Sarah E Knuth
Sarah Knuth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research investigates the contemporary intersection of neoliberal urban strategy, new ideas in green economic development and climate change resilience, and ongoing transformations in the global financial system. In places like the United States, making cities energy efficient, low carbon, and resilient means fundamentally reworking existing urban geographies and modes of city building. These radical changes require major upfront investments. Powerful institutions increasingly frame this challenge as a task for experimental finance and the creation of new forms of public and private indebtedness. Simultaneously, they frame it as a massive untapped market for institutional funds in search of novel assets. They describe experimental green fiscal instruments that range from new kinds of municipal bonds to infrastructure trusts, bids to tap into carbon markets, and real estate-tied financial products. In the years since the 2008 financial collapse, cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago have been centers for the working out of these proposals. They have developed climate change plans, major initiatives to retrofit buildings for energy efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and dedicated financing mechanisms. Sarah’s postdoctoral research asks how these instruments are being structured, disseminated, and placed within financial markets, and with what potential repercussions for economic and environmental justice in “financialized” cities.
Sarah’s current project builds on past participatory research on US urban climate change mitigation planning and local resilience, and more particularly on dissertation research she conducted in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Publications are currently available or forthcoming from her work in journals including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, The Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Applied Geography, and Local Environment. Her dissertation explored green economic visions that coalesced around the US urban built environment in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. In it, she argues that finance and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more socioeconomically redistributive visions. Financial innovation is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make sustainable urbanism increasingly risky and exclusionary, bolstering real estate speculation and green gentrification in wealthy cities like San Francisco while withholding badly needed investment from less “creditworthy” cities and regions.
Dissertation chapters and publications explore questions including: why the United States has experienced more success with building energy efficiency than with other fields of “Green New Deal” development; how green real estate is being sold as a new kind of environmental “resource” and a basis for experimental financial engineering; how unruly materialities and urban geographies obstruct these market environmentalist visions; and how green experimentation in US cities is advancing financial institutions’ emerging global investment strategies vis-à-vis climate change, land, and urban (re)development.
Supervisors: Dissertation advisor: Dr. Richard Walker (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Nathan Sayre (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Paul Groth (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Daniel Kammen (UC Berkeley), and Master's thesis advisor: Dr. Brent Yarnal (Penn State University)
Sarah’s current project builds on past participatory research on US urban climate change mitigation planning and local resilience, and more particularly on dissertation research she conducted in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Publications are currently available or forthcoming from her work in journals including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, The Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Applied Geography, and Local Environment. Her dissertation explored green economic visions that coalesced around the US urban built environment in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. In it, she argues that finance and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more socioeconomically redistributive visions. Financial innovation is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make sustainable urbanism increasingly risky and exclusionary, bolstering real estate speculation and green gentrification in wealthy cities like San Francisco while withholding badly needed investment from less “creditworthy” cities and regions.
Dissertation chapters and publications explore questions including: why the United States has experienced more success with building energy efficiency than with other fields of “Green New Deal” development; how green real estate is being sold as a new kind of environmental “resource” and a basis for experimental financial engineering; how unruly materialities and urban geographies obstruct these market environmentalist visions; and how green experimentation in US cities is advancing financial institutions’ emerging global investment strategies vis-à-vis climate change, land, and urban (re)development.
Supervisors: Dissertation advisor: Dr. Richard Walker (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Nathan Sayre (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Paul Groth (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Daniel Kammen (UC Berkeley), and Master's thesis advisor: Dr. Brent Yarnal (Penn State University)
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Papers by Sarah E Knuth
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation. Its ever-present threat, in competitive capitalist struggles and recurrent economic crises, compels capital forward to enclosures of new values and to new realms, techniques, and geographies of production and surplus extraction. It drives bitter struggles among capitalists as different actors, sectors, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere” – with profound consequences for the human and environmental geographies “brought in”, altered, and/or destroyed in such processes. These competitive devaluations, crisis-fueled jostlings, and transformations have a long history. With this special issue, however, we seek to open a lens onto contemporary encounters with devaluation that are novel in significant, yet insufficiently explored ways. Articles collected here consider new forms of value destruction and biophysical wasting as capital compulsively seeks to reproduce itself on an expanded scale – global-systemic and intimate transformations reflected in mainstream narratives of the Anthropocene and a so-called “used” planet (Ellis et al. 2013). Simultaneously, these articles interrogate qualitatively novel ways in which such devaluations have been recast as opportunities for capital accumulation, whether during acute crises or in the context of capitalist volatility-as-usual. Taken as a collection, they forge new analytical ground by illuminating parallels and interrelations between sites of de- and re-valuation usually considered separately: industrial obsolescence and waste-to-resource schemes; rural landscape degradation and ecological restoration; urban blight and redevelopment/gentrification; collapsed financial asset prices and new forms of speculation; and beyond. This discussion suggests key lineaments of an expanded theory of devaluation for capitalism’s contemporary moment – and makes a case for the significance and vitality of such an agenda for further geographic research...
However, decarbonization requires a more substantial confrontation with capitalist ruination-as-usual.
Keywords: retrofitting, planetary repair, green growth, green gentrification, political ecology/economy
Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance’s new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financial institutions invest in land differently, how they are mobilising value arguments and tools and how a growing scarcity of “safe“ assets may push even conservative financial players into new experiments with land and other accumulation frontiers.
RÉSUMÉ Pour comprendre les transformations foncières globales actuelles, il est nécessaire de porter notre attention à la finance et à la manière dont les institutions financières font de la terre
et la propriété des actifs financiers. S’appuyant sur l’économie politique géographique et la littérature sur la financiarisation, je questionne la nature et la temporalité de l’intérêt récent
de la finance pour la terre, à savoir si celui-ci est spéculatif et à court terme ou plutôt une stratégie à long terme. J’étudie comment différents types d’institutions financières investissent dans la terre de manière distincte, quels arguments et outils sont mis de l’avant et comment une rareté croissante des actifs « sécuritaires » peut encourager même des acteurs financiers conservateurs vers de nouvelles expériences avec la terre et vers d’autres frontières d’accumulation.
state, urban, and local levels. Even as a national mitigation agenda solidifies, researchers and political actors might strategically maintain local places and types of landscape –
center cities, older and newer suburbs, and rural areas in different United States regions – as distinct spheres for analysis and action. This local articulation permits ongoing analysis
of how place/landscape type-specific conditions structure everyday greenhouse gas emissions and the prospects for reducing them. As such, it promotes mitigation programs
that encompass broad, long-term infrastructure and lifestyle transformations for energy efficiency and conservation; not only top-down changes to energy generation technologies.
Participatory climate change mitigation research in the Philadelphia suburbs demonstrates how geographically particular metropolitan development patterns shape the
prospects for two such policies, residential energy efficiency improvement and the promotion of local food systems. The sprawling suburb investigated here, with the center
city its development has helped impoverish, challenges these mitigation options in
particular and emissions reduction in general. Deeply problematic elements include both the landscape’s ever-extending physical morphology and the socioeconomic inequalities
that this built environment – and the stakeholders who build it – help to create and maintain. Reshaping this and other suburban landscapes can not only promote long-term
climate change mitigation but also reduce vulnerability to climate change’s unavoidable impacts.
level, local and regional actors are increasingly taking progressive steps to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions. Universities are poised to play a key role in this
grassroots effort by targeting their own emissions and by working with other local
actors to develop climate change mitigation programmes. Researchers at the
Pennsylvania State University have collaborated with university administrators and
personnel to inventory campus emissions and develop mitigation strategies. In
addition, they have facilitated a stakeholder-driven climate change mitigation
project in one Pennsylvania county and started an ongoing service-learning project
aimed at reducing emissions in another county. These campus and community
outreach initiatives demonstrate that university-based mitigation action may
simultaneously achieve tangible local benefits and develop solutions to broader
challenges facing local climate change mitigation efforts. Outcomes include
improved tools and protocols for measuring and reducing local emissions, lessons
learned about service-learning approaches to climate change mitigation, and
methods for creating climate change governance networks involving universities,
local governments and community stakeholders.
Book Reviews by Sarah E Knuth
Drafts by Sarah E Knuth
Conference Sessions, CFPs, Abstracts by Sarah E Knuth
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation. Its ever-present threat, in competitive capitalist struggles and recurrent economic crises, compels capital forward to enclosures of new values and to new realms, techniques, and geographies of production and surplus extraction. It drives bitter struggles among capitalists as different actors, sectors, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere” – with profound consequences for the human and environmental geographies “brought in”, altered, and/or destroyed in such processes. These competitive devaluations, crisis-fueled jostlings, and transformations have a long history. With this special issue, however, we seek to open a lens onto contemporary encounters with devaluation that are novel in significant, yet insufficiently explored ways. Articles collected here consider new forms of value destruction and biophysical wasting as capital compulsively seeks to reproduce itself on an expanded scale – global-systemic and intimate transformations reflected in mainstream narratives of the Anthropocene and a so-called “used” planet (Ellis et al. 2013). Simultaneously, these articles interrogate qualitatively novel ways in which such devaluations have been recast as opportunities for capital accumulation, whether during acute crises or in the context of capitalist volatility-as-usual. Taken as a collection, they forge new analytical ground by illuminating parallels and interrelations between sites of de- and re-valuation usually considered separately: industrial obsolescence and waste-to-resource schemes; rural landscape degradation and ecological restoration; urban blight and redevelopment/gentrification; collapsed financial asset prices and new forms of speculation; and beyond. This discussion suggests key lineaments of an expanded theory of devaluation for capitalism’s contemporary moment – and makes a case for the significance and vitality of such an agenda for further geographic research...
However, decarbonization requires a more substantial confrontation with capitalist ruination-as-usual.
Keywords: retrofitting, planetary repair, green growth, green gentrification, political ecology/economy
Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance’s new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financial institutions invest in land differently, how they are mobilising value arguments and tools and how a growing scarcity of “safe“ assets may push even conservative financial players into new experiments with land and other accumulation frontiers.
RÉSUMÉ Pour comprendre les transformations foncières globales actuelles, il est nécessaire de porter notre attention à la finance et à la manière dont les institutions financières font de la terre
et la propriété des actifs financiers. S’appuyant sur l’économie politique géographique et la littérature sur la financiarisation, je questionne la nature et la temporalité de l’intérêt récent
de la finance pour la terre, à savoir si celui-ci est spéculatif et à court terme ou plutôt une stratégie à long terme. J’étudie comment différents types d’institutions financières investissent dans la terre de manière distincte, quels arguments et outils sont mis de l’avant et comment une rareté croissante des actifs « sécuritaires » peut encourager même des acteurs financiers conservateurs vers de nouvelles expériences avec la terre et vers d’autres frontières d’accumulation.
state, urban, and local levels. Even as a national mitigation agenda solidifies, researchers and political actors might strategically maintain local places and types of landscape –
center cities, older and newer suburbs, and rural areas in different United States regions – as distinct spheres for analysis and action. This local articulation permits ongoing analysis
of how place/landscape type-specific conditions structure everyday greenhouse gas emissions and the prospects for reducing them. As such, it promotes mitigation programs
that encompass broad, long-term infrastructure and lifestyle transformations for energy efficiency and conservation; not only top-down changes to energy generation technologies.
Participatory climate change mitigation research in the Philadelphia suburbs demonstrates how geographically particular metropolitan development patterns shape the
prospects for two such policies, residential energy efficiency improvement and the promotion of local food systems. The sprawling suburb investigated here, with the center
city its development has helped impoverish, challenges these mitigation options in
particular and emissions reduction in general. Deeply problematic elements include both the landscape’s ever-extending physical morphology and the socioeconomic inequalities
that this built environment – and the stakeholders who build it – help to create and maintain. Reshaping this and other suburban landscapes can not only promote long-term
climate change mitigation but also reduce vulnerability to climate change’s unavoidable impacts.
level, local and regional actors are increasingly taking progressive steps to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions. Universities are poised to play a key role in this
grassroots effort by targeting their own emissions and by working with other local
actors to develop climate change mitigation programmes. Researchers at the
Pennsylvania State University have collaborated with university administrators and
personnel to inventory campus emissions and develop mitigation strategies. In
addition, they have facilitated a stakeholder-driven climate change mitigation
project in one Pennsylvania county and started an ongoing service-learning project
aimed at reducing emissions in another county. These campus and community
outreach initiatives demonstrate that university-based mitigation action may
simultaneously achieve tangible local benefits and develop solutions to broader
challenges facing local climate change mitigation efforts. Outcomes include
improved tools and protocols for measuring and reducing local emissions, lessons
learned about service-learning approaches to climate change mitigation, and
methods for creating climate change governance networks involving universities,
local governments and community stakeholders.
Dimensions of Political Ecology annual meeting, February 26-27, 2016, Lexington, KY
Organizers: Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan and Jenny Goldstein, Cornell University
The notion of socio-environmental “degradation” has concerned political ecology since its founding. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), influentially investigating the structural causes of land degradation, presented the process as a relatively straightforward (anthropocentric) calculus of loss: socionatural changes that reduce the productivity and value of an environment for human uses. However, capital’s own encounters with degradation and devaluation are increasingly anything but straightforward. With the help of environmental economics, new markets are reframing waste, environmental loss, and devalued spaces as economic opportunities. Their unconventional “resources” include ecosystem services and tradable pollution credits, key topics of political ecological inquiry. However, capital’s schemes for converting degradation to accumulation potential do not stop in rural peripheries: they treat urban and industrial processes and spaces as equally important new resource frontiers.
This session aims to strengthen political ecology’s analytical purchase on the changing treatment of degradation in several key ways. First, we seek papers that engage different spheres in which this reframing is occurring. Discussing these functionally and geographically differentiated processes and spaces together can help us recognize common – or strategically distinct – discourses, actors, drivers, instruments, institutions, and other meaningful linkages. For example, we invite papers that might theoretically or empirically consider, but are certainly not limited to:
● Rethinking waste, garbage, industrial byproducts, and pollution as resource (e.g., Gidwani and Reddy 2011, Moore 2012, Labban 2014, Romero 2016),
● Commodifying ecosystem restoration/rehabilitation (e.g., Lave et al. 2010),
● Revaluing waste land/degraded land (Baka 2013, Goldstein 2014),
● Making energy (in)efficiency in urban built environments a financialized resource (Knuth 2016), or
● Reframing climate change risks as financial assets (e.g., Johnson 2014, Knudson 2015).
Second, this session aims to help advance political ecological discussion of degradation, devaluation, and their transformations. Important recent calls to more deeply theorize value/valuation within political ecology (Robertson and Wainwright 2014, Kay and Kenney-Lazar forthcoming) should be accompanied by related but distinct engagement with devaluation. We contend that devaluation is not only an alternative way of framing new valuations and extensive enclosures of nature. Degradation-related markets may facilitate capital’s expansion into new “first natures,” but they simultaneously entrain urban-industrial processes and biophysical environments already reworked by capitalism (Smith 2008). Engaging devaluation helps us analyze this differentiation in capitalist strategies: do devaluations and revaluations (more or less direct and strategic) meaningfully differ from new valuations? How and for what kinds of actors? How can they help us better understand “green” capitalism as a project, one that draws on industrial ecology and ecological modernization theory to (in theory) promise transformative eco-efficiencies and economic sectors as well as speculative bubbles and accumulation by dispossession?
Finally, by engaging theories and practices of devaluation, we also seek contributions that consider political ecology’s deepening engagement with geographical political economy (McCarthy 2012, Knuth 2016). For example, the latter has developed increasingly sophisticated tools for analyzing how finance capital strategically abandons and revalues urban geographies (e.g., Weber 2002). In so doing, the session aims to continue and extend the work that urban and First World political ecology have done to help political ecology engage new realms. Political ecology is compelled both analytically and politically to survey capital’s new accumulation frontiers – especially as problems like climate change and projects like the so-called green economy render diverse reframings and geographies of socio-environmental degradation ever more entangled.
Please send abstracts to Sarah Knuth ([email protected]) and Jenny Goldstein ([email protected]) by November 15th. To facilitate deeper conversation, we will ask for full papers in advance of the conference. Depending on participant interest, we are excited to consider potential publication venues for these papers.
References
Baka, J. 2013. The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India. Development and Change 44:409–428.
Blaikie, P., and H. Brookfield. 1987. Land Degradation and Society. New York: Meuthen & Co.
Gidwani, V., and R. N. Reddy. 2011. The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus. Antipode 43.5:1625–1658.
Goldstein, J. E. 2014. The Afterlives of Degraded Tropical Forests: New Value for Conservation and Development. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 5 (1):124–140.
Johnson, L. 2014. Geographies of Securitized Catastrophe Risk and the Implications of Climate Change. Economic Geography 90.2:155-185.
Kay, K. and Kenney-Lazar, M. Forthcoming. Special Issue: The Value of Capitalist Natures, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Knudson, C. 2015. Commodification by Other Means: Mitigating and Adapting to Risk through Financialization. Paper, 2015 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
Knuth, S. 2016. Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier Antipode 48.3. Forthcoming.
Labban, M. 2014. Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.3:560-576.
Lave, R., M. Doyle, and M. Robertson. 2010. Privatizing Stream Restoration in the US. Social Studies of Science 40.5:677-703.
McCarthy, J. 2012. Political Ecology/Economy. Chapter 39, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard, Eds., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell:612-625.
Moore, S. A. 2012. Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste. Progress in Human Geography 36.6:780–799.
Robertson, M. M., and J. D. Wainwright. 2013. The Value of Nature to the State. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103.4:890–905.
Romero, A. 2016. “From Oil Well to Farm”: Industrial Waste, Shell Oil, and the Petrochemical Turn (1927-1947). Agricultural History 90.1. Forthcoming.
Smith N (2008) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd Edition. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press
Weber, R. 2002. Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment. Antipode 34.3:519-540.
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation and an ever-expanding vista of enclosed value. Its threat compels capital ever forward, to constant overturning of existing techniques, fields, and geographies of production. And it drives bitter struggles within capital itself, as different actors, factions, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere.” In this session, we invite papers that take on processes of devaluation emerging in the current moment: whether as a threat to capital or a tool for capital.
Radically new sources and forms of devaluation now threaten capital’s ability to reproduce itself. Novel threats range from abrupt environmental change and material risks and instabilities that overwhelm attempts to “bring them in” as engines for accumulation, to the destabilization effected by ever more frequent and generalized financial crises, to, ultimately, new forms of political volatility and systemic challenge. Simultaneously, capital’s response to these threats is conditioned by internal tensions such as, for instance, a heightened competition for “safe” assets among pension funds and other massive institutional investors.
At the same time, financiers and other actors are developing ever-more-sophisticated ways to turn devaluation into a tool and weapon, against states, against workers and against each other. Far beyond the blunt destructions of value effected through war, capital is expanding its fine-grained tools for effecting and making strategic use of devaluation, in many forms and fields: speculative accumulation by dispossession, competitive devaluation, manufactured obsolescence, distressed asset trading, geographical clearances and displacements. Most often, these strategies are about devaluation for some actors in the present, in order to secure higher values for different actors in the future. They are the dark side to every scheme that sells new sources of enclosed value, new forms and geographies of private property.
These contradictory transformations not only vary by kind, but by geographical and regulatory context, and have recently engaged many geographers. Related work on value, property, and materiality has fueled work that bridges traditional divisions between rural and urban geographers; scholars and activists working in the Global South and Global North; and political ecologists and geographical political economists – particularly financial geographers (e.g., Ghertner and Lake 2015, Kay and Kenney-Lazar, Forthcoming). We aim to build on these important developing conversations.
We particularly invite papers that develop precise engagements with new forms of devaluation, consider connections between these forms and more established strategies, and/or consider these processes’ broader grounding in value theory. Relevant examples include strategic real estate depreciation and “obsolescence” to facilitate gentrification and urban redevelopment (e.g., Smith 1984, Weber 2002); speculative manipulations of official fixed capital depreciation rates (Hanchett 1996); transformations of property deterioration into an asset for “green” retrofit markets (Knuth, Forthcoming) and catastrophic risk of fixed capital devaluation under climate change into a financial asset (Johnson 2014); and distressed debt trading to profit off sovereign defaults in Argentina, Greece or Puerto Rico. Papers might take up topics including, but not limited to:
- New, and newly-evident, kinds of devaluation threats: financial volatility, political challenge, environmental risks, intransigent materialities, new kinds of technology-induced obsolescence and “moral depreciation,” and so on.
- Tools and methods for strategic devaluation, new and old: “shorting” stock, tools for betting against financial bubbles, “creditworthiness” manipulations, manufactured obsolescence, accelerated depreciation within tax codes, blight designations, land value write-downs, etc.
This session is inspired by two related assumptions. The first is that the law-finance relationship is central to the production of financial geographies. Not only do state and federal regulations define the borders of market spaces, but financial players have also long exploited this geographic differentiation in their accumulation strategies. Territorially defined spaces like offshore zones have been central to the rising power of financial institutions since the 1970s, and these same institutions continue to use their influence over states to produce other kinds of supportive jurisdictional spaces. We argue that this legal-financial power is central to the expansion of many important financial frontiers today, including but not limited to: speculation in environmental regulatory commodities like traded carbon, contemporary rural land grabs, the production of new sovereign and sub-national government debt markets, and innovation in other emerging classes of securities. Legal-financial power also continues to structure the uneven geography of the global financial system, for example bolstering the influence of financial centers like New York over other territorial configurations. These processes demand more theoretical and empirical investigation.
The second assumption driving this call is that a deeper understanding of the law-finance relationship is necessary if we are to understand the role of the state and politics in enabling and shaping financial flows. Geographers of law and geographers of finance have each worked to expose the power relations behind the supposed neutrality of, respectively, legal and financial spaces. Articulations among law, finance, geography and the state shape financial geographies at multiple scales, from the municipal to the federal to the transnational, making the power of the financial class inseparable from political struggles at all levels. These interrelationships provoke many questions. For example, which legal, financial and political actors are engaged in the production of specific financial geographies? When do legal-financial players attempt to design spaces for maximum closure or coherence, and conversely, when do they aim for selective permeability of these spaces? When do these strategies overlap or conflict?
This session invites papers exploring any of these financial-legal spaces, emerging frontiers, or pressing questions; or considering other articulations among law, finance and geography. Relevant focus areas may range in scale from the micro-ethnographies of legal-financial practice, through state and federal regulatory spaces, to the geopolitical engineering of transnational jurisdictional boundaries. We also seek panelists and discussants for a potential accompanying panel session on these questions.
This session seeks papers that survey the green economy’s many new forms of commodification and the rapidly expanding primary and secondary markets on which these commodities are traded. The session also aims to question how these evolving technological and financial products force geographers to employ and to reexamine traditional Marxian concepts including value, the real economy, productive and unproductive labor, formal and real subsumption, and the spatial fix. How can we distinguish productive growth from speculative bubbles in commodities whose use value depends entirely upon fluctuating and uncertain regulatory policies, and for which accurate tests of value have not been devised? How and to what extent are booming financial markets translating into on-the-ground investment and developing spaces of the green economy, and what long-term future can we forecast for these places? Does this new wave of commodification mark the beginning of a new phase of material expansion through which ecological surplus is decoupled from capital accumulation, or merely the fitful dying struggles of the latest, and perhaps the last, cycle?
In this study, I critically examine the crisis-era development of green economic ideas in the United States, particularly in cities like San Francisco. I focus on new forms of value and unconventional resources being developed for the green economy, from energy efficiency to the “green-ness” of buildings. I examine how the federal government and cities hope to harness this value for transformative economic development, and how financial institutions and real estate developers are pioneering distinct visions of the profits to be made from environmental change and/or its mitigation. Critical resource geography and political economy/ecology offer important theoretical windows into green economic development. I consider how critiques of market environmentalism developed to analyze rural resource extraction can be expanded to analyze a new urban resource geography. I use methods such as surveys of industry and policy literature, participant observation at conferences, historical research, and analysis of financial instruments.
I find that financial institutions and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more economically redistributive visions. Finance is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice, aided by new “green” financial instruments. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make green urbanism increasingly speculative and exclusionary, and delimits more ambitious federal programs to promote green manufacturing and mass employment.