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

The most celebrated and seemingly successful cities in postindustrial America have gotten their fair share of satire in recent years. The HBO series Silicon Valley (2014–present) lampoons the thinly veiled greed and self-congratulatory zeal of techies who only want "to make the world a better place" in San Francisco's Bay Area, while IFC's Portlandia (2011–present) has mocked the eccentric culture of the most quintessentially "hipster" city in the United States. Meanwhile, Austin has remained a beacon of robust growth and favorable press coverage, maintaining an enviable reputation for technological innovation, indie rock, and fish tacos—yet the city has not received quite the same critical gloss as other, similarly hip destinations.

Geographer Eliot M. Tretter aims to set the record straight in his new book Shadows of a Sunbelt City. A former lecturer at the University of Texas, Tretter has a unique vantage point from which to tweak the Texas capital's glowing image, exploring the rise of a university-linked, high-tech economy and the costs it has imposed on those communities that have not been buoyed by the metropolitan area's growth—particularly poorer people of color who had the misfortune to live beside the emerging colossus of UT. The book's subtitle hints at the sundry issues that Tretter engages by narrating the entwined stories of the university and the city, touching upon issues of environmentalism, urban renewal, federal science policy, and the dynamics of tech investment. These varied themes make for a difficult juggling act, but Tretter handles them with admirable skill.

In Tretter's telling, the University of Texas played a commanding role as a driver of both economic development in general and real estate in particular. In partnership with a "local growth coalition," the state of Texas, and federal policymakers, UT managed to cultivate a tech economy in a region that lacked significant innovation prior to World War II. Hence, Austin's story runs on a parallel, if distinct, track with Silicon Valley, Massachusetts's Route 128, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, among other storied examples of high-tech centers throughout the United States. What sets Austin apart is not just its "excessively sunny image" in the media (142). Rather, the city offers a case study of a tech economy more singularly tied to the ambitions and vision of one institution—the University of Texas—than perhaps any other example commonly studied by scholars. Tretter shows how, more so than Harvard or MIT, the University of North Carolina or Duke, or even Stanford in Silicon Valley, this one university steered the evolution of a metropolitan area on a remarkable scale.

The book illuminates the unusual circumstances that shaped the political economy of the University of Texas and its relationship with both the city and the state. A funding mechanism devised in the late nineteenth century provided UT ownership of a massive tract of land in western Texas, which appeared to be more or less useless until the discovery of reserves of oil below the surface. State law required revenues from "subterranean" resources to be reinvested in the university's endowment, while income from grazing rights and other rents on the land could only be spent on infrastructure. Since the oil underground was worth more than the agricultural terrain above, UT found itself unable to maximize the land's value to satisfy the needs of a growing campus. In the 1920s, though, an accommodating state legislature allowed the university to issue bonds against the endowment for new infrastructure. In this way, a once shambolic campus became a giant over the course of the twentieth century. Shadows of a Sunbelt City thus provides an instructive example of how seemingly arbitrary policy choices can generate a kind of path dependency that results in profound consequences for a city's economic, social, and cultural landscape.

Indeed, students...