The Urban West

Note: What appears here is the abstract of a paper for the 2010 meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association. For the full paper, follow the link to the Word document immediately below.

Colorado as Refuge

Regional identities emerge from the interaction of imaginative representations and social and economic conditions. Business boosters, novelists, television producers, song writers, and a range of other contributors to popular culture start with conditions on the ground, abstract certain elements, and construct imagined regions whose identities take on trajectories of their own

Since the early 20th century, Americans have constructed Colorado simultaneously as the nation’s most accessible western adventureland and as its refuge from the threats of the future. We find the first Colorado in such disparate sources as tourist promotion pamphlets, the post-World War II ski culture, and the songs of John Denver, all of which attempted to erase the state’s troubled industrial past to allow the creation of a new, ahistorical image. We find the second in the NORAD complex at Cheyenne Mountain and in proposals to relocate the national capital to Denver to protect it from foreign invasion.

Science fiction writers have drawn on both constructed identities—Colorado as fortress and Colorado as tabula rasa—to imagine Colorado, and the central Rocky Mountain region more generally as a frontier of isolation.

Texts include Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow, Ursula Le Guin, City of Illusions, Stephen King, The Stand, Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, and Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Because none of these authors had a close association with Colorado or deep experience of the central Rocky Mountain region, I argue that they were drawing on a popular sense of the area’s physical isolation and social newness to construct fictions that reiterate and reinforce that very sense of isolation.

These fictional “Colorados” stand in contrast to the construction of other western regions in speculative fiction—to a vaguely ecotopian Pacific Northwest (Ernest Callenbach, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, David Brin) or to a dystopian southern California as depicted by science fiction writers far too numerous to list. The juxtaposition suggests the variety of roles that the American West plays in visions of the American future and the ways in which these visions draw on and reinforce distinctions among our different “frontier” regions.

Editor’s Note: This is an article length piece. What appears below is an extended abstract. For the full article, use the link to the Word document immediately below.

MS Word file: “The Social Hinterlands of Washington, D.C.: A Regional Framework for City History”

From its beginnings in the 1790s, Washington, D.C. has been a border city–famously described by John F. Kennedy as a place of “southern efficiency and northern charm.” The new American nation carefully chose a site for a new capital that balanced regional interests. The members of the first Congress under the new Constitution understood the federal city as poised balanced between the northern and southern states and also between the Atlantic seaboard and the continental interior.

Washington has also been a southern city from its origins to the present. Additional roles have been overlaid on its southern character, making it also a “northern” city (especially from 1861 to the 1880s), a national city (especially in the twentieth century), and a global city (especially since 1940). Nevertheless, it has continued to maintain a distinctive regional character that reciprocally supports the distinctiveness of the South Atlantic region.

In this paper, I explore what I call the “social hinterland” of Washington, as distinguished from an economic or commercial hinterland. In effect, I propose to use Washington to show the possibilities of emphasizing a social and cultural dimension to city-regional history. Washington has never had wide-ranging commercial influence comparable to a Chicago or Montreal. But it has been a focus for interregional migration, a draw for regional elites, and symbolic prize among rival regions.

Editor’s Note: This is a footnoted, article length piece. Below is a brief introduction of the work. To download the full article, use the link to the PDF Document below.

PDF: “Competing Cascadias: Imagining a Region over Four Decades”

In 1997, the distinguished architect and urbanist Robert Geddes offered the suggestion that “Cascadia” would be the “shock city” of the twenty-first century, following in the pattern set by in earlier eras by Manchester and Chicago, Los Angeles and Calcutta. Come again? Cascadia? Where’s that, and why might it be more interesting to twenty-first century scholars than Shanghai or Mumbai or Sao Paolo?

For Geddes, as for Ethan Seltzer, Anne Moudon, and Alan Artibise, the trio of urban scholars who contributed “Cascadia: An Emerging Regional Model” to Geddes’s edited volume Cities in Our Future, Cascadia is a bi-national megaregion consisting of the Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver metro areas and the farms and forests in between.

The Cascadia Megaregion is the newest in a series of recent efforts to reimagine a regional identity for the northwestern coast of North America.

For a century and a half—beginning with the intrusion of Russian, British, and American fur traders, extending through imperial contests and boundary marking, through Anglophone settlement, and on through the dam-building and timber booms of the mid-twentieth century—the greater Northwest had a stable identity as region rich in natural resources and driven by their exploitation and development. Whether as the pre-national Oregon Country in the early nineteenth century or the U.S. Pacific Northwest and idiosyncratic British Columbia of the twentieth century, this was a remarkably constant region of the mind.

The vast territory has had subregions to be sure—an Empire of the Columbia, the inland sea from Olympia, Washington north to Campbell River, British Columbia, an Inland Empire (that’s the big one around Spokane, not the little one around Riverside). However, Wilbur Zelinsky’s now classic study of vernacular regions found the Northwest firmly in place in the 1970s. His study compiled and tallied the regional adjectives that appeared in business and organizational names in the phone books of the 276 of the largest U.S. and Canadian cities. “Northwest” was the dominant regional marker in Boise, Spokane, Eugene, Portland, Seattle and Tacoma, and made a strong 2nd or 3rd place showing in Missoula, Billings, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, and Anchorage (as Canada’s windows to Asia, Victoria and Vancouver gave first place to “Pacific”). The regional core along Puget Sound and the lower Columbia River also joined the Canadian Maritime Provinces and the heart of Dixie in having the greatest regional self-consciousness as measured by the percentage of regional terms relative to all terms.

Beginning in the same decade as Zelinsky’s study, however, that identity began to come unstuck. For the last generation it has been up for grabs with competing metaphors and definitions that suggest very different planning and policy responses. Journalists, boosters, advocates, and scholars have tried out a series of ways to conceptualize and shape a regional identity for the northern Pacific coast—as Ecotopia, as bioregional Cascadia, as boosterish Mainstreet Cascadia and as the Cascadia Megaregion. Think of the change this way: The old identity was like a reliable older automobile with lots of miles but well maintained and still perking along. Suddenly, however, it is too boring, too unfashionable, inadequately trendy, causing us to shop for an alternative—perhaps a Prius? A Smart Car? A Ford F-350 pickup? A Lexus? All have their strong points, but none seems to satisfy every need and expectation. Stepping back from the simile, the goal of this paper is to interrogate these changing ways for thinking about the regional identity of the old Oregon Country.

This working paper was prepared for the Working Waterfront Coalition. Below is the executive summary from the paper. A full draft can be downloaded from the Schnitzer Steel website.

Portland is one of a handful of U.S. cities whose riverside location is nearly as important to prosperity and growth today as it was a century ago. The water, rail and energy complex that converges around the lower Willamette River has long supported several industrial sectors, especially primary metals, machinery and equipment manufacturing, distribution and logistics.

Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of the general public isn’t familiar with Portland’s industrial heart – its history, its function, its importance. If there is a public image of Portland’s working waterfront and heavy industry, it tends to be about problems, such as the Superfund designation or the environmental costs of maintaining the navigation channel.

This report traces the stages of development of Portland’s industrial heartland and industrial mix, identifies current issues and places Portland in a comparative context. The report touches on:

• Portland’s strategic location at the intersection of the Columbia River Valley and the Puget-Willamette Trough.

• The growth of various sectors in Portland: lumber and wood products, agricultural processing, metals and machinery, and electronics.

• Recognition of how the natural river can live in concert with the commercial and industrial uses on the river.

• How Portland’s economy is supported by river-dependent and transportation-oriented businesses.

• Trends in the region’s industrial land preservation and the working waterfront.

• Considerations as Portland plans for the future of its harbor and industrial areas.

The report concludes by offering specific recommendations for planners, governments, employers, investors and the general Portland populations, including some of the following:

• The public sector should continue to recognize the importance of Portland’s industrial heart with supportive land use regulations and protections.

• Portland needs to take extreme care and caution before determining that industrial land is no longer viable for industrial uses.

• It is vital to protect and enhance this transportation infrastructure as an economic asset that would require billions of dollars to replace or reproduce, and to promote public awareness of its value.

• Public agencies and private organizations that promote sustainable development have an opportunity to increase their effectiveness by taking advantage of a supportive industrial base.

• As private activity increases in the first decade of the 21st century, it is important to keep the industrial economy on the public agenda.

• Deliberate efforts to maintain this diversification by supporting the continued development of the waterfront transportation/industry complex should be a central element of all regional planning and development efforts.

Historically, Portland has been committed to investing in its working waterfront and industrial complex. Moving forward, the community should remain committed to preserving the resources the city has built over the last hundred years.
Portland’s