Sustainability Studies

Speaker Series

Green Debris: The Byproducts of Sustainable

Urbanism
November 19, 2015 1:00 - 2:30 PM
Genomics 1102A (reception afterward)

Lindsey Dillon is a postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis, in the American

Studies Program. Her work focuses on environmental justice, urban ecologies,
and histories of race and racism in U.S. cities. She received her Ph.D. in
Geography from UC Berkeley in 2014. In addition to writing a book manuscript
on environmental inequalities and race in San Francisco, her other research
projects include chemical biomonitoring technologies and a collaborative project
on "critical sustainabilities". She also serves on the board of the California
Studies Association and teaches at San Quentin Prison. In 2016 she will begin
as Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.
The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard redevelopment project, in southeast San
Francisco, is widely recognized as a model of sustainable urbanism. Today, the
US Navy is cleaning up the polluted military base, while a development company
is in the process of replacing the shipyard with a 700-acre urban landscape of
condominiums, offices, and parks, which includes green design features such as
solar panels, energy efficient street lamps, and restored coastal habitats. At the
same time, the cleanup and new construction work of this sustainable
development project have its own toxic side effects releasing dusts and other
airborne contaminants into the low-income community currently living near the
shipyard. For many residents in Hunters Point today, sustainable urbanism is
more of a dystopia than an ecotopia. In this presentation, I argue that the
dominant notion of sustainability at Hunters Point is only possible through a set
of exclusions and erasures, and that sustainability at the shipyard today is part of
a longer history of how ideas of nature have worked to exclude and erase certain
bodies and histories from the landscape. I also explore alternative analytical
frameworks that enable a critical evaluation of contemporary sustainability
projects, and bring us closer to realizing more socio-ecologically just futures.

Co-sponsored by the Gender & Sexuality Studies Department and the Center for Ideas & Society