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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Seeing Green: Speculative Urbanism in the Green Economy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33k4k2j8 Author Knuth, Sarah Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Seeing Green: Speculative Urbanism in the Green Economy By Sarah Elisabeth Knuth A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Richard Walker, Chair Professor Dan Kammen Professor Paul Groth Professor Nathan Sayre Spring 2014 ©Copyright 2014 Sarah Elisabeth Knuth Abstract Seeing Green: Speculative Urbanism in the Green Economy By Sarah Elisabeth Knuth Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Berkeley Professor Richard Walker, Chair As the twenty-first century begins, climate change has become an urban problem. Global urban networks and institutions such as the World Bank point to cities’ energy demand and major greenhouse gas emissions share. Simultaneously, they frame cities as a critical source of environmental solutions, through green building, energy efficiency retrofitting, “smart” infrastructure, and other transformations of twentieth century urban geography. And critically, they argue that innovative cities can make these changes profitable, and thereby help propel a technological revolution in advanced capitalism: the development of a “green” economy. Amidst the economic turmoil that followed the 2008 financial collapse, many public and private institutions took up the idea of green economic development as a pathway to economic recovery and twenty-first century accumulation. 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. 1 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………….………….1 Chapter 1: Seeing Green in San Francisco: Cities and/as Resource Geography…......….12 Chapter 2: Resource Geographies in a Green Economy…………………………………41 Chapter 3: Making Energy Efficiency a Resource………………………………..….….58 Chapter 4: Green IT and the Problem of “Post-Material” Resources……………..…..…84 Chapter 5: Making Green Real Estate Markets………………………………………...102 Chapter 6: New Resources, The State, and Finance………………………………..…..123 Chapter 7: Financialization and a Green New Deal?……………………………….…..139 Chapter 8: Urban Greening and Fiscal Financialization………………………..…...….159 Conclusion……………..………………………………….……………………………178 i Introduction Residents of cities are responsible for as much as 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time residents of cities are facing significant impacts from climate change…well managed, well designed, dense cities are also the only way to meet GHG emission mitigation targets, while providing an acceptable quality of life for the soon-to-be 6.5 billion urban residents. - World Bank (2010)1 Larger cities have a ravenous appetite for energy, consuming ⅔ of the world's energy and creating over 70% of global CO2 emissions…but, in the heart of the city lies an opportunity…We believe that a better global future lies in urban innovation and action. As the majority of future humans will live in cities, it just makes sense that our solution to climate change will reside there too. - C40 Cities (2012)2 In the late 2000s, climate change became an urban problem. Talk of greening and resilience became inescapable in major cities worldwide, and urban questions increasingly preoccupied international climate forums. Urban organizing efforts like the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Clinton Climate Initiative grew rapidly and joined forces. The World Bank, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN Environment Programme, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Rockefeller Foundation all initiated major urban climate programs and partnerships.3 As seen in the quotations above and many similar statements, globally powerful institutions put forward variations on a common argument: that cities are responsible for the bulk of world greenhouse gas emissions, that cities and urban populations are highly at risk from climate change, and that urban economic and political innovation is the key to solving both problems.4 What is new today is not the environmental and emissions significance of cities: urbanization, industrialization, mounting fossil fuel use, and large-scale landscape change have been closely interlinked for the past two centuries.5 Neither is it recognition of these connections. Modern environmentalism is deeply rooted in disquiet about the cities that industrial capitalism has built. Political movements over the last 150 years have organized against these cities’ explosive, seemingly unplanned bursts of growth and crisis, their smoke and disease, and their transformations of vast regional hinterlands of resource extraction and waste disposal. What is new today is not even a realization that major cities have deepening global environmental geographies. As many voices took up concepts of globalization, global environmental change, and sustainability in the 1990s, UN-Habitat and other international development organizations began to include sustainable urban development in their mandates. Activist mayors and administrations signed their cities on to transnational urban initiatives like Local Agenda 21 and the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (now ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability). By the late 1990s, a tightening focus on global climate change and fossil energy consumption had prompted these cities to start producing urban emissions inventories and climate plans. This rescaling marked a major conceptual departure for a problem that had previously been represented in national level emissions figures and global or regional impact projections. 1 What is novel now is, first, the mainstream uptake of these urban visions of climate change response. Influential urban institutions are making climate change a core concern, and throwing more money into the problem via initiatives like C40 Cities. Second, and even more critically, these powerful players are reframing climate change action as an opportunity rather than a burden, and specifically an opportunity for cities. Using neoliberal ideas of market-based environmental regulation, they argue that environmental costs can, with the right tools and shifts in perception, be transmuted into radically new kinds of resources. From mitigating the bad to cultivating the good and useful, it is all to be a matter of perspective. They argue further that the new sources of value and kinds of private property created by environmental markets can drive globally beneficial technological innovation and urban economic growth. Introducing framings like the “green economy,” they aim to push these ecological modernist visions and resource geographies into the heart of urban and industrial economic processes. This re- centering represents a geographic expansion for schemes that have been most often rolled out in rural resource peripheries. Simultaneously, they promise that green economic leadership can help cities address other twenty first century challenges: namely, attracting investment and maintaining urban growth in an increasingly turbulent and competitive global economic system. In the financial turmoil of the late 2000s, visions of green economic development have proven attractive to many urban and national governments worldwide, as well as private sector actors. Major cities now vying for the mantle of leadership in green development have advanced strategies that range from pioneering green architecture to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, constructing low-carbon infrastructure, and incubating clean technology development clusters. National governments have simultaneously enlisted cities as delivery mechanisms