As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low‐carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle‐ and upper‐income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike‐ and pedestrian‐friendly streets, and in higher‐density mixed‐use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower‐income, often non‐white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio‐environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low‐carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower‐income and non‐white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.

COMMENT LEE POWELL/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY© 2 0 1 6 M a c m i l l a n P u b l i s h e r s L i m i t e d , p a r t o f S p r i n g e r N a t u r e . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .

Specters of rationing haunt metro São Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state's center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state's profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation, I propose, through an exploration of the crisis's origins and recent developments that builds on over one year of ethnographic fieldwork, a new approach to ecological scarcity. It revitalizes, in a socioecological and crisis-sensitive form, Manuel Castells's concept of collective consumption politics, with a focus on housing and land use. The question is how acute crises and longstanding socioecological struggles interact, from above and below. In São Paulo, this dilemma takes the form of housing movements' and environmentalists' longstanding estrangement, but prompted by crisis, some leaders are experimenting with cooperation. In an echo of the June 2013 bus fare protests, this fledgling coalition proposes a democratic version of rationing that goes beyond the distribution of water through pipes and that threatens broader power arrangements. Note to reader:This is a pre-publication text, unformatted and missing final copy-edits. This pre-publication text is made available with permission from Duke University Press. For the final version, go to: http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/28/2_79/261.abstract. The full citation of the published text is as follows: Cohen, Daniel Aldana. 2016. "The Rationed City: The Politics of Water, Housing and Land Use in Drought-Parched São Paulo." Public Culture 22(2):261-89.Abstract:Specters of rationing haunt metro São Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state's center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state's profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation, I propose, through an exploration of the crisis's origins and recent developments that builds on over one year of ethnographic fieldwork, a new approach to ecological scarcity. It revitalizes, in a socioecological and crisis-sensitive form, Manuel Castells's concept of collective consumption politics, with a focus on housing and land use. The question is how acute crises and longstanding socioecological struggles interact, from above and below. In São Paulo, this dilemma takes the form of housing movements' and environmentalists' longstanding estrangement, but prompted by crisis, some leaders are experimenting with cooperation. In an echo of the June 2013 bus fare protests, this fledgling coalition proposes a democratic version of rationing that goes beyond the distribution of water through pipes and that threatens broader power arrangements.

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