Whose "Sense of Place"?: Topophilia, the Grassroots, and Urbanization in Austin, Texas

Grassroots social movements have often formed the basis for academic study of urban culture. Indeed, sociologist Manuel Castells's majestic 1983 The City and the Grassroots vigorously proclaimed the importance of understanding how social movements affect spatial form, cultural production, and relationships in cities. To Castells, collective social practice aimed at changing dominant social and political urban landscapes has the ability to produce truly democratic urban space. The City and the Grassroots was a sweeping analysis of multiple case studies, from the 1871 Paris Commune to the gay rights movement in 1970s San Francisco. In most of Castells's examples, grassroots groups engaged in battles for urban territory with the state and elite economic interests.¹ The work signaled a newfound interest in the city, and more particularly in the idea that urban space was being produced, changed, and reappropriated. Scholars now generally agree that macroeconomic and social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s put an end to the industrial city for good, replacing it with a radically different city aligned with neoliberal regimes and deindustrialization.

Perhaps because of this radical change in urban form, the first massive restructuring since suburbanization just after World War II, Castells was not alone in his interest in cities. Scholars, most notably from disciplines such as geography, architecture, and sociology, but representing myriad fields and methodologies, turned their critical lens toward cities, focusing on what came to be known as "uneven development." Equipped with a reinvigorated focus on space and armed with a sophisticated Marxist theoretical toolbox, these scholars inverted preconceived notions about life in the city. The unevenness of development under capitalism was empirically reflected in class, race, and to a lesser extent gender relations in cities. David Harvey, Mark Gottdiener, Edward Soja, Thomas Sugrue, Janet Abu-Lughod, Joe Feagin, Doreen Massey, Allen J. Scott, William Julius Wilson, and many others led a frontal assault on traditional forms of urban geography and sociology, engendering scholarship designed to link local forms of spatial production, such as suburbanization, ghettoization, gentrification, and uneven financial investment with macroeconomic permutations including globalization, deindustrialization, and multinational corporations.² The focus was clearly on racial minorities and the lower classes, whose lives were often disrupted by new rounds of capitalist restructuring. Not since the Chicago School of urban sociology's golden age in the 1920s has so much academic brain power focused so intensely on cities.

Scholars tended to focus on particular cities and regions while also expanding out of the traditional sites of analysis, New York and Chicago. A loosely based group called the Los Angeles school took that growing megalopolis to be the paradigmatic city of the postwar United States and focused on its immense and sprawling metropolitan area, its relationship to the defense and aeronautics industry, and its particular brand of segregated, decentralized spatial production.³ Others focused on the disheartening failures of older rust belt cities, particularly the embattled city of Detroit, which since the 1960s has been the symbol of urban decline and decay in the United States.⁴ A small but focused body of literature even emerged around the Sunbelt, the somewhat amorphous area in the U.S. South and West that was and is experiencing economic and demographic growth at a faster rate than the North and East are.⁵ It seemed, in fact, that a wealth of scholarly literature documented almost every major U.S. city by the 1990s.

And then there is Austin, Texas. Austin, today the center of a rapidly growing metropolitan area that now includes more than 1.7 million residents, was barely a blip on the urbanist...