Open Collections

O'Donnell, Margaret

University of British Columbia

In a northern section of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the former site of the NuHart Plastic Manufacturing facility is being remediated and redeveloped into a majority market-rate apartment complex. While residents have waited decades for the city to address their concerns related to the contaminants leaching from the site and their potential health effects, the current clean-up has been met with resident frustration and ambivalence. This thesis explores how the structure of the environmental clean-up at NuHart obscures the underlying ecology of injustice of northern Greenpoint. Through archival data, interviews, and observations of community meetings, I analyze how the State and developers construct and maintain regimes of perceptibility that foreclose more expansive solutions to the problems expressed by Greenpoint residents. Chapter 1 depicts how the slow violence of environmental mismanagement shaped Greenpoint into a sacrifice zone. Today, development follows the contours etched by decades of disinvestment, using toxic sites (like NuHart) as opportunities to advance the interests of the real estate state. Chapter 2 examines how the State and developers use statistical data and maps to collapse and quantify the historical accrual of injustice. The knowledge regimes mobilized at NuHart allow the State and developers to wield environmental science as a tool of the green growth machine. Chapter 3 explores how specific constructions of urgency and latency create hegemonic timescapes at the site that are out of rhythm with the neighborhood. By manipulating time so that in turn both urgency and latency are naturalized when it suited the project, developers left no room for residents to articulate an alternative orientation to the remediation timeline. Ultimately, at the NuHart site the narrow framings of both the local environmental crises—as historical but not ongoing—and the housing crisis—as perpetuated by a lack of supply best remedied by swift, smooth development procedures—produced technocratic, partial solutions. By looking more deeply at the root causes of resident ambivalence and the conflicting ways various pasts, presents, and futures of NuHart were articulated by residents and the State, the co-constructed nature of these crises comes into clearer view.

Text

2025-01-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90081

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/