Yonn Dierwechter | University of Washington Tacoma (original) (raw)

Books by Yonn Dierwechter

This book investigates urban growth management in the USA as a contested form of state territoria... more This book investigates urban growth management in the USA as a contested form of state territoriality. Synthesizing, interpreting, and contributing to literature on the history, theory and practices of urban growth management, the analysis offers critically theorized case studies of four 'city-regions' located in four different growth management states."

Papers by Yonn Dierwechter

In recent years “smartness” has risen as a buzzword to characterise novel urban policy and develo... more In recent years “smartness” has risen as a buzzword to characterise novel urban policy and development patterns. As a result of this, debates around what “smart” actually means, both theoretically and empirically, have emerged within the interdisciplinary arenas of urban and regional studies. This book explores the changes in discourse, rationality and selected responses of smartness through the theme of “transition.” The concept of transition provides the broader context and points of reference for adopting smartness in reconciling competing interests and agendas in city-regional governance. Using case studies from around the world, including North America, Europe and South Africa, the authors link external regime transition in societal values and goals with internal moves towards smartness. While reflecting the growing integration of overarching themes and analytical concerns, this volume further develops work on smartness, smart growth, transition, city-regionalism, governance and sustainability. Smart Transitions in City Regionalism explores how smart cities and city regions interact with conventional state structures. It will be of great interest to postgraduates and advanced undergraduates across urban studies, geography, sustainability studies and political science.

Frontiers in sustainable cities, Mar 31, 2020

Building on work that critiques smart growth's "industrial blind spot," we explore here the poten... more Building on work that critiques smart growth's "industrial blind spot," we explore here the potential for "transit-oriented manufacturing" (TOM) rather than transit-oriented development (TOD) in order to gain some purchase on visions for green city futures that include blue collars workers. The shift from TOD to TOM, we argue, involves some rethinking of what (and who) cities are for, and paying careful attention to how investments in transit infrastructure serve to define, materially and symbolically, urban and regional relations and identities. Through an engagement with the scholarship on planning for urban industry, smart growth, and transit-oriented development, we argue that the first challenge is to make TOM thinkable. By this we mean not only how we abstractly imagine or conceive future worlds, but also how we create and deploy practical vocabularies of deliberated urban change that actively help to mobilize new conversations about critical places in our changing and changeable cities and regions. We link this challenge of the "thinkability" of TOM to a brief case study in the city of Tacoma, WA.

Frontiers in sustainable cities, Oct 26, 2022

This article engages governance visions for green urbanism and sustainability through the concept... more This article engages governance visions for green urbanism and sustainability through the concept of "industrial regionalism". Bringing together emerging research on the importance of manufacturing to inclusive economies and critiques of "methodological cityism", we explore the relational production of the iconic "green city" of Seattle. Here we consider how secondary cities, suburbs, and other peripheral spaces get subsumed within the metropolitan production of "urban" sustainability in ways that go unacknowledged and underappreciated. By absorbing tasks of production and social reproduction, such peripheral spaces may enable primate cities like Seattle to claim the mantle of sustainability, highlighting the rain gardens, bike lanes, urban green spaces, and other infrastructures that score high on walkability indices. In contrast, the working-class livelihoods on the periphery are often marginalized from sustainability discourses, if not actively disparaged for their inability to measure up to the green city ideal. This paper aims to o er a corrective by exploring how peripheral spaces are involved in the production of primate city sustainability. Employing the concept of intra-regional relationality, and drawing from census and geospatial data as well as regional planning analyses and reports, we illustrate that "urban" sustainability is produced regionally and relationally. The aim here is to consider how the "industrial region" might gain purchase as an important component of the governance of urban sustainability.

Journal of Urban Affairs, Jan 9, 2023

The urban book series, 2017

This chapter lays out the major themes and key debates associated with the now expansive scholarl... more This chapter lays out the major themes and key debates associated with the now expansive scholarly literatures on urban sustainability and smart growth, respectively. The discussion highlights distinct interpretations of urban sustainability: state-progressive, radical-societal, and market-liberal. Smart growth is then discussed as a more concrete and largely state-progressive (rather than radical-societal or market-liberal) planning theory and policy doctrine that, in the US context at least, “spatializes” urban sustainability in ways that are legible in the institutional and discursive environment. Following Cooke’s (Theories of planning and spatial development, London, 1983) lead, I argue that we need to integrate the planning theory of smart growth with the wider pursuit of urban sustainability as an urban geopolitical project. Such a theoretical commitment, I suggest, might help us both to describe and to explain what I call in Chap. 3 the sustainable geographies of uneven smart growth in Greater Seattle—and perhaps beyond.

The Urbanization of Green Internationalism, 2018

The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics has stimulated remarkable debates abou... more The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics has stimulated remarkable debates about sustainable urban development and the geopolitics of a changing world order no longer defined by tightly bordered national regimes. This book explores this major theme by drawing on approaches that document the diverse histories and emergent geographies of “internationalism.” It is no longer possible, the book argues, to analyze the global politics of the environment without considering its various urbanization(s), wherein multiple actors are reforming, reassembling, and adapting to nascent threats posed by global ecological decay. The ongoing imposition and abrasion of different world orders—Westphalian and post-Westphalian—further suggests we need a wider frame to capture what the critical theorist of internationalism, Josep Antentas (Antipode, 47: 1101–1120, 2015), drawing on Daniel Bensaȉd, calls the “sliding scale of spaces.” The book will therefore appeal to students, scholars, a...

The Urbanization of Green Internationalism, 2018

This chapter engages with recent work on the histories and geographies of "internationalism," tra... more This chapter engages with recent work on the histories and geographies of "internationalism," tracing the story back to the early nineteenth century. While the internationalism of nations-of governing the world through a state-created framework-forms an important development of the older Westphalian order mentioned in Chapter 1, this chapter also draws attention to other outlooks and practices, including what Mark Mazower (Governing the world: The history of an idea, 1815 to the present. The Penguin Press, New York, 2012) calls diverse "brotherhoods" around free market ideals, evangelical moralism, anti-slavery campaigns, legal codification, and scientific knowledge as well as to what geographers have similarly charted as the heterogeneity of subaltern movements that challenge hegemonic forms of power and oppression (Featherstone, in Solidarity: Hidden histories and geographies of internationalism.

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, 2018

Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth, 2017

This chapter refines the principal research question introduced initially in Chap. 1, viz: What i... more This chapter refines the principal research question introduced initially in Chap. 1, viz: What is the relationship between Greater Seattle’s smart growth plans and territorial programs and the shifting geographies of work, home, and mobility? These questions include both quantitative and qualitative dimensions and suggest a mix-methods research approach based on a what is called here an “abductive” philosophy on inquiry. The chapter discusses this approach, highlighting the use of interview data, documentary review, census and GIS analysis, and other visualization techniques. The chapter also discuss the main data sources, including quantitative data on jobs, housing, and transportation and qualitative data that help interpret, visualize, and contextualize major quantitative trends, including interviews, site visits, analysis of public documents, newspaper and activist accounts, and drone imagery.

Case Studies in Suburban Sustainability, 2020

Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth, 2017

This chapter focuses empirically on the “intercurrence of intentions” that characterizes the poli... more This chapter focuses empirically on the “intercurrence of intentions” that characterizes the policy geographies of smart growth across Greater Seattle. Focusing methodologically on the substantive content of adopted plans at various territorial scales of authority, from the neighborhood to the federal government but especially local plans, I argue for the ideational and institutional coexistence of multiple orders as Greater Seattle seeks to reshape the uneven geography of local metropolitan life into putatively more sustainable forms and functions in the coming years. Local public plans, whether comprehensive, sub-area, or sectoral, are key governance spaces through which diverse values and interests in visions of urban sustainability inevitably emerge. Accordingly, the discussion considers various multi-scalar policy efforts to reshape the location, connectivity, design, and procedures associated with the uneven growth dynamics across the Greater Seattle city-region.

The smart growth literature has not engaged questions of labor, in general, and the spatialities ... more The smart growth literature has not engaged questions of labor, in general, and the spatialities of work, in particular. Although smart growth theory, as discussed originally in Chap. 2, makes much of “mixed-use” landscapes and transit-oriented development, both addressed at some length in Chap. 6, urban researchers have not sufficiently explored the many new empirical relationships between smart growth interventions and extant labor geographies, particularly as these implicate wider questions of urban sustainability. After providing context in the introduction, this chapter describes contemporary patterns of wealth and poverty across the city-region with respect to major industrial sectors. It then maps key commuting linkages and functional interrelationships. The chapter ultimately highlights efforts to grow mobility choices within transit communities, an inter-scalar state strategy that ostensibly seeks to strengthen local growth plans, regional sprawl containment, and the genera...

The Urbanization of Green Internationalism, 2018

This chapter builds on the conclusions of Chapter 3, using the metaphor of “romance” to assess th... more This chapter builds on the conclusions of Chapter 3, using the metaphor of “romance” to assess the rise of cities as they have engaged states and international organizations, and vice versa. While international affairs have environmentalized, global environmentalism in turn has strongly urbanized in recent decades. The discussion thus presses the case for how urban space was steadily reconceptualized after the denouement of the Cold War as a “global solution” to ecological challenges. One major implication is that political ecologies have now “delocalized” and “upscaled,” a process that has caused its own tensions and political contradictions. Attention is paid to signature initiatives like Local Agenda 21, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the rise of inter-municipal policy networks, and recent “smartness” discourses. In particular, the chapter identifies three distinctive kinds of urbanizations: international, transnational, and smart. Each section considers major world cities...

Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth, 2017

The latest measurements of CMB electron scattering optical depth reported by Planck significantly... more The latest measurements of CMB electron scattering optical depth reported by Planck significantly reduces the allowed space of H i reionization models, pointing towards a later ending and/or less extended phase transition than previously believed. Reionization impulsively heats the intergalactic medium (IGM) to ∼ 10 4 K, and owing to long cooling and dynamical times in the diffuse gas, comparable to the Hubble time, memory of reionization heating is retained. Therefore, a late ending reionization has significant implications for the structure of the z ∼ 5−6 Lyman-α (Lyα) forest. Using state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations that allow us to vary the timing of reionization and its associated heat injection, we argue that extant thermal signatures from reionization can be detected via the Lyα forest power spectrum at 5 < z < 6. This arises because the small-scale cutoff in the power depends not only the the IGMs temperature at these epochs, but is also particularly sensitive to the pressure smoothing scale set by the IGMs full thermal history. Comparing our different reionization models with existing measurements of the Lyαforest flux power spectrum at z = 5.0 − 5.4, we find that models satisfying Planck's τ e constraint, favor a moderate amount of heat injection consistent with galaxies driving reionization, but disfavoring quasar driven scenarios. We explore the impact of different reionization histories and heating models on the shape of the power spectrum, and find that they can produce similar effects, but argue that this degeneracy can be broken with high enough quality data. We study the feasibility of measuring the flux power spectrum at z 6 using mock quasar spectra and conclude that a sample of ∼ 10 high-resolution spectra with attainable S/N ratio will allow to discriminate between different reionization scenarios.

Frontiers in sustainable cities, Mar 31, 2020

Frontiers in sustainable cities, Oct 26, 2022

Journal of Urban Affairs, Jan 9, 2023

The urban book series, 2017

The Urbanization of Green Internationalism, 2018

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, 2018

Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth, 2017

Case Studies in Suburban Sustainability, 2020

Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth, 2017

The Urbanization of Green Internationalism, 2018

Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth, 2017

Urban Growth Management and Its Discontents, 2008

Oregon folklore has it that a simple coin flip between two East Coast pioneers kept Portland from... more Oregon folklore has it that a simple coin flip between two East Coast pioneers kept Portland from being named Boston. While today placing a second Boston on the West Coast seems a particularly odd formulation, Portland is actually situated some seventy miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and, though located at the confluence of two major rivers and tied originally to the timber trade, this city of 560,000 is not really a port in the coastal sense of the term, certainly not like Boston, Seattle, Tacoma, or Baltimore. Portland is, however, classic in another sense. As first indicated in chapter 1, it is the one U.S. city—or more precisely city-region—usually identified with urban planning, in general, and what we now call the smart growth paradigm, in particular.