Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin by Eliot M. Tretter (review)

Contemporary development theory and practice presume, following Richard Florida, that thriving cities attract a diverse, creative, and educated workforce through cultural eclecticism and environmental sustainability. Austin, Texas, celebrated as "weird," tops many lists of such cities. Eliot M. Tretter contends that Austin's culture was less important to its development than were decisions made beginning in the 1950s by a coalition of local, state, and federal entities, particularly University of Texas (UT) officials, to remake the city's institutions and physical spaces to attract investment in the electronics industry. This coalition and its successors razed working-class and minority neighborhoods and prioritized the needs of research professionals and investors, showing that the creative-class city is a "system of asymmetrical power relations that has engendered both uneven development among neighborhoods and inequalities among peoples" (p. 142).

Tretter divides his book into two parts. The first, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s, describes the rise of UT's growth coalition, while the second critically evaluates the selective incorporation of environmentalism into growth politics after 1990. Readers familiar with recent studies of urban renewal will recognize in the first part a description of local leaders empowered by the Housing Act of 1949 to declare land blighted, seize it, and redevelop it. Tretter enhances this history by arguing that UT, spurred by a 1957 commission to generate more lucrative intellectual property, adroitly linked its need for research facilities to the property value goals of the Austin Urban Renewal Agency. Later, UT leveraged the university's bond power to subsidize the costs of private production facilities through university-industry partnerships.

The second part addresses contemporary development politics. Municipal officials, drawn evenly from developer and conservationist constituencies, beganin theearly1990stoembracea "sustainability fix" for a political impasse that allowed Austin's suburbs to capture development (p. 7). Intensifying land use in central Austin accommodated state support for suburban sprawl, mollified influential water quality activists, and attracted professionals to redeveloped neighborhoods, enhancing land value, while pushing burdens of pollution and displacement onto politically marginalized communities of color.

Tretter effectively critiques both "creative class" and "smart growth" analyses by highlighting the elite politics that created them and the skewed distribution of their costs and benefits (pp. 146, 147). A knowledge economy did not spring spontaneously from brainpower gathered at UT; it was nurtured by public commitment to physical and institutional infrastructure that ignored working-class and minority constituencies and by UT's turn toward entrepreneurial pursuits. And "smart growth" policies reconciled the concerns of affluent and liberal environmentalists with growth by supporting redevelopment and gentrification in central and eastside Austin neighborhoods. As a disciplinary matter, some historians may find Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin less a history of UT's and Austin's intertwined development than a set of essays that use history to (again, effectively) debunk influential development pieties. The organization of the book does not always present recurrent themes to best advantage; for example, a discussion of enduring at-large council elections (which diluted the power of students, minorities, and the poor) would have lent a useful structure to following chapters had it been presented in the introduction of the book rather than in chapter 6. While Tretter's writing is concise, the book is slim, offering a chronology of plans, ideas, and decisions without extensive engagement with the voices of either the elites driving policy changes or the disadvantaged affected by them. That said, historians writing studies of the knowledge-economy cities Austin exemplifies should find in this book a number of provocative ideas to evaluate through future archival research.