young 2001). According to Desfor and Keil
(ibid: 50-51), only rarely, at specific historico-geographical conjunctures, has it been
possible to escape or go beyond the current hegemony of this continuum and to create
meaningful and sustained alternatives Although they rarely succeed in the current
climate of urban development under globalized market rule, such social and ecological
challenges to the ecomodernist status quo are ever-present and pervasive events.
Political Ecology, Urban Development and Post-Industrial Cities
The Red Hill Creek Expressway debate lasted over four decades and involved a great
diversity of political actors with differing interests and ideological positions. Discursive
and material strategies changed over time according to the political framing of issues by
environmental groups, changing political economic and socio-ecological conditions,
and environmental imaginaries, defined here as popular representations of normative
relationships with urban nature. Ideological disagreement in the articulation of concepts
and values often remain implicit or unelaborated in the course of political debate and
discussion, particularly with respect to urban sustainability. References to democracy,
nature, development, progress and sustainability were abundant but it soon
became clear that these terms had profoundly different meanings for different people
and groups, informed by differing values, norms and interests.
While consensus may not be a realistic goal in conflicts of this nature and magnitude,
it is vital to the pursuit of urban sustainability that the diversity of different meanings,
8
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
9/40
values and desires attached to terms such as these be recognized and discussed, rather
than ignored and dismissed (Harre et al. 1999; Hull and Robertson 2000). In many
cases, including the Red Hill Creek Expressway conflict, those with greater influence
and resources often shape the language of the debate, disregarding or obscuring other
voices and perspectives through a process that Michael Freeden (2003) refers to as
decontestation the attempt to present a fixed and immutable definition of a concept
or social relation in order to thereby removing its meaning from the realm of political
debate. By examining the multiplicity of actors and views involved in conflicts over
urban transportation and development, and by clarifying the ideas, beliefs and
aspirations that shape those conflicts, we can better appreciate how relationships of
power operate and how those relationships can be transformed.
This research is situated within the growing field of urban political ecology. Political
ecology is an interdisciplinary field of social science research that has been developed
over the last twenty years or so, drawing together elements of cultural ecology, political
economy, critical development studies and related approaches to the study of human-
environment interactions.3 Political ecology is explicitly concerned with explaining the
interaction of social and biophysical processes, and places particular emphasis on the
interdependent relationships between political, socio-economic, and ecological change
3 The term political ecology has been applied to a variety of political movements and researchapproaches since the early 1970s (see, for example, early uses of the term by Wolf 1972 and
Enzensberger 1974). Within European politics, it is often used to refer to environmental politics
and movements, particularly politics that emphasize substantial economic reforms,
democratization, social justice and convivial relationships, both with nature and within human
communities (see for example, Lipietz 1995 and Whiteside 2002). According to MauriceDurverger (1992), the expression cologie politique was first coined in 1958 by the French
philosopher and political economist Bertrand de Jouvenal.
9
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
10/40
(Robbins 2004). This field aims to understand and explain how human practices of
resource use are shaped by social relations at multiple levels over time, and the ways
that these relations shape and are shaped by the physical environment (Walker 1998:
132).
This approach to environmental studies primarily examines how political economic
forces influence transformations of nature, from forestry to genetic engineering, and it
draws attention to the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of such
transformations.4Thus, political ecology can show us how environmental conflicts are
generated by the unequal social and spatial distribution of the material impacts of
development (here understood in terms of the transformation of nature to benefit
human beings), and by ideological disagreements based upon differing experiences and
conceptions of nature and environment. In contrast to more technocratic and
managerial approaches to environmental studies which often de-emphasize or bracket
out the normative disputes and social inequalities inherent to environmental issues,
political ecology seeks to understand the beliefs, practices, and power relationships that
perpetuate such conflicts in order to support alternative relations to nature that are more
ecologically responsible, socially equitable and inclusively democratic (Robbins 2004).
While much early and influential work in political ecology was based on case studies
of rural struggles in the global South (cf. Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Bassett 1988;
4 I use the term political economy to refer to the interdependence of political and economic
phenomena and institutions, and the study of the reciprocal influence between politics, social
relations and economic change. This broadly defined field has had a major influence on politicalecology, which explores the connections between political, economic, social andecological
relationships.
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
11/40
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
12/40
significant nodal points or concentrations in these networks rather than as distinct and
discrete entities.
This conception of the city as a hybrid of intersecting socio-ecological networks
demands an approach to urban environmental studies that traces these networks beyond
the local scale and situates local processes of urbanization within broader multi-scalar
contexts regional, national, global. As Erik Swyngedouw writes, There is no longer
an outside or limit to the city, as the urban process harbours social and ecological
processes that are embedded in dense and multilayered networks of local, regional,
national and global connections (2004a: 10). Urban political ecology seeks to identify
and understand the specific processes through which urban space is produced and
transformed, and to examine the multi-scalar interconnections between urbanization and
environmental change. The aim is not simply to map these networks and interactions
but to use this information to support the creation of healthier, more democratic and
more equitable communities (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003).
To this end, many recent studies have considered the discursive dimensions of
political conflicts over the use and control of urban nature, often emphasizing the
dominant influence of neoliberalism, ecological modernization and popular notions of
urban sustainability as the balanced coexistence or reconciliation of economic
development and environmental protection. While there is now a good deal of literature
criticizing this dominant vision of urban sustainability, little attention has yet been paid
to analyzing how and why counter-hegemonic movements and political narratives
emerge and how they might be sustained and expanded. My dissertation provides a
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
13/40
basic framework for such analysis, examining how more radical visions of urbanization
and nature develop in dialogue with competing political narratives and ideologies,
shifting political economic conditions, andthe material and symbolic qualities of the
surrounding local environment. In this way, I am responding to Peter Walkers call for
research in political ecology research that more directly engages with political practice
(2007) and policy formation (2006), and attempting to flesh out what Erik Swyngedouw
(2006: 13) has referred to as the political programme of political ecology as a guide
for actively contributing to the democratic content of socio-ecological construction.
Existing studies of urban political ecology and governance have tended to focus on
global cities such as New York (Gandy 2002), Toronto (Desfor and Keil 2004; Keil
and Boudreau 2006) and Los Angeles (Gottlieb 2001; Wolch et al. 2002; Desfor and
Keil 2004). Little attention has yet been given to smaller urban centres and even less to
former industrial centres like Hamilton (some notable exceptions include Heynen and
Perkins 2005; Brownlow 2006; Heynen 2006). Post-industrial cities present serious
challenges for urban sustainability, both in terms of the severity of ecological
degradation and in terms of the socio-economic disparities and financial limitations that
hinder efforts to attract new investment and pursue new approaches to economic
development (Langer and Endlicher 2007). Shaped by the legacy of infrastructure
systems, regulatory frameworks and economic development capacities closely linked to
manufacturing, these cities find themselves in a grey area between Fordist and post-
Fordist regimes of capital accumulation and related mixtures of regulatory practices
(Filion 1985; Brownlow 2006). They simultaneously attempt to build on existing
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
14/40
economic sectors and infrastructure while tentatively exploring new approaches, often
lacking the resources, political influence and economic power of the global centres that
are often seen as examples of the post-industrial or post-Fordist city. As I discuss
throughout my dissertation, these conditions provide unique opportunities and obstacles
for the formation of more radical visions of urban nature and environmental politics.
Burdened by the ecological legacy of large-scale heavy industry andthe socio-
economic impacts of deindustrialization and associated regulatory restructuring, these
shrinking cities have unique spatial forms, socio-ecological relationships, and forms
of environmental politics that are worthy of much deeper analysis than they have
received to date (Alsop et al. 2006; Haslam et al. 2006; Langer and Endlicher 2007).
The brownfields, neglected inner-city neighbourhoods and other degraded urban
landscapes that characterize such cities can vividly illustrate the co-production of social
and ecological processes (Davis 2003).5 Furthermore, as exemplified by my case study
of Hamilton, these cities present unique social and ecological problems, often
characterized by profoundly uneven patterns of spatial distribution that are shaped in
part by historical social and spatial relationships between industry, government and
labour. I demonstrate in my dissertation that these historical relationships have a strong
influence on political narratives of nature and development, producing unique forms of
environmental politics that revolve around issues of environmental justice related to
industrial pollution. As I discuss throughout the dissertation, the Hamilton case is
5 Photographer Edward Burtynsky has vividly documented Hamiltons stunning and sometimes
disturbing sites of industrial detritus and urban decay, intermingled with the flourishing of
unique forms of ruderal ecology.
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
15/40
particularly notable for the high degree of community organizing and coalition building
involved in public resistance to this highway project. Through my analysis of political
narratives, I explain how this activism emerged and how it has been sustained over
time, drawing upon the unique socio-ecological relationships, political economic
conditions and articulating landscapes of this industrial city.
Urban Metabolism and Transportation
To express the interdependence between social and biophysical change within processes
of urbanization, theorists have drawn upon Marxs concept of metabolism, understood
as the circulatory exchange through which every living organism transforms its external
environment and is transformed in turn by that environment. The concept of urban
metabolism draws attention to the flows of different materials that sustain the city and
to the interdependence of social and biophysical processes in the production of urban
space. However, most existing studies of urban metabolism presuppose a functionalist
analogy of bodily metabolism and focus primarily on the inputs and outputs of energy,
biophysical materials and nutrients (cf. Girardet 1992, 1999; Warren-Rhodes and
Koenig 2001; Sahely et al. 2003). Too often, inadequate attention is paid to the political
and economic dimensions of the efforts to define and create sustainable urban
environments, including modes of social regulation and habits of consumption (Keil and
Boudreau 2006). Whereas sustainability theorists like Herbert Girardet focus primarily
on technological shifts from linear to circular metabolic flows of biophysical exchange,
defining urban sustainability in terms of homeostatic stability and efficiency, political
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
16/40
ecology views urban metabolism in terms ofpolitical contestation over control of the
socio-ecological processes through which urban space is materially and discursively
produced. In the words of Matthew Gandy, nature is not conceived as an external
blueprint or template but as an integral dimension to the urban process which is itself
transformed in the process to create a hybridized and historically contingent interaction
between social and bio-physical systems (2004: 364).
This broader notion of metabolism has been usefully applied to the analysis of urban
infrastructures, particularly water and wastewater systems, as pivotal points of struggle
over the material transformation and symbolic representation of urban nature (Gandy
2002; Swyngedouw 2004a; Kaika 2005) but relatively little attention has yet been paid
to transportation infrastructure.6 Waterways, railways, airports and highways are vital
material features of the networks that support urban life and efforts to promote
sustainable transportation can benefit greatly from an analysis that illuminates the links
between the economic relationships, governmental regulations, and ideologies and
cultural norms that support particular transportation modes and systems over others. My
dissertation research applies the analytical framework of urban political ecology
transportation, showing how transportation infrastructure has played a pivotal role in
struggles over the transformation of urban nature, and why transportation is becoming
an increasingly volatile site of struggle in contemporary debates over the meaning and
6 Work in this area has included a session on Transportation and Political Ecology at the 2006
Association of American Geographers conference that I co-organized with Dr. Julie Cidell fromCalifornia State University (other participants included Jason Henderson, Matthew Huber and
Rene Venon), and a recent paper from Anna Waugh (2006).
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
17/40
implementation of urban sustainability. The case study of the city of Hamilton is
particularly useful for exploring the connections between political economy, mobility,
urban form and conflicts over the transformation of nature because of Hamiltons
physical geography, the central role that transportation infrastructure has played in its
historical development, and the ways in which natural features and processes have been
radically transformed through contested shifts in the social and economic conditions of
the city.
The question of sustainable urban transportation requires consideration of more than
just the biophysical inputs and outputs required for different transportation modes, the
design of alternative technologies, or the implementation of ecological planning
principles. Creating sustainable transportation modes and systems, from reformist
measures such as increasing the circulatory efficiency and ecological impacts of roads
to more radical shifts toward alternative modes of transportation, requires critical
examination of the political economic and social relationships that support and
perpetuate particular modes and systems over others, including investment, exchange
and consumption patterns, property and ownership regimes, governmental policies and
regulations, and the ideologies and cultural norms associated with particular
transportation modes and systems. Jason Henderson (2004: 193) has usefully described
such considerations as the politics of mobility, which he defines as:
the political struggle over what type of type of transportation mode be it
automobile, transit or walking is developed in a city and how urban space is
configured to make various modes functional. The politics of mobility is more than
simply a debate over how people and goods are moved around the city and how
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
18/40
space is organized for that movement. It is an extension of ideologies and normative
values about how the city should be configured and by whom.
Hendersons work considers how participants in transportation and land use debates
struggle to represent and reconfigure urban space in order to promote particular forms
of mobility. These different forms and visions of mobility clearly reflect particular
interests and ideologies, shaped primarily but not exclusively by the shifting political
economy of capitalism.
Transportation has played a key role in the development of both cities and
capitalism. A major determining factor in the production of urban space, transportation
infrastructure links together the sites of extraction, production, consumption and social
reproduction so vital to the accumulation of capital (Harvey 1985). Economic and
political pressures have always driven the expansion of transportation infrastructure, as
business interests have struggled to persuade governments to provide the means of
accelerating the circulation of goods and people, and improving access to raw materials
and markets. Growth entrepreneurs seeking to increase the exchange value of their
property have long been concerned with promoting and expanding transportation
infrastructure such as ports, railways and roadways because this increases the
accessibility of land parcels and opens up new lands to speculation and development
(Logan and Molotch 1987). Throughout the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth
century, this synergy between the expansion of transportation infrastructure, urban form
and capitalist development was met with widespread public support, bolstered by
modernist identifications of progress and freedom with the speed, spectacle and status
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
19/40
of motorized mobility. Sheller and Urry (2000) use the term automobility to capture
this linkage between automobile production and infrastructure, urban form,
consumption patterns, and associated social practices and desires.
Cities have been shaped and continually reshaped by the demand for more and better
transportation circuits, from waterways to railways to roadways, subway systems and
flight corridors (Hanson 1995). The high-density nodes prevalent in the nineteenth
century expanded out along streetcar and railway lines, creating corridors and nodes of
development with commercial activities concentrated at transportation axes and in
downtown areas. The development of the first low-density suburbs, the further
stratification of urban space along class lines, and the gradual decentralization of
commercial and industrial activities were all accelerated by the emergence of the private
automobile. By the mid twentieth century, the proliferation of highways supported rapid
urban and suburban expansion, particularly in North America where the automobile
industry had a profound influence on shaping the course of transportation planning,
urban development and patterns of consumption around the automobile and associated
industries (Freund 1993). From this autocentric perspective, maintaining and increasing
traffic circulation by improving the capacity and efficiency of roadways is the primary
goal of transportation planning. Issues of transportation accessibility and the ecological
impacts of automobility are seen as secondary or ignored entirely.
The political ecology of mobility I present in my dissertation is concerned with
understanding the relationships between transportation, urban form and the use of urban
nature, and explaining how this particular conflict over transportation and development
1
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
20/40
was shaped by differing visions and narratives of the city, nature and sustainability. I
examine how particular visions and narratives achieved a hegemonic status and how
they were challenged by alternative views, in order to better understand how more
equitable and inclusive alternatives can be promoted. My analysis also directs attention
toward the multi-scalar networks and relationships involved in the (re)production of
urban environments, demonstrating that efforts to define and implement sustainable
transportation necessarily entail conflict over the relevant scales of authority and action.
The Social Production of Urban Space, Scale and Nature
As Peter Walker (2003) notes in his discussion of the application of political ecology to
First World contexts, it is important to consider how local conditions interact with
broader scale processes. Walker calls for regional political ecologies that situate
local-scale dynamics within larger regional and global contexts. I attempt to do this in
my dissertation, situating the social, ecological and political economic dynamics of the
expressway conflict within the larger context of regional and global change. In
particular, I touch upon the larger context of environmental politics within and beyond
the Greater Toronto Area, Canadas colonial past and present, and the political
economic and ideological currents of change associated with economic globalization.
Political ecology has always been attentive to the spatial dimensions of ecological
and socio-economic change, and the way that those spatial relationships are transformed
and utilized within political conflicts. Not surprisingly, the material and discursive
production of geographical scale has become a central thematic in analyses of the
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
21/40
metabolic interactions and networked relationships that constitute urban environments.
While there has been a flourishing of academic interest in the social production of scale
in recent years, particularly within human geography, much of this work has focused on
the rescaling of social, political and economic relationships that has come to be
associated with globalization and, to a lesser extent, the ways that these rescaling
processes have been resisted and contested (Brenner et al. 2002; Herod and Wright
2002; McMaster and Sheppard 2004).
A central aspect of the politics of scale is the use of scalar narratives to influence
political outcomes by framing socio-spatial relations in particular ways, creating
political space (Magnusson 1996) for advancing particular visions of social, political,
economic and ecological relationships. Hegemonic narratives seek to frame conflicts
within and across particular spatial boundaries, limiting or opening up the boundaries of
political debate and action. Such research has fruitfully begun to explore how social,
political and economic relationships stretch across, jump between, and transform spatial
divisions and borders, as actors struggle to define and control the relevant scales of
organization and authority (Smith 1996; Swygedouw 1997; Brenner 1999; Marston
2000; Gough 2004). Until recently, little attention has been paid to the roles that
ecological processes, and symbolic representations of nature, play in the production of
geographical scale (Kurtz 2003; Swyngedouw 2004a, 2004b; Brown and Purcell 2005;
Rangan and Kull 2008).
Study of the socio-ecological relationships and networks that produce urban space
naturally focuses upon how these scalar configurations are utilized and transformed
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
22/40
through struggles over the meaning and direction of urban development (Swyngedouw
and Heynen 2003; Desfor and Keil 2004; Oddie 2008). Such research is vital, both for
understanding the pivotal role that the transformation of urban nature plays in the social
and spatial conditions of cities, and for more effectively intervening in development
initiatives that are socially and environmentally damaging. As I hope to demonstrate,
attention to the politics of scale is particularly important for the study of the political
ecology of urban transportation and land development, which invariably involves
material transformations and symbolic representations of nature that stretch across
spatial scales and are continually altered by political struggle. Destructive forms of
urban transportation and development are sustained by cultural norms, governmental
regulations and socio-ecological relationships that become fixed and un-fixed through
political contestation. Challenging these norms, regulations and socio-ecological
relationships requires a politics that can expose the interests and ideologies that support
them and build persuasive alternatives without becoming trapped at a single scale of
analysis and action (Brown and Purcell 2005).
Research on the social production of scale, and urban political ecology more broadly,
draws upon geographical work on the social production of urban space. This work
invites us to understand space not simply as a physical container or background for
political struggle but rather as material and symbolic spaces whose meaning and value
are continued reproduced through social relations and practices (Gottdiener 1985; Soja
1989; Lefebvre 1991). In this way, spaces are understood as contested terrain, social
products that necessarily involve political contestation. Social relationships are
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
23/40
understood, in turn, as inherently spatial that is to say, always articulated within and
through particular spaces and, increasingly, across geographical scales. As Edward Soja
(1989: 81) writes, commenting on the formative work of Henri Lefebvre, this socio-
spatial dialectic insists that social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-reactive,
interdependent; that social relations of production are both space-forming and space-
contingent.7
Subsequent work on the social production of space has examined the pivotal roles
that material organization and symbolic representation of city spaces play in the
contested processes of urbanization. Much of this research is grounded in a tradition of
urban political economy that emphasizes the relationships between the state, class and
capital accumulation but has incorporated new approaches to understanding the
connections between the material processes of urban life and the symbolic
representation of those processes through culture and discourse (Zukin 1991;
Beauregard 1993; Harvey 1996, 2000; Massey et al. 2000). These approaches draw
upon poststructuralist and feminist theories of difference that highlight the complexities
of social life and the ways that culture and language mediate our experience of the
world (Grosz 1995; Staeheli 1996; Rose 1996). This research has prompted a
7 Lefebvres work explored this dialectic in the context of urbanization, politics and capitalist
development, articulating a trialectic of socially producing urban space. Firstly, perceivedspace is constituted by the everyday practices and routines that are carried out in a given space.
These spatial practices reflect a societys mode of production (e.g. industrial production) and
tend to reproduce the social relations that support this mode of production. Secondly,
conceived space consists of abstract, totalizing representations of space that seek to fix the
meaning of the space in terms of pre-planned functions. Thirdly, lived space refers to theways that spaces are experienced, imagined and utilized by those who actively inhabit them,
often in ways that contradict or challenge dominant definitions of their purpose and value
(Lefebvre 1991).
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
24/40
reconsideration of Marxist political economy that does not privilege relations of
production as the fundamental source of social conflict, but does examine overlapping
forms of oppression and identity formation, and does pay close attention to agency,
identity and strategies of resistance as well as political economic structures and
constraints (Tajbakhsh 2001). These theories resist the tendency to reduce urban
research and politics to a single dominant mode of explanation or ideology, encouraging
research that examines the interface between social identity and spatial practices in
urban analysis (Eade and Mele 2001).
Similarly, geographical research on the social production of nature invites us to
consider nature and environment as invariably and unavoidably experienced,
defined and understood through language, culture and diverse material practices. Nature
is understood as an amalgam of biophysical and social phenomena that is always
invested with changing cultural meanings and shaped by shifting political and economic
relationships (Smith 1984; Fitzsimmons 1989; Braun and Castree 1998; Escobar 1998;
Castree and Braun 2001; Castree 2005). Environmental knowledge of natural processes,
organisms and ecosystems is always mediated by historical and contingent processes of
social interaction and signification. In this sense, natural and social phenomena are
coproduced (Jasanoff 1990). According to Tim Forsyth, The concept of
coproduction does not imply there is no external reality or biophysical world that
exists beyond human experience. But it does meant that knowledge about such a
biophysical world cannot be separated from social influences, and particularly from
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
25/40
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
26/40
a future where class, gender, race and interplace relations might be configured
along more just and equitable lines.
Environmental Imaginaries, Frames and Ideologies
One of the more useful concepts for examining the interface between the material and
the symbolic in the context of urban political ecology, and for countering the tendency
toward an overemphasis on symbolic and discursive politics, is the notion of
environmental imaginaries. This concept was introduced by Richard Peet and Michael
Watts (1996: 263) and based on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1994). Peet and
Watts argue that each society carries what we refer to as an environmental imaginary,
a way of imagining nature, including visions of those forms of social and individual
practice which are ethically proper and morally right with regard to nature (1996:
263).9 They maintain that these normative, place-based visions of the relationship
between nature and humanity are developed and articulated through regional
discursive formations certain modes of thought, logics, themes, styles of expression,
and typical metaphors (ibid: 16) that highlight particular socio-ecological relationships
and actors, while excluding others. These discursive formations are grounded in
everyday practices and expressed through particular political-economic and institutional
spaces. Peet and Watts see this as reciprocal relationship between thought and nature.
That is to say that nature is socially constructed through language and culture but the
9 Edward Soja (2000: 324) offers a similar definition of urban imaginaries as mental or
cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretive grids through which we think about,experience, evaluate and decide to act in the places, spaces and communities in which we live.
However, there is here no recognition of the central role that nature plays in these mappings and
interpretations of urban space.
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
27/40
social is also naturally constructed as natural organisms, processes and landscapes
invariably influence the way we think, reason and imagine.
Peet and Watts propose that political ecologists have much to gain from studying
the processes by which environmental imaginaries are formed, contested and practiced
in the course of specific trajectories of political-economic change (ibid: 263). Yet there
has been surprisingly little attention directed towards this research agenda, particularly
in an urban context (exceptions include Cowell and Thomas 2002; McGregor 2004;
Huber and Currie 2007). My dissertation research develops these ideas further by
exploring the urban environmental imaginaries through which particular transportation
and development practices come to be accepted as necessary or natural. Following
Peet and Watts, I present urban environmental imaginaries as normative visions of
socio-ecological relationships, represented in everyday discourse and familiar images of
urban nature and landscapes, that are shaped by changing cultural norms, political
economic conditions and struggles over the meaning and control of urban development.
This is particularly relevant to a political ecology of transportation and mobility, as an
aspect of urbanization and urban life that is dramatically shaped by political economic
changes, saturated with culturally mediated values and desires, and increasingly the
subject of intense political contestation. Urban environmental imaginaries constitute the
ideological terrain upon which these struggles occur and with which political actors
engage in the effort to promote the acceptance of alternative visions and practices.
This approach is based, in part, on recent work in cultural geography that explores
landscapes as the products of material and symbolic contestation (Mitchell 2000;
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
28/40
Duncan and Duncan 2001; Walker and Fortmann 2003). These critical analyses of
landscapes, from wilderness areas to shopping malls, aim to reveal the historical
conditions of labour and social struggle involved in their construction, thereby
contextualizing places, practices and relationships that are represented as natural and
necessary. By understanding how and why a given landscape is defined, represented
and invested within meaning, and how and why particular people and particular
activities are sanctioned and others discouraged, one can gain a better grasp of how
hegemonic socio-ecological relationships are sustained and challenged by discursive
representations and material transformations of space.
In my research, I distinguish between environmental imaginaries, as normative
visions of urban nature, and the political framing efforts of social movements that are
combined to form overarching political storylines or narratives, arguing that political
narratives always develop and change in a reciprocal relationship with these more
widely accepted and often implicit place-based conceptions of nature and the city.
Narratives are modified through changes in the frames that are used to represent
particular issues, actors and events in the debate. Political frames, then, are strategic
representations of issues, actors and events within a political struggle, articulated and
re-articulated in the effort to clearly and persuasively foreground particular
interpretations (Goffman 1974; Snow and Benford 1988a, 1988b, 1992, 2000; Tarrow
1994). According to Snow and Benford (1988b: 137) a master frame is an interpretive
schemata that simplifies and condenses the world out there by selectively punctuating
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
29/40
and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences and sequences of actions within
ones present or past environment.
In recent years, this concept of cultural framing within social movements has been
rightly criticized for assuming an instrumental or structural interpretation of cultural
politics that reduces the production and reception of movement identities and values to a
kind of strategic marketing, based on a rational choice view of political agency which
narrowly interprets cultural practices as individual strategic actions, abstracted from
the relational actions, networks and group processes in which they occur (Steinberg
2002: 210). Accordingly, there is little explanation of how and why movements develop
particular arguments and values, how and why these values change over time, and how
and why their efforts at meaning making are accepted or rejected by others through
political struggle and debate (Masson 1997; Olivier and Johnston 2000; Goodwin and
Jasper 2004).
As Dominique Masson (1997: 64) argues, theorists have to account for the
positionality of both the actor (the frame producer) and of the target audience (be it
supporters or state agencies) in social conflicts and in the more immediate context of
their interaction. In addition, to explain why certain frames are adopted, why they
resonate or not, succeed or not, or why they are produced at all, they should also
consider the hegemony of dominant ideologies, the prevalence of institutional
discourses (for example, the discourse of rights), as well as movements symbolic
constructions of a higher order such as movement identities (the logic of the name) or
ideologies. Along similar lines, Olivier and Johnston (2000) call for an approach that
2
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
30/40
combines the analysis of frames with a revitalized conception of ideological analysis
that traces the historical development of core political concepts, values and norms
through the words, symbols and actions of social movements.
To frame an ideology as a frame is to say that the social psychological issues are
paramount. By contrast, to frame an ideology as an ideology is to call attention to the
ideas on their own terms, to the structure of beliefs about a society (its social theory),and to its ethical, moral and political content, to its values and norms. It is to
understand the origin and logic of those beliefs, and potentially to be prepared to
assess that belief system against ones own meaning system (Olivier and Johnston
2000: 13).
Ideology was long considered an indispensable tool for understanding society and
politics but has become an unfashionable concept over the last twenty years or so,
primarily due to poststructuralist critiques of the alleged limitations and essentialist
qualities of structuralist interpretations, particularly of the Marxist variety (Baudrillard
1988; Lyotard 1984; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). However, a number of theorists have
more recently attempted to revive and rehabilitate the concept of ideology,
incorporating some of these poststructural criticisms but demonstrating the continued
relevance and importance of the concept as an analytical tool (Eagleton 1991; Van Dijk
1995, 1998; Freeden 1996, 2003; Malesevic and MacKenzie 2002; Sunderlin 2002;
Talshir et al. 2006). Sinisa Malesevic (2002) persuasively argues that poststructuralism
reduces the concept of ideology to the structuralist Marxist notion of false
consciousness and fails to consider the contributions of other intellectual traditions.
Malesevic calls for a shift from structure-centered approaches to agency-centered
approaches that consider how and why individuals are motivated to believe in
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
31/40
particular ideologies, and a related shift from the form of ideologies (what ideologies
do) to analysis of their content. To this end, he proposes an analytical framework that
examines 1) the conceptualization of cultural values and economic and political
relationships; 2) representations of social actors; 3) the use of language and images
within ideological texts; and 4) the representation of counter-ideologies. Finally,
Malesevic (ibid: 106) emphasizes the importance of the distinction between normative
and operative ideology or ideology as officially represented by its proponents and
ideology as it functions and operates in the circumstance of daily routine.
In my dissertation research, I apply this general framework to the political ecology of
transportation and development, emphasizing the importance of representations of
urban nature and socio-ecological relationships. The concept of urban environmental
imaginaries is used to identify normative visions of the relationship between
urbanization and nature that are formed and reformed in a reciprocal relationship with
the political narratives of social movements, providing a discursive field that shapes
the limits of political discourse and is shaped in turn by political narratives that support
or challenge these widely accepted visions of urbanization and nature. In place of a
discourse analysis that understands political contestation exclusively in terms of the
struggle for hegemony between competing narratives, I aim to show how the political
framing efforts of actors in the Red Hill Creek Expressway debate were shaped by
larger systems of meaning that changed over time in response to changing political
economic conditions, cultural norms and competing ideological narratives related to
mobility, progress and development.
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
32/40
This is an attempt to offer what Marc Steinberg (2002: 211) describes as a dialogic
analysis of social movements, viewing frames, ideologies and movements themselves
as relations between people in communication, ranging from speech to text to images
and symbols. Drawing upon the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) and Antonio
Gramsci (1971), Steinberg argues that political contestation always occurs within a
discursive field that is constrained by dominant political narratives and widely
accepted cultural norms. Political contestation is not simply a matter of competition
between self-contained hegemonic and counter-hegemonic frames or ideologies but
rather an interaction between different narratives and visions in which domination can
never be total, as the successful appropriation and reworking of discourse in one
context contains the potential for resurgent hegemonic meanings in another (Steinberg
2002: 213). This is illustrated in my research by examination of the different ways in
which the language of sustainability, development and democracy has been
appropriated, altered and re-appropriated over the course of this particular conflict.
Research Methodology
My research relied upon three methodological approaches: discursive analysis of
relevant texts and images; discursive and ideological analysis of twenty-eight semi-
structured interviews; and participant observation. Firstly, I looked at a wide variety of
publications, press releases, websites, media reports, maps, artwork, videos and other
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
33/40
visual representations produced by prominent actors in the expressway debate,
including the City of Hamilton, the Hamilton Spectator, View Magazine, the Hamilton
Independent Media Centre, Friends of Red Hill Valley, Showstoppers, the Hamilton
Chamber of Commerce, the Get Hamilton Moving Task Force, Hamilton-Halton
Homebuilders, Hamilton Action for Social Change, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
and the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force. Drawing primarily on the tools of
critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2001; van Dijk 2001) and the analytical
framework outlined above, I examined how these texts and images were used to frame
arguments related to the expressway project and paid particular attention to normative
representations of particular places, issues and actors. I consulted local history books
and relevant data on opinion polls; campaign contributions in recent municipal
elections; local development charges and recent urban boundary expansions;
demographic shifts, levels of employment and types of industries in different sections of
the city; and assessments of local air, soil and water pollution during the last thirty
years.
I also conducted twenty-eight semi-structured interviews with prominent individuals
involved in the expressway conflict, including real-estate developers, politicians,
planners and various social activists.10 My interview questions were open-ended to
allow interviewees to speak at length about their interpretation and/or their
organizations interpretation of the expressway conflict and related debates. I would
10
Please see Appendix A and B for consent form and sample interview questions.
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
34/40
pose additional questions to probe for information regarding the history and geography
of this conflict and in order to solicit responses to the arguments raised by opposing
groups. All interviews were digitally recorded and subject to the ideological analysis
outlined above. This process involved transcribing each interview and then reading
carefully a number of times, noting recurring words, phrases and themes. These words,
phrases and themes were then summarized and seemingly related concepts were
visually mapped out to create a visual network of associated discursive themes and
ideological concepts from each interview. I then compared all the interviews in order to
identified themes and concepts that were shared, grouping interviews together based on
these commonalities.
On the basis of these interviews and my analysis of various publications, I created an
outline of four basic political narratives, noting the interpretative frames that they
utilized at different points in time and the ideological content of those narratives. They
can be summarized as follows.
1) Growth and Progress Narrative: Relying upon the master frames of urban
growth, which presents economic and population growth as universally
beneficial; freedom and prosperity, which valorizes individual mobility,
wealth, safety and security; and representative democracy, which presents
democratic citizenship as primarily involving the election of governmental
representatives and optional engagement in consultation processes.
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
35/40
2) Conservation Narrative: Relying upon the master frames of urban
conservation, suggesting an approach to economic development and societal
progress that protects significant ecological areas and transitions towards
industries, urban forms and transportation modes that reduce ecological damage;
health and urban nature, emphasizing the importance of nature for human and
non-human health on a citywide scale, access to natural areas, more compact
urban development, and the reduction of air and water pollution; and
participatory democracy, presenting democratic citizenship as primarily
involving active engagement in municipal politics and decision-making
processes.
3) Public Ecology narrative: Relying upon the master frames of urban ecology,
which conceptualizes urbanization in terms of interconnections between
ecological health, socio-spatial justice and economic development, and
advocates forms of development that address these problems simultaneously;
environmental justice, which highlights the unequal social and spatial
distribution of healthy and unhealthy environments; and ecological
citizenship, emphasizing the importance of public engagement in the
monitoring and improvement of urban environments.
4) Colonialism narrative: Relying upon the master frames of imperialism,
highlighting the historical and contemporary oppression and displacement of
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
36/40
Aboriginal people; environmental justice, as outlined above, but with
particular emphasis on environmental racism; environmental reciprocity,
emphasizing indigenous ties to the land, responsibility for future generations and
the earth as a living organism; and Aboriginal sovereignty, highlighting
indigenous ownership and control of the land and the recognition of treaty
rights.
These narratives and frames, and the ways in which they change over the course of the
conflict, are explained in more detail within subsequent chapters.
On the basis of my interviews and my historical research, I also identified the basic
features of two dominant imaginaries of urban nature, one tied to Hamiltons unique
physical geography and history of industrial manufacturing during the 19 th and 20th
centuries, and another emergent imaginary of urban sustainability shaped by the
decline of manufacturing and the intensification of political debate over the future
course of urban development and transportation over the past three decades, as
exemplified by the Red Hill Creek Expressway conflict. The industrial imaginary is
outlined in Chapter 2 and expanded upon throughout the text, alongside the gradual
emergence of the urban sustainability imaginary. These normative visions of nature
were expressed through representations of the valley, variously described as a wasteland
and garbage dump; an urban wilderness and ecological oasis; a sacred burial ground;
and a symbol of successful or potential ecological modernization, and the expressway,
various represented as an economic catalyst; an ecological disaster; an instance of
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
37/40
environmental injustice; and an award-winning example of ecological restoration and
green infrastructure.
Finally, I relied on participant observation as a life-long citizen of Hamilton and as a
community activist who has worked with a number of local groups including
Environment Hamilton, Citizens at City Hall, the Hamilton chapter of the Council of
Canadians, and the Peoples Agenda. Between 1999 and 2004, I participated in some of
the later attempts to halt completion of the expressway, including various letter-writing
campaigns, public protests and the picketing of construction in the valley, and draw
upon these experiences in Chapters 6 and 7.
Chapter Overview
Chapter One has provided an overview of theoretical work that I am drawing upon and
responding to, and has outlined the methodology I used in my research. Chapter Two,
Water, Stone and Steel: Hamiltons Socio-Ecological Roots, provides a history of
Hamilton that explores the relationships between social, ecological and political
economic change, showing how material transformations and symbolic representations
of nature played a pivotal role in urban form, planning and governance. Here, I
introduce the industrial imaginary as a vision of urban nature that emphasizes the
productive transformation of nature in the name of progress. I also discuss
infrastructure as a symbol of this progress, in the context of a functionalist conception
of urban metabolism in which urban space and nature can be neatly compartmentalized
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
38/40
and the socio-ecological costs of development 'externalized', conceptually and
materially.
Chapter Three, Accelerating Development and Resistance: Contested Landscapes
and Political Narratives, introduces the expressway project in the context of
modernization, automobility and associated infrastructure, linked to suburbanization
and the Keynesian welfare state. I discuss the emergence of a pro-growth urban regime
focused on suburban expansion, roadways and manufacturing, and outline the "growth
and progress" narrative articulated by these interests. Finally, I outline the
"conservationist" counter-narrative articulated by local environmental groups during the
1970s and 1980s.
Chapter 4, Re-Envisioning Urban Development? Globalization, Ecological
Modernization and Vision 2020, discusses the emergence of the globally influential
discourse of ecological modernization, in the context of economic globalization and the
gradual decline of Hamiltons manufacturing sector. I discuss significant shifts in the
dominant narratives articulated through the expressway debate, first through a
controversial environmental impact assessment process, and then in relation to
Hamiltons Vision 2020 urban sustainability plan and the subsequent cancellation of
provincial funding for the expressway under the New Democratic Party (NDP).
Chapter 5, Urban Sustainability, Neoliberalism and Public Ecology, examines the
impacts of neoliberalization on urban politics and policy in Ontario following the defeat
of the NDP by the Progressive Conservative party, and the subsequent changes in pro-
expressway strategies. I examine the rise of new strategies of resistance to the
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
39/40
expressway, including emphasis on municipal finances, ecological citizenship and
coalition-building, alongside the intensification of pro-expressway activism galvanized
by the attempt to subject the expressway project to a federal environmental assessment.
These new approaches are analyzed in terms of the greening of the dominant narrative
of growth and progress and the emergence of a narrative of public ecology that
emphasizes environmental justice and the democratization of control over urban
development.
Chapter 6, Contesting Development, Democracy and Aboriginal Rights in the Red
Hill Valley, briefly discusses the emergence of a vision of greenfield development
beyond the city limits, based around the expansion of transportation infrastructure,
before turning to a series of confrontations in the Red Hill Valley that involves various
forms of direct action, including an Aboriginal land occupation. In this chapter, I
discuss the interaction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists, placing the
expressway conflict in the larger spatial and temporal context of colonialism.
Chapter 7, Beyond Red Hill Valley: Greening Development and Democratizing
Ecology, presents the expressway as an example of neo-Fordist ecological
modernization, examines the ideological dimensions of this conception of urban
development, and discusses the ongoing debate surrounding the expansion of the
Hamilton International Airport as an extension of the expressway debate. I then outline
new forms of environmental activism that have emerged in the wake of this conflict,
including the Six Nations uprising in the nearby town of Caledonia. Drawing upon my
interviews with Aboriginal activists, I provide a constructive critique of the public
3
-
8/14/2019 Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 1
40/40
ecology narrative in order to suggest ways that this vision of environmental justice and
democratization can be deepened and expanded beyond the conceptual limits of the city,
the Canadian state, and liberal notions of democratic citizenship. Finally, I provide a
summary of the findings and contributions of my dissertation, and point to some
directions for future research and action.