There is increasing competition between cities to attract investment. Older industrial cities have a particularly difficult time. It is in this context that there is an attempt to rewrite the meaning of the industrial city. Constructing a new, more positive picture includes the marketing of a new image, constructing a new Environment, and reorienting a city% relationship with its physical environment. The process involves many actors, from business leaders eager to stimulate investment to local citizens' groups seeking to reclaim community space. This paper examines these issues in Syracuse, New York, and documents the important changes in civic boosterism, the construction of a new iconography of the downtown, and the evolving discourse on environmental pollution.Key Words: industrial cities, image, civic boosterism, pollution, downtown i~~n o g r a p h~.

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The study of human—nature relationships has long been central to geographic inquiry. Recent attempts to reconcile the growing demands of the international economy with the equally important concerns about environmental protection can be seen as one challenge to the dominant construction of human—nature relationships. Attempts to ‘green trade’ are well illustrated in the debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the environment. This paper presents three arguments. First, the growing influence of the environmental movement in the USA during the past twenty-five years has embedded concern for the environment in political culture. This ‘politics of the environment’ is exemplified in NAFTA's explicit goal of promoting sustainable development. Including sustainable development as a specified goal thus provided environmentalists a legitimate entry into the NAFTA debate over free trade, development, and environmental protection. Second, it is argued that the NAFTA debate highlights several trade—environment dilemmas, dilemmas which must be addressed in order to reconcile economics and the environment. Particular attention will be paid to the debate about NAFTA and environmental sovereignty. Third, the NAFTA debate brought together two distinct communities: free traders and environmentalists. Far from being two exclusive communities, in this paper I assert that economics and the environment must be seen as interdependent forces which will increasingly interact with each other. In the case of NAFTA, these two communities not only interacted with each other, they created a common ground which made supporting NAFTA acceptable to both interest groups. The creation of a common ground took place through negotiation, debate, and compromise, and thus is a fundamental engagement with human—nature constructions. I conclude that we can expect the environmental community to participate in future trade and development issues because environmentalists now see these areas as critical to reconciling economic—environment and human—nature relationships.

This paper gathers potent visual images of one city, Los Angeles (L.A.), by examining three contemporary films-LA. Story (199 l), Boyz N the Hood (199 I), and Grand Canyon ( 199 1). It argues that popular culture, and in particular popular film, is an integral part of the portrayal of the cultural landscape. This paper primarily uses the assorted visual images of the urban landscape in considering how this one city has been recently depicted. The three films reveal a city shaped by rapid changes in urban America, depicting Los Angeles as an urban area composed of a fragmented landscape divided into many geographies: L.A. as a realm of simulations and void of consequences; L.A. as a city under siege, a place of epidemic violence and fear; L.A. as a place obsessed with security and control; L.A. as an increasingly ambiguous and chaotic place. Far from concluding that cities have become so fragmented that they are ageographic, these films reveal various geographies that are rooted in economic, political, and cultural contexts. Attention to the "restlessness" of cities and the postmodern focus on the instability and chaotic nature of urban experience actually challenge geographers to uncover the multitude of geogruphies of place. Interpreting the many geographies of Los Angeles shows that film can reveal a uniquely visual catalog of human experience of place, supplementing the ways in which we decipher place image and representation. This paper suggests that film is one way by which previously marginalized groups, such as blacks, can disseminate ideas from the margins and provide alternative experiencesof place. Geographers should add film to the cache of qualitative data that constructs an urban experience through images and representation, widening the discussion of what is place.

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