A counternarrative to a popular perception of Austin as a progressive city
Eliot M. Tretter is assistant professor of geography, University of Calgary, Canada.
Shadows of a Sunbelt City offers a compelling analysis of the power
that universities wield in regional development and their
complicity in reshaping the urban form to benefit powerful actors,
often at the expense of vulnerable residents. As he examines how
policy and social relations transform cities, Tretter challenges
the narrative that sustainable urban policy, and the knowledge
economy that undergirds it, is universally beneficial.--Andrew M.
Busch "Southern Spaces"
Shadows of a Sunbelt City offers an important new interpretation of
Austin's twentieth-century urban history and more recent
political-economic transformation into a putatively high-tech
'smart city of knowledge.' A stimulating intervention into one of
this country's fastest growing cities, Eliot Tretter's study
questions and significantly advances our current understanding of
an impressive range of literatures.--Yonn Dierwechter "author of
Urban Growth Management and Its Discontents: Promises, Practices,
and Geo-politics in U.S. City Regions"
As a disciplinary manner, some historians may find Shadows of a
Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in
Austin less a history of UT's and Austin's intertwined development
than a set of essays that use history to (again, effectively)
debunk influential development pieties.--Michan Connor "Journal of
Southern History"
The book illuminates the unusual circumstances that shaped the
political economy of the University of Texas and its relationship
with both the city and the state. Tretter recovers an important and
largely untold story in showing that Austin's development has not
been a giant love fest or an unalloyed good... Ultimately, Shadows
of a Sunbelt City provides a welcome corrective to anodyne
cheerleading about the "creative class" and the wonders of
high-tech development.--Alex Sayf Cummings "Journal of Social
History"
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