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This conference examines a paradox: urban sustainability initiatives that are so vital in countering climate change can, through their improvements, contribute to driving up rents and driving out residents, and in the process, exacerbate sprawl, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change itself. Our speakers examine this growing link between environmental improvement and social displacement and ask: How is it possible to break this link? What would it mean to include affordable housing and equity within sustainability efforts? And what are the consequences—socially and ecologically—if we don't?
We begin with a focus on the housing crisis that is transforming our own state and region. Renowned for greening and sustainability initiatives—from transit-oriented development to locavore food sheds to green building—California is also home to the most unaffordable housing markets in the country, including Santa Cruz. Thus greening interacts with gentrification and increased consumption, declining diversity and rising inequality, displacement and longer commutes, and multiple environmental health and ecosystem impacts, including habitat fragmentation, loss of groundwater, and increased carbon footprints. Our region, however, is not alone. We bring together a new generation of scholars, planners, and activists addressing 'the housing question' across the Americas —in Mexico City and New York, Seattle and Medellin, Sao Paulo and Oakland— as well as emerging strategies for democratizing the green city.
Participants
Hillary Angelo, University of California, Santa Cruz
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University and Urban Democracy Lab
Joan Byron, Pratt Institute and Neighborhoods First Fund
Karen Chapple, University of California, Berkeley
Melissa Checker, City University of New York (Queens College)
Daniel Aldana Cohen, University of Pennsylvania
Lindsey Dillon, University of California, Santa Cruz
Gordon Douglas, San Jose State and the Institute for Public Knowledge
Miriam Greenberg, University of California, Santa Cruz
Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan
Claudia Lopez, University of California, Santa Cruz
Oscar Sosa Lopez, University of Georgia
Steve McKay, University of California, Santa Cruz
Dawn Phillips, Causa Justa:: Just Cause and U.S. Right to the City Alliance
Jennifer L. Rice, University of Georgia
Julie Sze, University of California, Davis
David Wachsmuth, McGill University
Camilo Sol Zamora, Causa Justa:: Just Cause, Housing Rights Campaign
Co-Sponsors
Rachel Carson College, UC Santa Cruz
The Sustainability Office, UC Santa Cruz
Sociology Department, UC Santa Cruz
Science & Justice Research Center
Social and Environmental Practice in the Arts at UCSC