City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas

by Andrew M Busch

The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city's identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region's environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a "city in a garden" perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century.

In telling Austin's story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin's mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city's midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin's green growth.

336 pages, Paperback

Published July 17, 2017

Reviews

[Kristy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tired: "You should have been in Austin 10 (or 20, or 30) years ago, man, it was so much cooler then."

Wired: "Are you aware of the impact of damming the highland lakes starting in the early 1900s, funding from the defense industry, pro-growth/anti-industrial city councils, overt and institutionalized racist policies, and an 'all in' push toward new urbanism with little real concern about gentrification on shaping the changes Austin has gone through over the past 130 years?"

In this extensively researched and historically ambitious volume, Busch explores "why the concept of urban sustainability has developed in a way that seems to exclude so many people from its benefits and why Austin is a city so tied to its natural environment yet so bifurcated by race." This is a fascinating and very readable look at the history of Austin through a lens of environmentalism and race that takes us from a spatially integrated (but functionally separate) late-19th century Austin to the redlining of the 1920s, the building of I-35 as a more prominent barrier between the races, the impact of the University, the rise of the tech industry, the threat of development to Barton Springs, and the efforts of PODER and other neighborhood groups to shut down the Holly Power Plant and re-zone the east side to remove industrial tracts from within residential neighborhoods. I would have also liked to see more information on the impact of integration on the UT area and a look at how the change to a geographically representative city council in 2012 has affected development at the neighborhood level, but understand that this is a very full book as it is.

While the text sometimes gets repetitive and Busch can occasionally lose the thread of the impact of changes in Austin on underrepresented communities, this is a great read for anyone interested in the history of Austin, the impact of urban planning, and the importance of bringing *all* voices to the table if we want to reverse the trend of racist development decisions in our city.

[Molly S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have lived in Austin for a decade and wanted to understand the history behind this city’s unique economic development. Austinites like to promote a very white-washed version of the city’s growth and economic engine. I learned a lot about how early city planners implemented segregation and made deliberate choices to curtail industries that employ low-skilled workers. While the content of the book is great, I felt like the chapters repeated content a lot and it rambled on in some sections. Maybe a future edition will be more concise.

[Faye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the content. It was quite repetitive and could be condensed or added to more in the sections about the different African American and Mexican American settlements. I wanted to know more about them especially and how they have been maintained in present day despite gentrification.

[Kelsey Huse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great content, dry and academic and hard to read