City in a Garden

Abstract

The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city’s identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region’s environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a “city in a garden” perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century. In telling Austin’s story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin’s mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city’s midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin’s green growth.

Dams and the Age of Abundance: Hydraulic Boosterism, Regional Growth, and the Reemergence of Water Scarcity in Central Texas

“…81 And for others, Town Lake could be the centerpiece of a planned city, where new highways carried people from its shores to the suburban homes and new shopping malls that now ringed the older city. 82 While these groups would battle over the future of the city in the coming decades, in 1962 they all agreed that the finished envirotechnical system that harnessed the river was an improvement that citizens could be proud of and that would become a symbol of all the city had to offer. Water allowed the city itself to prosper.…”

Climate Adaptation as a Racial Project: An Analysis of Color-Blind Flood Resilience Efforts in Austin, Texas

“…75 Like many cities in the United States, Austin is fundamentally a racialized space characterized by systemic and pervasive social inequalities that have been created and maintained through multiple racist ideologies and practices. 76 Therefore, planning in these spaces is never neutral and should be framed as either intentionally working to enact an antiracism praxis or maintaining racial inequalities.…”