Jennifer Foster, York University
How can we build environmentally just cities amidst industrial deterioration? Vast expanses of old factories and industrial infrastructure present some of the most interesting possibilities for rechanneling the momentum of conventional urban development patterns that intensify inequities, reduce habitat and contribute to climate change. These spaces also offer important opportunities to challenge the imprint of European whiteness as a dominant cultural construct of urban landscape form and create space for alternative socio-ecological relationships. Typically interpreted as defiled, disturbed and contaminated, post-industrial urban spaces that are left fallow tend to produce extraordinary novel ecological and social formations that are unavailable elsewhere in cities. Meanwhile, they often function as urban socio-political archives, as repositories of territorial dispossession and the erasure of communities and their livelihoods. This presentation explores post-industrial urban greenspaces through lenses of environmental justice, novel ecologies, and environmental aesthetics to probe the ecological dimensions of industrial legacies and the range of possibilities for more equitable futures. Informed by cases studies from cities such as Toronto, Berlin, Paris and New York City, the focus is on Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley. Once known as the “machine shop of the world”, then “the armpit of the city” and a “no-go zone”, the Valley is now known as a “gold standard” that prioritizes the needs of local residents in greenspace conversion. Creating jobs, healthier living conditions and vast new greenspace, the Menomonee Valley also offers insight into strategies for Indigenous sovereignty that hinge on both collaboration and an ethic of incommensurability.