Whose "Sense of Place"?: Topophilia

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American Quarterly, Volume 63, Number 2, June 2011, pp. 399-408 (Review)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/aq.2011.0025

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aq/summary/v063/63.2.busch.html

Access provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries (28 May 2015 21:46 GMT) Grassroots and Urbanization in Austin | 399

Whose “Sense of Place”? Topophilia, the Grassroots, and Urbanization in Austin, Texas

Andrew Busch

Environmental City: People, Place, Politics, and the Meaning of Modern Austin. By William Scott Swearingen Jr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 295 pages. $50.00 (cloth).

Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas. By Joshua Long. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 211 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper).

Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spykids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas. By Alison Macor. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 392 pages. $45.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).

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

©2011 The American Studies Association | 400American| Quarterly 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 radar in the 1980s.6 Since the 1970s, the city’s steady growth and economic success, largely as a center of information technology firms and cultural production, along with its traditional employers, the Texas state government and the University of Texas at Austin, have become Grassroots and Urbanization in Austin | 401 increasingly difficult to ignore. Like Texas as a whole, Austin has weathered the current economic recession surprisingly well, actually adding jobs every year since 2003.7 Unlike the rest of the state, Austin has a reputation for progressive, left-wing politics—locals refer to it as “an island of blue in a sea of red.” Since 2000, the city has garnered an impressive array of accolades. It was named the United States’ greenest city in 2007 by MSNBC (the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives also listed Austin as one of the fifteen greenest cities in the world in 2007), and it is consistently mentioned on lists of most livable city, best city for singles, and numerous others.8 Most famously, in 2005 urban redevelopment guru Richard Florida proclaimed Austin the most “Creative City” in the United States in his book Cities and the Creative Class, exemplifying his argument that successful cities focus on creating environments that are attractive to creative workers and creative industries.9 In 1993 Austin dubbed itself “The Live Music Capital of the World” because of its rich music scene, and that moniker is still used to promote the entire cultural output of the city. The city now boasts two highly successful music and film festivals; the larger, South by Southwest, brings in well over $100 million to Austin’s economy each year.10 To borrow a concept from Raymond Williams, Austin is clearly an emergent city, largely because of a successful blend of economic and cultural production. Some local academics and the University of Texas Press have recently taken notice of Austin as a subject for scholarly inquiry as well. In the spring of 2010 the press published three books by academics that focus on aspects of Austin. Though disparate in their respective arguments, all three deal with the somewhat amorphous concept of “sense of place”; two of them also focus on the relationship between this “sense” and the urbanization process in an emergent city. I will go a step further in arguing that the three works are bound by something stronger, topophilia, or “love of place,” as well as a general disdain for unchecked growth. This is true of the people and movements studied, but also of the authors themselves, which creates some problems common to all three books. Like The City and the Grassroots, these books also display a great admiration for grassroots social and cultural movements, and locate them as sources of progress and conflict in urban environments. For Joshua Long and William Swearingen Jr., grassroots social movements appear as the epitome of a democratic population standing up against the economic interests of elites. Austin’s progressive identity is likewise based upon its populism. Unlike the urban-focused academics of the 1980s, however, the critical concepts of race and class are largely absent from all three books. | 402American| Quarterly

Joshua Long’s Weird City argues that Austin’s sense of place is largely defined by local cultural and social battles over developments that residents feel homogenize the city. Since the 1960s, Austin has steadily grown from a mid-size university and state government town into a regional center of cultural production and information technology. This growth, while good for the city’s economy, threatens Austin’s unique sense of place; as Long writes, “wedged between homogenizing growth and a long tradition of rebellious nonconformity, many Austinites still feel they are in the midst of a battle for the city’s soul” (ix). The argument focuses on Keep Austin Weird, a grassroots, anti-commercial movement engendered by a local librarian in 2000 that was quickly appropriated for myriad uses throughout Austin and North America. Weird City, however, is more of a compendium of various types of social and cultural resistance and the ramifications of unchecked urban growth in Austin since the 1970s. Long invokes Florida’s argument that Austin is the paradigmatic “Creative Class” city (the only exception to the dearth of class analysis in the three books), meaning that this case study should be applicable to other creative cities such as Boulder, Portland, and Albuquerque. Almost all the historical information in Long’s book comes from second- ary sources or from more than a hundred interviews he conducted with both prominent Austinites and other randomly chosen residents. The first two chapters discuss why and how Austin is “weird.” Long locates Austin’s weirdness in the city’s diversity and tolerance beginning in the 1970s at the University of Texas and in the burgeoning music scene and environmental movement. The third chapter contains a brief history of North American urbanization since World War II. Unlike most older cities, Austin did not have to contend with a dilapidated industrial infrastructure or a large population of displaced workers when deindustrialization occurred, giving it a competitive advantage. The fourth and fifth chapters deal with the problems of rapid growth in Austin, most notably gentrification, displacement, and the loss of a unique communal identity as new, often wealthy, residents and businesses transformed the city. Long then chronicles the Keep Austin Weird movement throughout the 2000s, and addresses some of the major battles to preserve Austin’s “sense of place.” In the final chapter, made up largely of interviews, interviewees give their opinions about changes in Austin. There is a theoretical postscript at the end. Weird City is notable for its ability to illustrate the relationship between sense of place and resistance lucidly; residents who fought to preserve local businesses, for example, and avoid “Houstonization” consciously created meaning for Austin. In an increasingly competitive environment, successful cities must Grassroots and Urbanization in Austin | 403 be acutely aware of how they are viewed by potential residents, businesses, and other sources of capital. In Austin, as elsewhere, creating social movements and local culture that are perceived as authentic is paramount to this success, which Long recognizes. Like Weird City, Environmental City argues that Austin is defined by a unique sense of place, but in this case Austin’s meaning is derived from its environmental movements and the natural environment itself. William Swearingen argues that Austin’s quality of life has long been defined by its relationship to its natural landscape. Protecting the environment from overdevelopment has preserved the “environmental meaning” of Austin and created social meaning for residents who have fought developers who wanted to expand Austin for selfish financial reasons. As Swearingen is fond of repeating, environmentalists encouraged Austin to be built “into the natural landscape rather than over it” as profit-minded developers preferred. Grassroots movements have thus saved a great deal of Austin’s natural landscape and preserved much of the city’s unique sense of place in spite of rapid growth and an often hostile municipal political apparatus. Today, Austin’s reputation as an environmentally friendly city is largely an outcome of green policies won by environmentalists in the 1990s. Swearingen uses Harvey Molotch’s “urban growth machine” paradigm to frame the discourse. The “growth machine” is characterized by a group of powerful politicians, business people, and developers who are interested in urban growth because it creates revenue.11 Austin’s “machine” was made up of developers and politicians whose sole interest was municipal growth (mostly in real estate) for profit. Beginning in the late 1960s, grassroots environmental groups began to form in opposition to the growth machine. Environmental City progresses chronologically: conservationists in the 1960s and 1970s secured park lands and cleaned up public urban spaces; accelerated growth in the 1970s caused a rash of problems that citizens responded to by forming associations and coalitions; by the 1980s neighborhood and environmental groups were fighting developers in environmentally sensitive areas. The environmental movement coalesced as a group called Save Our Springs (SOS) in 1990 around Barton Springs, a public pool and landmark fed by the Edwards Aquifer that was being damaged by overdevelopment. Unlike previous groups, SOS was organized enough to fight developers successfully. Barton Springs thus became the main symbol of Austin’s environmental meaning, and by the late 1990s the city council under Mayor Kirk Watson was decidedly green. Since that time the city has followed a “Smart Growth” policy:12 the environment is used as an economic tool and is advertised as a major component in Austin’s quality of life and sense of place. | 404American| Quarterly

Swearingen is at his best discussing the intricacies of municipal policy and law. He brilliantly describes the tricks used by developers to circumvent environmental ordinances and build outside of municipal jurisdiction, and demonstrates exactly how grassroots environmental groups can win development battles and ultimately define a city’s future. In a particularly evocative passage, Swearingen describes how the City of Austin was able to purchase developmental rights from landowners without actually purchasing the land, a cost effective way to ensure environmental sustainability without infringing on private property rights (193–99). Alison Macor’s Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spykids differs from the other two books in its avoidance of dealing with city politics and social movements. It is, rather, a very straightforward history of the vibrant independent film scene in Austin, bookended by Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 and Robert Rodriguez’s Spykids in 2001. It also chronicles the efforts made by Texans, both privately and in the state government, to attract capital and enrich film culture in the state. Although most of the book consists of blow- by-blow accounts of the filmmaking process, postproduction, and efforts to secure distribution, Macor argues that independent directors in Austin preferred the artistic license, laid-back culture, and grassroots nature of Austin’s “Third Coast” film industry relative to the studio-directed culture of Los Angeles and New York City, especially before Richard Linklater’s Slackers appeared in 1989. After Slackers, filmmakers began producing films specifically formulated to attract new venture capital, much of which moved to the region during the tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Macor characterizes these potential investors as part of the “new Texas: geek smart and culturally savvy, they had money to burn” (4). Macor bases her narratives almost entirely on interviews she conducted with hundreds of people in all aspects of the Texas film industry. Each chapter focuses on one film, and most of each is an account of how the film was conceived, produced, and distributed, along with directors’ biographies. Early films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match, and Rodriguez’s El Mariachi are all characterized as fairly successful regional movies made on very limited budgets. In Austin, grassroots film enthusiasts and state politicians promoted films through groups such as the Texas Film Commission, a state agency whose job was to attract film to Texas, and CinemaTexas, a group of University of Texas students who began screening films on campus in the 1970s. In the 1980s Austin boasted one of the first gay and lesbian film festivals. In 1985 the Austin Film Society formed Grassroots and Urbanization in Austin | 405 and began screening; in 1986 it was incorporated as a nonprofit educational organization that eventually awarded grants and set up production space for local artists. By the 1990s, Austin had two large annual film festivals, South by Southwest and the Austin Film Festival, that showcased mostly local films at first; the Texas film industry also became more mainstream in the 1990s as directors’ increased success brought in more investment dollars and led to more expensive and elaborate films such asSpykids . Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spykids makes no claims to be scholarly and at first glance appears as a direct account of the most important films made in and around Austin. Each chapter is structured in the same manner, which makes reading the book a bit tedious. There are, however, aspects of the narrative that will interest filmmakers, film historians, and others interested in the relationship between independent film production, labor, and the powers of the film industry. In particular, Macor addresses how interest in independent film at the state level can help draw film production to an area. The main point, however, is that Austin’s success as an industry mecca is based on its grassroots film community, which has nourished directors and made film a primary popular art in Austin. Here, as in the other two books, Austin is characterized by its uniqueness, its populism, and its ability to sustain creativity. Almost all of the interviews are with people who are part of the film community in Texas, leading to a very pro-Austin and anti-Hollywood stance. As I have mentioned, all three books fall prey to topophilia. They are limited by a failure to situate their work within a larger discourse and a resistance to critical analysis of the grassroots movements they document.13 In each book, Austin seems to exist in a vacuum. Theoretical concerns are underdeveloped and packed away into one chapter or a postscript. None of the books uses census or other demographic data, and surprisingly little archival material is cited, especially considering that each book has a large historical component. There is very little discussion of the regional and global socioeconomic forces, so important to most urban geographers, sociologists, and historians, that were instrumental in Austin’s growth: the postwar Sunbelt shift that brought jobs, capital, and federal investment to Texas and the South; the turn to post-Fordist “flexible accumulation” in capitalist production during the 1970s that greatly favored Austin’s nonindustrial landscape; the university’s ties to nascent information technology businesses; and the New Deal welfare state, which provided the initial capital for Central Texas’ infrastructural advancements that allowed modernization and stability in the region from the 1930s on. All of these factors play distinct roles in Austin’s contemporary social, cultural, and even | 406American| Quarterly natural landscape. The three books share a relaxed style, tone, and methodol- ogy, and they all ultimately argue that there is in fact something special and unique about Austin. To my mind, this indicates an attempt on the part of the publisher to market these books to a wide, popular audience, which may be a reflection of the effects of the recent economic downturn on academic presses, whose budgets are often limited to begin with. Even before the financial crisis, profitability was becoming increasingly important to university presses. “Austin exceptionalism” is found in periodic booster-like language and a disregard for economic development that has made Austin relatively affluent. Weird City often slips into elitist language: “If book recommendations from eccentrically dressed New Age bookworms bother you, or if you don’t like your macchiato prepared by a tattooed, pierced, struggling local poet, perhaps this is not the place for you” (117). While Swearingen’s narrative is painstakingly detailed and supported with many interviews, it also lacks impartiality at times. Environmental City spends more time denigrating economic growth in Austin than analyzing it. The growth machine and the grassroots movements need to be imagined as more dynamic, fluid entities and economic aspects of development should be analyzed rather than simply disparaged. Austin became relatively affluent and grew because of its thriving economy as much as its sense of place. At times both books appear to be marketing their versions of what Austin should and should not be, at the expense of race and class discourse. The resistance to critical analysis manifests itself as a lack of focus on uneven development and the most marginalized citizens in Austin. Long, for example, avoids analysis of gentrification on Austin’s east side, the historically African American and Latino neighborhoods, even though displacement has been acute there for a decade: he focuses instead on middle-class gentrification in predominantly white contemporary South Austin. Swearingen fails to address why African Americans and Latinos never really make it into his narrative even though Latino-based environmental groups such as People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources (PODER) have existed in Austin for some time. 14 This could be because historically minorities have focused more on jobs and public services than on the concerns of more affluent and mostly white members of environmental groups. Swearingen repeatedly claims that a con- sistent economy and an educated population in Austin favored environmental protection over economic growth, failing to discuss the obvious class and race component. None of these books discusses Austin’s institutionally segregated past in great detail. Austin is a very affluent and consumption-oriented city, but it also has a higher than average rate of poverty, which is especially acute Grassroots and Urbanization in Austin | 407 among minority residents.15 This disparity is largely the outcome of a workforce increasingly bifurcated into informational (high tech white collar) and informal (unsteady or underpaid blue collar) components. The numbers bear this out: in 2000, white Austinites made almost exactly twice as much money per fam- ily as Austin’s African Americans and Latinos.16 Even though Austin’s overall population grew by roughly 15 percent between 2000 and 2008, the African American community in Austin lost gross population.17 Viewed economically and demographically, Austin’s African American community does not appear to be experiencing the topophilia evidently common to the rest of the city. When dealing with “sense of place,” then, the important question to ask is, whose sense of place? As materialist urban scholars continue to demonstrate, cities are paradigmatic manifestations of uneven capitalist development, which creates disparate senses of place. Scholars focusing on urban growth need to be similarly focused on competing visions of particular cities—not just between grassroots groups and capitalists but between other segments of society. Eco- nomic, cultural, and social aspects must be integrated if we are to get a balanced view of cities such as Austin. In this respect much empirical and theoretical work remains to be done on Austin that will help scholars better understand how and why Austin has grown so dramatically while addressing the place of cultural production and consumption, social movements, and economic geography. Future works will, I hope, contain many of the invigorating aspects of the classic urban scholarship such as disparity, divisiveness, and attempts toward social justice in cities. Emphasis on socioeconomic unevenness, along with an understanding of grassroots movements, is what makes great urban scholarship so engaging and meaningful.

Notes 1. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 2. Not all of these scholars were or are expressly “Marxist,” although most share Marx’s interest in political economy and class. Major works of these scholars, except those I cite later in the essay, include David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbaniza- tion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Janety Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Joe R. Feagin, Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political-Economic Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). | 408American| Quarterly

3. The most comprehensive and influential Los Angeles School works are Edward Soja’sPostmodern Geog- raphies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), and Soja and Allen J. Scott, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 4. See Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 5. Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Bruce Shulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6. The only academic work to appear on Austin from an urban perspective during the 1980s was Anthony Orum’s Power, Money, and the People: The Making of Modern Austin (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987), which is a broad, popular history of Austin beginning in 1839. 7. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more new jobs were created in Texas last year than in all other states combined. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “News Release,” July 10, 2010, http://www.bls.gov/ news.release/pdf/laus.pdf (accessed August 3, 2010). For Austin, see Barbara Kiviat, “The Workforce: Where Will the New Jobs Come From?” Time, March 19, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/nation/ article/0,8599,1973135–3,00.html (accessed August 3, 2010). 8. Howard Witt, “In the Heart of Texas, Drumbeat for Green: Austin Attacks the Problems of Climate Change Right at Home,” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 2007, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ services/newspaper/eedition/chi-austin_green_wittsep28,0,4963994.story (accessed August 3, 2010). 9. Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005). Florida’s “creative class” thesis is by now well known and has been disputed by numerous scholars and critics. 10. See, for example, “SXSW Could Have $110 M Impact on Austin Economy,” Austin Business Journal, February 28, 2008, http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2008/02/25/daily21.html (accessed August 2, 2010). 11. Harvey Molotch, “The City as Growth Machine: Towards a Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology, 82.2 (Sept. 1976): 309–32. 12. Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, and Mike Lydon, The Smart Growth Manual (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010). Duany is the creator of the urban planning style New Urbanism. “Smart Growth” blends many facets of New Urbanism with regional planning in an effort to achieve sustainable development. 13. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006) by Matthew Lassiter is a good recent example of integrating local cases with more national social and spatial trends. 14. See the group’s website: http://www.poder-texas.org/ (accessed January 18, 2011). 15. In 2007, Austin had an overall 17.5% poverty rate and an alarming 23.7% poverty rate among chil- dren. See http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Austin-Texas.html (accessed August 6, 2010). The U.S. poverty rate was 13.0% in 2007. Conversely, a study recently found that Austin residents spend more money per capita than residents of any other city, exclusive of mortgage and rent. “How America Spends: The 2010 Bundle Report, Spending by City,” http://www.bundle.com/article/ Assets2010-Bundle-Report-Spending-city-10139 (accessed August 10, 2010). 16. See http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/demographics/downloads/mfi_by_ethnicity.pdf (accessed August 6, 2010). 17. See http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/demographics/downloads/City_of_Austin_Profile_2008.pdf (accessed August 6, 2010).