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 82 nd 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.
Lacking access to stable shelter, infrastructure, and services, houseless people are exposed to a range of environmental hazards. Yet, environmental justice scholars have only begun to consider how environmental justice issues impact unsheltered people. In dialogue with Critical Environmental Justice Studies and geographies of homelessness research, and drawing on seven years of participant observation and a national phone survey of 47 houseless community representatives, this paper begins to chart a baseline Critical Environmental Justice analysis of homelessness. I argue that understanding the environmental justice experiences of houseless people requires attention not only to direct exposure to hazards, but also to criminalization. Police sweeps in downtown and residential areas push people into toxic spaces; when houseless communities express concerns, they risk further eviction. In this way, cities overwhelmingly respond to hazard exposure with displacement, creating a cycle of criminalization, dangerous living conditions, and serial forced removals. Moreover, examining such intersecting hazards and their impacts through a Black feminist lens of intersectionality reveals how systemic violence vis-à-vis environmental hazards is multiplied and magnified for houseless people along lines of race, gender, age, disability status, and so on. By bringing Critical Environmental Justice and geographies of homelessness into conversation, with particular attention to intersectional impacts, scholars and organizers can better attend to the complex suite of issues that differentially shape the lives of houseless people and inspire resistance.
Urban political ecology scholars recognise that a historical perspective is central to elucidating processes of racialised uneven development. In this paper, I articulate a collectively produced “peoples’ history” of the Portland Harbor Superfund Site, recounting how over a century of industrial pollution in Portland, Oregon has disproportionately impacted Native, Black, immigrant and refugee, and houseless residents of all backgrounds—and has spawned collective work for a more just future. I argue that it is imperative for scholars to not only articulate such racialised pasts, however, but also to recognise how those working on the front lines of change draw on their own personal and group experiences to produce shared narratives, particularly across difference and in a context of depoliticised, ahistorical sustainability discourse. The case of the Portland Harbor Community Coalition reveals how the production of a shared history can be an important part of work to redress racialised dispossession and displacement in so‐called green cities.
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