The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics

I have visited many cities over the years. Some that left a strong impression include Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Seattle, and Sofia. I currently live in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since moving to the United States nine years ago, I would have to say that my favorite North American city is Chicago. It is one of the few cities of the world where you can sit on the beach with the skyline immediately behind you or where you can promenade along the waterfront for miles and miles. It is also one of a handful of U.S. cities where bicycling is the norm and public space abounds. The restaurants are hip and alive; its music scene is thriving; its architecture is bold; the art on show is often provocative and cutting edge; and the intellectual scene is stimulating and challenging. In a nutshell, the city has shed its blue-collar rustbelt image, and in its place it has joined the ranks of other global cities the world over.

Chicago is also one of the few cities in the United States that has ranked highly on the various green cities measuring indexes. Over the past decade and under the leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley (1989–2011),¹ it has undergone a green facelift, moving it into fourth position on the 2008 SustainLane U.S. Sustainable City Rankings.² By making Chicago an “environmentally friendly” city, Mayor Daley expanded on the new and shiny global brand identity that Chicago had forged for itself in a way that reinforced its competitive economic and cultural status within the global arena and in the process generated a greener way of life for Chicagoans. Put differently, as a green city, Chicago epitomizes modern feeling as much as it produces that feeling, and it is this connection that I am interested in exploring further in this chapter. There are obviously many other examples of green urban development that I could have chosen to look at—Abu Dhabi, Tianjin, and Freiburg, to name just a few. Yet in an effort to stave off flattening the theoretical terrain by avoiding the discomfort that can arise from being too close to the issue at hand, I thought it better to focus my analysis on a city that I have a strong attachment to as opposed to one that is by and large present for me as only an abstraction.

I am curious as to how the greening of the built environment is tied to the broader phenomenon of modern feeling on which Fredric Jameson casts a spotlight: “This modern feeling now seems to consist in the conviction that we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same again; nor do we want anything to be the same again, we want to ‘make it new,’ get rid of all those old objects, values, mentalities, and ways of doing things, and to be somehow transfigured.”³

That said, the appetite for “newness” Jameson describes has the unfortunate consequence of generating amnesia throughout the social field, an amnesia that inhibits institutions and social organizations from effectively intervening in the structural inequities that infuse our common landscape.

Indeed, as David Harvey points out, modern feeling facilitates an axiomatic of capital as it configures and distributes geographical landscapes: “Capitalism strives … to create a social and physical landscape in its own image and requisite to its own needs at a particular point in time, only just as certainly to undermine, disrupt and even destroy that landscape at a later point in time. The inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes.”⁴

By combining Jameson’s notion of modern feeling with Harvey’s discussion of accumulation through dispossession, we can confront the ways in which green urbanism and the political practices asserted throughout this process of capital accumulation are produced by and in turn are constitutive of modern feeling and an uneven socioeconomic geography.

When we talk about green living in the city and the modern feeling it facilitates, we are not just thinking about how cities are lowering their energy consumption or the GHGs they emit or even the green spaces they have. These things are only part of the picture. I say this not to denigrate the work being done in the area of green building and green city development; to be clear from the outset, I recognize that this work is without doubt an important part of solving the climate change jigsaw puzzle. What I am interested in taking a closer look at, though, is how green urbanism and green building produce modern feeling and in turn how modern feeling overlaps the politics of climate change with the sociopolitical realities shaping cities. I propose that the process of producing modern feeling and the dynamics that it generates facilitate the production of neoliberal landscapes. This combination is placing the transformative potential of modern feeling in the service of capital accumulation. As such, in this chapter I look at how modern feeling was at work throughout the transformation of Chicago as the city moved away from its blue-collar union identity to become a global city, an image later strengthened by the brand of environmental friendliness. In conjunction, I study the socioeconomic effects of this process of transformation, all the while examining how modern feeling directs and is reproduced through the urban greening process. The guiding question in this examination is: How does the formal operation of modern green feeling align itself with a conservative impulse? And what role does capital play in this alignment?

To begin, in 2008 the world consumed approximately 8,428 million tons of oil equivalent of energy, as compared with 4,676 in 1973.⁵ The world’s largest GHG emitters are China and the United States. Together they contribute more than “32% of global GHG emissions, and approximately 40% of global CO₂ emissions from energy use and industrial processes.”⁶ Primary energy consumption is unfortunately not expected to drop or level off; the International Energy Agency predicts that, if anything, it will grow approximately 50 percent from 2005 to 2030.⁷ Within this picture, the building sector has an especially significant role to play in lowering the global GHG emissions arising from global energy-consumption patterns. On an annual basis, it consumes 2,500 million tons of oil equivalent of global energy supplies. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s carbon footprint comes from the built environment.⁸ Lowering the GHG emissions from the building and construction industry is therefore an important factor in ameliorating climate change, and the most common ways in which this task is being broached is through policy, technological innovation, and benchmarks for green building and the development of green cities.⁹

In general, a green city has a low ecological footprint. There are a variety of ways to assess and rank a city based on how green it is. One factor is the amount of power the city receives from clean or renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, and biomass) along with its overall energy use. The transportation habits of the city’s residents are important indicators: traffic congestion and the number of residents who frequently walk, bicycle, carpool, or use public transportation. Data on the city’s air and water quality are collected. Other factors considered are metro area sprawl, housing affordability, quality and availability of local food (farmers markets, community gardens, and markets that accept food stamps), number of areas devoted to green spaces (public parks and nature preserves), and green economic activity. Finally, a survey of the number of green buildings is conducted.

A green building is one that is environmentally friendly. The construction, performance, and demolition of a green building are designed to maximize energy efficiency and minimize environmental impacts. There are three ways in which buildings consume energy. The first is through their embodied energy—that is, the energy required to extract raw materials and to manufacture and transport the materials and components to a factory or building site as well as the actual energy used to construct the building. The second and, I should add, highest amount of energy consumed is in a building’s operational phase. This is the amount of energy needed for heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, and cooking.¹⁰ Last, there is the amount of energy consumed at the end of a building’s life cycle (demolition, landfill, recycling, and incineration).

In 2008, the U.S. building sector was responsible for nearly 40 percent of the country’s primary energy consumption, which was 8 percent more than what the U.S. industrial sector consumed and 12 percent more than what the U.S. transportation sector consumed the same year. These figures are 50 percent higher than those recorded for total U.S. building energy consumption in 1980. Further, buildings account for 72 percent of overall U.S. electricity consumption. Then factor into these statistics the fact that in 2007 average per capita CO₂ emissions in the United States were 19.74 tons, as compared to 4.92 tons in China, 1.94 tons in Brazil, 1.38 tons in India, and a mere 0.64 tons in Nigeria.¹¹ Further, if the U.S. population was estimated at 296 million in 2005 and is projected to grow to 438 million by 2050,¹² then one pressing problem in respect to climate change is how to ensure that the new buildings needed to house this growing population might become more energy efficient.

In 1993, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) was formed to respond to the negative environmental impacts of the building and construction industries.¹³ In 1999, the organization piloted a digital measuring tool that could be used to assess buildings’ energy efficiency. This tool is basically a rating system that in professional circles is popularly referred to as LEED, for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.” It has six primary categories of assessment—sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation—each with its own goals. One goal equals one credit point, and a total of 100 points can be given. As of 2009, the basic LEED rating requires at least 40 to 49 points; silver accreditation requires 50 to 59 points; gold 60 to 79 points; and platinum, the highest LEED rating, 80 points or more.

Michael Zaretsky points out in his assessment “LEED After Ten Years” that LEED may not be the “first green building rating system” but is “certainly the most commonly used in the U.S.” Whereas the 2005 USGBC expo had less than 10,000 attendees, by 2009 this number had grown extensively, with 27,373 attendees from seventy-eight countries.¹⁴ The growth in LEED-registered projects, membership, and professional training in the United States is testimony to LEED’s growing popularity and more specifically to green living both among professionals and the general public. This is not to suggest that LEED has been immune to criticism. As many have pointed out, the rating system focuses too much on individual buildings and not enough on contextual conditions.¹⁵ The USGBC’s changing mission indicates that the organization is attempting to respond to its critics. For instance, whereas the 2005 mission statement set out to “promote the design and construction of buildings that are environmentally responsible, profitable, and healthy places to live and work,” by 2010, Zaretsky explains, the organization had become more community oriented, aspiring to create, as the USGBC states, “buildings and communities” that can “regenerate and sustain the health and vitality of all life within a generation.”¹⁶

In his evaluation of LEED, Zaretsky highlights the manner in which the rating system has “brought important attention to critical issues of ‘green design,’” although he is quick to point out that there is a fundamental distinction between “green” and “sustainable” design. He calls for a “more nuanced understanding of sustainable design” because regardless of how much energy, water, or resources a building saves, we need to be mindful of the ways in which LEED facilitates the “greenwashing” of the building and construction industries. He states that the “seemingly endless number of architecturally deplorable and socially exclusive, developer-based projects” that showcase being green as a result of their LEED certification continues to raise concerns over LEED’s limited scope.¹⁷ His point, as he shows via the example of his own collaborations with a rural community in Tanzania in the design and building of an off-the-grid medical center, is that it is crucial for the integrity of sustainable design that it not be reduced to another investment opportunity. Rather, sustainable design has to aspire both to create environmentally friendly buildings and to contribute to the creation of a more inclusive society. The distinction is both a philosophical and a pragmatic one, for it concerns how we affect and are affected by the environment in which we live.

In addition to changing its mission statement, the rating system used by the USGBC’s LEED program has also expanded. There are now LEED ratings for green-building design and construction, green interior design and construction, green-building operations and maintenance, green home design and construction, and green neighborhoods. The rating system for green neighborhoods specifically tackles the focus on individual buildings by providing a holistic view of the built environment. To achieve this, it combines the principles of green building and smart growth with the theories and practices of New Urbanism. The idea is to present a series of standards that can be used to create environmentally friendly neighborhoods and communities, and throughout the United States it has become a popular way to “green” cities and introduce policies that promote green urbanism. Points are awarded for green infrastructure and buildings, innovative design, smart location and linkages (site design for habitat, brownfield redevelopment, floodplain avoidance, wetland and water body conservation, to name a few), and neighborhood pattern and design (walkable streets, compact development, mixed use, mixed income, local food production, neighborhood schools, tree-lined streets, and so on). All these goals neatly align with the twenty-seven principles listed in “The Charter of the New Urbanism.”¹⁸

New Urbanism is the outcome of a marriage between the principles of environmentalism and neotraditional design and planning. It aspires to make cities and towns more people-friendly by creating walkable, efficient, and livable communities. It is a form-generating approach to design and planning, and key components include mixed-use neighborhoods, the transformation of suburbs into communities, diversity, a celebration of local conditions, identifiable community centers and edges, infill, an integrated urban pattern, affordable housing, a variety of transportation options (public transportation, bicycle paths, sidewalks), sharing of tax revenues throughout metropolitan regions, identifiable edges and centers, interconnected streets, pedestrian friendliness, green space, diverse housing types, safe and secure environments, green building, efficient land use, and the preservation of historic buildings and sites. Narrow streets, front porches, wide sidewalks, historically inspired architectural styles, a central square, and rear garages are common neotraditional features of U.S. New Urbanism. (New Urbanism principles are also being used in Europe—for instance, in Amersfoort, Netherlands, and Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm, just to cite a couple of examples.)

There is enormous merit to the notion that a compact, well-planned community with a strong public infrastructure and green buildings is an effective way to reduce the ecological footprint of cities and metropolitan regions. Yet as critics of New Urbanism have pointed out, if we examine some of the movement’s touchstone examples—Seaside, Florida (the set for the film The Truman Show) and Celebration, Orlando (built by Disney Co.)—we are presented with a more ominous world of white middle-class enclaves uniformly organized by a series of restrictions and regulations. The end result is, as Michael Sorkin so scathingly describes it, a development that harbors “a single species (the white middle class) in a habitat of dulling uniformity,” one that “seeks the stability of the predictable, a Prozac halcyon in which nothing can go wrong.”¹⁹

The point Sorkin makes is important: that “New Urbanism” is a misnomer. It reproduces all the “worst aspects of Modernism” because “undergirding modernity was the fantasy of a universal architecture.” Sorkin explains that New Urbanism promotes “another style of universality that is similarly overreliant on visual cues to produce social effects,” wherein the uniformity of production, “the polemic of stylistic superiority, and the creepy corporatist lifestyles are scary indeed.”²⁰ Others have argued that New Urbanism expresses a desire to return to the simplicities of traditional village life, which they have characterized as a nostalgic impulse to escape from the complexities of contemporary life. The material struggles of history are basically erased, however, and only a depoliticized historical shell is left.²¹

Although attentive to architectural history, the specificities of site, and local climatic conditions, New Urbanism surprisingly operates on the premise that there is no community prior to the design implemented by the expert knowledge of planners and architects. In order for sustainable design to be a politically transformative project, some conception of a Whole or a Universal needs to be invoked, but not in the way that New Urbanism does. A political project integrates difference and yet moves beyond identity and local differences in order to effectuate change. Unlike Sorkin, who is critical of the universal content of the New Urbanist project, I consider the problem to be less one of content than one of form: New Urbanism does not prioritize a responsive design process that emerges in collaboration with existing communities. Instead, it begins by creating a tabula rasa onto which the physical features of a traditional conception of community are rolled out. In this way, it is committed to a predefined urban form that deters the self-organization of matter and energy at work throughout the social field from challenging, disrupting, or informing the work of the designer, planner, or developer. For this reason, it is a normative approach to design that works in a top-down way to reconfigure local geographies, dehistoricizing them in the process.

Expanding on the criticism that New Urbanism shares the modernist goal of universality under a different guise—nostalgia for the picturesque small-town lifestyle—I am interested in the way that the modern feeling for green living, as epitomized by the environmentally friendly city, emerges out of an apparent contradiction as it emphasizes both the nostalgic and the new. And I have to ask whether this contradiction simply reinforces a neoliberal agenda. In addition, I would suggest that the traditional codes of New Urbanism in operation throughout the country—for example, in the greening-of-Chicago initiative—are similar to their traditional referents but serve a different function. That is, they function as a new axiom of capital.

Chicago has a long history of being one of America’s main transportation hubs, which helped its economy boom as its manufacturing and retail sector grew. Yet Chicago, like other cities of the rustbelt, underwent a serious setback during 1970s deindustrialization. The latter process resulted in a rise in urban crime, middle-class flight to the suburbs, and a growth in districts maimed by abject poverty.

The social implications and causes of Chicago’s demise have long been the source of great debate. For instance, sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that the poor urban black community bore the greatest brunt of the deindustrialization burden. Unemployment sent the first round of shockwaves throughout the community, and a second-round of aftershocks hit when the employed black middle class left the city. The result for poor Chicago neighborhoods, which were the subject of Wilson’s study, was the corrosion of social institutions and massive social dislocation. As one woman from the South Side Chicago neighborhood exclaimed,

Wilson’s analysis, however, sidelines the impact that postwar migration had on the social cohesiveness of Chicago’s South Side, an issue Nicholas Lemann emphasizes in his epic study of the great black migration north. Lemann examines the social impact that the introduction of mechanical cotton pickers had on southern black laborers when they suddenly found their skills had become redundant.²³ For Lemann, Chicago’s ghettos were an inevitable outcome of poor public policy when not enough attention was paid to job creation. He goes on to provide a brutal assessment of what he describes as a pervasive sharecropping culture—that is, the social disorganization endemic throughout African American communities, as displayed in the hustling to make ends meet, the illegitimacy, and the broken families. Last, he blames bad timing in that the migrants arrived in Chicago at a time when unskilled manufacturing jobs were on the decline.

Whereas Wilson correlates Chicago’s urban deterioration with economic depression, Lehman associates the same condition with a flawed migrant culture. Both studies of race and poverty, however, contribute to a historical narrative that pathologizes Chicago’s poor urban African American communities, and, as I discuss later, this patholigization reappeared in Mayor Daley’s use of New Urbanism: demolishing public housing (“the Projects”) and replacing it with mixed-income housing, restructuring public schools in low-income areas, and developing initiatives to address Chicago’s food deserts.

The racist view of African American communities that the 1992 U.S. public-housing revitalization program Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) was predicated on has had the unfortunate consequence of moralizing poverty. Between 1993 and 2009, a total of 249 revitalization projects were either completed, under construction, or in planning, with approximately $6 billion in grants being awarded by the program to projects across the country.²⁴ The program demolishes public housing and relocates residents to mixed-income developments. The idea is that by placing poor people in a context where they will have exposure to middle-class values and can interact with and make friends with the middle class, the “culture” of poverty will be broken. In reality, as Loretta Lees has amply demonstrated, the benefits of gentrification do not trickle down to the poor; they quite simply lead to “displacement, segregation, and social polarization.”²⁵

In an effort to attract middle-class investment in low-income areas, Chicago’s low-income public-school sector was also restructured. In 2004, Chicago Public Schools launched the plan to close sixty to seventy of Chicago’s low-income community public schools. Renaissance 2010, as this project was titled, would open one hundred new schools of choice: two-thirds would be nonunion, publicly funded charter schools run by the private sector; the remaining one-third would be public schools that would operate on a five-year performance contract. Pauline Lipman reported in 2009 that the plan was ahead of schedule, having closed or phased out seventy-six schools, all of which were located in Chicago’s “low-income communities of color.”²⁶

The mixed-income, community-oriented narrative of New Urbanism not only underpins the policy to deconcentrate low-income students by sending them to mixed-income schools—operating on the premise that “advantages rest in the ‘social surplus’ of the middle class and whites … rather than in the educational resources and advantages they have accrued as a result of their status and power”²⁷—but also appears in the HOPE VI program. That is, by forcing poor communities out of the “Projects,” poverty will be deconcentrated, and the poor will be rehabilitated through their exposure to the more “civilized” cultural values of the middle class. The policy has proven itself to be a mask for gentrification. Lipman draws attention to the alarming statistic that in Chicago since 2000 only 1,126 of the 7,186 family units that were demolished as part of the regeneration scheme have in fact been replaced.²⁸

The justification used to dismantle public-housing projects has found support among architectural and urban theorists who have been highly critical of the modernist project and more specifically of modernist high-rise public-housing schemes. The failure of modernist architecture was symbolized by the iconic demolition in 1972 of the Pruitt-Igoe public-housing project in St. Louis, Missouri. In The New Paradigm in Architecture, Charles Jencks comments that Pruitt-Igoe represented a “failure in planning and architecture,” declaring that “modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme … [was] given the final coup de grace by dynamite.”²⁹ One of the most influential criticisms of modernism had come from Jane Jacobs many years earlier, who influenced New Urbanism with her 1961 groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.³⁰ In it, she put forward a convincing case for community-oriented urban planning, arguing that the crime and social alienation characteristic of top-down modernist planning and the high rise had weakened urban life. To counter these problems, she recommended efforts to revitalize the local economy with more diversity and greater density. Out of this New Urbanist trajectory, mixed-use and mixed-income developments were held up as the new design idiom that could replace the isolation and social segregation of the high-rise projects.

The pathological codification of disenfranchised communities and the spaces they inhabit has given rise to a series of public-policy initiatives that have reconfigured the geography of race and class in many U.S. cities, and Chicago has been no exception to this trend. For instance, policies of deconcentration have been part of a larger effort on behalf of Chicago’s governing authorities and corporate sector to pull Chicago up by the bootstraps and transform it into a “global city” so that its elite can competitively position itself in the global free market.

“Globalization is a trillion puppeteers dancing on very long strings,” explains Saskia Sassen, and “global cites are where the puppeteers live and work.”³¹ Chicago has grown to become a place of “power and sophistication,” says Adele Simmons: it boasts having a multicultural base, with 22 percent of its population being immigrants who send approximately $1.8 billion dollars home each year; it has 130 non-English newspapers to meet the needs of its cosmopolitan population; and it is home to seventy consular offices to meet the demand that comes from being a truly “global” entity. The turnaround came about largely because the city was flexible and open to new ideas, which translates into being willing to diversify its economy. And the prize: “Being known as a global city is an economic and cultural asset”!³² As a result, Chicago became a destination for corporate investment and relocation, one famous example being Boeing Company, which relocated its headquarters to Chicago from Seattle in 2001.

Much of Chicago’s success comes from being able to lure the creative class, those well-educated individuals who flock to a city proudly showcasing its diverse cultural assets, its wide array of recreational options (restaurants, cafes, bike trails, water sports, etc.), an efficient transportation network, a variety of upscale condos, employment in the knowledge economy and intellectual service industry, along with opportunities to work in elegantly designed offices in the city’s downtown. What is more, today Chicago has the added benefit of enjoying the status of being a wonderful example of sustainable urban living: compact and dense, it boasts a strong public transit system; it is walkable and bikeable; and its residents enjoy energy-efficient buildings, mixed-use developments, and green spaces.³³ It has basically transformed itself into an urban success story.

Popular culture presents a consistent image of what a successful city looks like. This city features in advertisements, provides the backdrop to television shows and movies, and is marketed as a tourist attraction. The successful city is fashionable, fast paced, sexy, wealthy, globally linked; is able to attract upwardly mobile immigrants and swarms of visitors; and, more important in the twenty-first century, is green, clean, and diverse. As stated in the New Urbanism news publication New Urban Network, “The Daley administration and other public entities have accomplished many positive things—among them, demolishing unlivable public housing towers at Cabrini-Green; sprucing up city parks; rehabilitating architecturally distinguished old schools rather than building second-rate replacements; improving the public transportation system; and ending the expedient practice of putting new schools on park land.”³⁴

Cities account for up to 70 percent of GHG emissions, and yet they cover only a mere 2 percent of global land area. The majority of the world’s population resides in cities, with many more expected to follow in the footsteps of the millions of people worldwide who have already migrated from rural areas.³⁵ For these reasons, there is enormous potential to lower global GHG emissions by making cities more environmentally friendly. So when Mayor Daley publicly kicked off his goal of making Chicago the greenest city in the United States by symbolically installing a green roof on City Hall in 2000, he positioned himself at the cutting edge of environmental urban politics. In 2006, he went on to adopt the Environmental Action Agenda as a way to pragmatically green the city’s infrastructure, buildings, and energy as well as to improve livability standards for Chicago residents. The list of green urban achievements that took place under Daley’s watch is indeed impressive: 1,300 new acres of open space, 7 million square feet of green roofs (which reduce urban heat island effect and help manage storm water), 90 miles of green street medians installed, half a million trees planted, removal of one of the downtown airports for a 100-acre park instead, 165 miles of bikeways built, and new investment pumped into the city’s transportation infrastructure.

Then on September 18, 2008, Mayor Daley announced his Chicago Climate Action Plan. The plan set out to take a serious stab at reducing the city’s carbon emissions. It spearheaded the city’s energy use and aimed to reduce waste and finance emissions-reduction programs.³⁶ Overall, the aim was to place Chicago at the forefront of environmentally friendly urban planning. Some of the strategies implemented include changing building codes and retrofitting residential, commercial, and industrial buildings so as to reduce the energy they use and improve their water efficiency. New policies require all new public-building renovations to comply with green standards. Some of the mitigation strategies for clean and renewable energy sources outlined in the plan include upgrading or repowering the twenty-one Illinois coal plants that supply energy to Chicago, improving power-plant efficiency, and procuring renewable energy. The question that remains is: How does the green glow of the Chicago brand infuse everyday life on the ground?

The 2009 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey reported that Chicago continues to suffer from severe income disparities, with the average African American person earning $28,725 a year, but the average white Chicagoan earning $63,625 a year.³⁷ The only other large U.S. city that topped Chicago for inequitable income distribution across racial lines was Dallas. In 2009, Chicago’s rate of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and aggravated battery) was approximately double the national average.³⁸ These statistics point to disparities in income and opportunity that the greening-of-Chicago mission has certainly not addressed. Chicago may have become more environmentally friendly, but if we look at the growing wage inequality that has occurred despite “robust job growth at the bottom of the labor market” in Chicago,³⁹ the neoliberal transformation of public housing, and the restructuring of the public-school sector, in particular those schools that serve low-income communities, then the city as a whole remains an unfriendly place for its poor and nonwhite residents.

In light of this assessment, I suggest that the modern feeling for New Urbanism and the green city in operation throughout Chicago does not change the axiomatic of capital; it merely modifies how that axiomatic works. Deeply critical of suburban sprawl, New Urbanism advocates for the importance of public spaces, transit-oriented development, density, and community vitality. Thus, in principle it appears to offer an alternative to the neoliberal focus on individualism, privatization, and the laissez-faire approach to urban design that has resulted in suburban sprawl, an automobile-centric culture, and the reification of private space. As the alienation of a capitalist social order has dismantled the vitality of community, a problem has arisen in which the reinvestment of the energies of alienation in a nostalgic view of a traditional social form is deployed as a signifier of the New.

The problem I am outlining here is formal; it concerns the manner in which the content of the past is used to accomplish a neoliberal agenda in the present under the guise of fulfilling a transformative program. The green roof on Chicago’s City Hall is just another code, alongside other codes such as the LEED-rated buildings, housing voucher schemes, bicycle paths, and so on and so forth. What grounds all of these codes and the shifts they undergo over time is the axiomatic of capital, for in all cases capital serves as the justification for urban development and change. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have so aptly noted, “The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones.”⁴⁰ How capitalism overcomes contradiction is by introducing a new axiomatic—the global city, the environmentally friendly city. None of these new names, however, actually changes the axiomatic of capital; they simply obscure how it works.

By turning green urbanism into an economic function, Mayor Daley integrates the Climate Action Plan and the urban greening strategies into the axiomatic of capital. Presenting green urban development, investment, and spending as a way to solve the financial crisis establishes an ideological opposition between the good green successful city and its urban Others (at the regional scale, the shrinking cities of the Rustbelt; at the metropolitan scale, the foreclosed landscapes of the suburbs; and in the urban core, Chicago’s poor communities’ living in the Projects). The environmentally friendly city is just another way to organize everyday urban life around consumption—a way that helps promote Chicago as a tourist and convention destination.

There is nothing particularly new in claiming that there exists a strong connection between capital accumulation and urban transformation. David Harvey is one notable theorist who has studied this phenomenon at length. Leaning on Marx, he outlines that capital transforms the conditions of production to procure a surplus-value and accumulate further capital. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism,⁴¹ he succinctly defines neoliberalism as a theoretical position that valorizes individual freedom and liberty, which in practice is propped up by a system of deregulation, free markets, and private-property ownership. He describes the ways in which neoliberal theory and practice have resulted in the withdrawal of government from everyday life, such that the role of the state has changed from facilitating social well-being to becoming largely concerned with upholding the interests of the free market and safeguarding private-property rights.

Economic power and influence is enhanced through what Harvey describes as a relentless process of accumulation by dispossession: individuals, communities, and entire societies are dispossessed of their assets, resources, wealth, and rights. For example, in Chicago the Projects were developed into mixed-income communities, and vouchers were provided to those who could not return to these communities that they could use on the private rental market; and public schools in low-income neighborhoods were restructured to make these areas more attractive for middle-class families. Throughout all these measures, however, the voices of the poor were rendered inaudible.

Another feature of the gentrification process has been the concerted effort to address the perennial problem of food deserts throughout Chicago. People living in these areas that lack access to grocery stores with healthy food options experience on average greater diet-related health problems (obesity, diabetes). In the United States, food deserts share the following demographic characteristics: low income, poor education, and high populations of African Americans. In 2009, Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group reported that since 2006 “Chicago’s food desert shrank by 1.4 square miles, 220 blocks, 4 Census tracts and roughly 24,000 people,” Yet, despite this change, the desert “remains large, affecting 609,034 residents as of September 2008.” More important, the “majority of people living in food deserts continue to be African Americans by a wide margin,” of which nearly “200,000 of them are children and more than 100,000 are single mothers.”⁴² Despite the improving access to healthy affordable food in Chicago’s food deserts, there still exists a racist, classist, gendered divide regarding who benefits from these greening initiatives. The point in all this is that the gentrification process does not signal greater equality.

Capital accumulation shapes the social organization and built environment of the city through policy, planning, and development, all of which become defined by capital as another form of productive labor. As a key ingredient to the production of surplus value, the environmentally friendly urban landscape basically functions to keep capital in circulation. It is no coincidence that in 2003 Mayor Daley raised 25 percent of his campaign contributions from developers and real estate (Dick Simpson and Tom Kelly report that 27 percent came from financial services and law firms, 11 percent from wealthy individuals, and only 10 percent from labor unions).⁴³ Meanwhile, Renaissance 2010 was first proposed in 2003 by the Commercial Club of Chicago, an organization that Lipman explains is made up of Chicago’s most “powerful corporate and financial leaders.” The organization’s goal is to end what it perceives to be the “monopoly of public education.”⁴⁴ Transforming the public schools of low-income areas is an integral ingredient to Mayor Daley’s gentrification of Chicago because middle-class people are attracted to areas that have good schools. Interestingly, the Renaissance 2010 schools were chosen by Chicago Public Schools and the Renaissance School Fund, an organization established by the Commercial Club of Chicago.

If we expand Marx’s notion of value (use-value, exchange-value, surplus-value) to posit that modern feeling is a value that in the final instance exceeds value, in this context modern feeling is both abstract and concrete labor. It is worthwhile adding here that I am the first to admit this is a rather idiosyncratic use of Marx, who in volume 1 of Capital clarified the distinction in these much cited lines: “On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values.”⁴⁵

For Marx, the concrete labor of the individual laborer selling his or her labor as a commodity works to produce use-value (commodities have a use-value and an exchange-value). At the same time as the laborer sells his or her labor, abstract labor enters the equation as a social relation (commodified labor power that is exchanged and is integral to the circulation of capital).

The concrete labor expenditure of modern feeling—the mayor working to rebrand the city, individual laborers tearing down the Projects and replacing them with mixed-income developments or working on the reorganization of the city’s fabric through green infilling, and so on—can be said to acquire a social quality when these individual projects combine to rebrand the city anew. The new Chicago brand is social, and it is behind the city’s rising success. For instance, in 2009 Chicago hosted 31.9 million visitors, of which 28.9 were domestic travelers and 11.7 million domestic business travelers, contributing more than $10.2 billion to Chicago’s economy.⁴⁶ In 2009, approximately 1,130,000 overseas travelers visited Chicago, ranking it tenth for visitors in the United States.⁴⁷

The logic of the commodity is central to urban modern green feeling because modern feeling works both as a use-value (decoding the urbanscape, reconfiguring urban geography, and reorganizing social life) and as an exchange-value (climate change politics and urban rebranding). Further, the structure of modern feeling (the new, erasure, etc.) is also the outcome of “value in motion,” as Harvey puts it.⁴⁸ Harvey fittingly insists that before a built environment is even produced, developers and entrepreneurs have already invested their capital. As a spatially fixed commodity, real estate has to be produced first and later sold. The delay between investment, production, and exchange presents a risk because circumstances can dramatically change from one stage to the next (the recent global financial crisis has aptly demonstrated this point). The state responds by freeing up the spatial fixity of real estate—Mayor Daley’s demolition of the Projects and the subsequent transformation of them into “mixed-income” properties; the racial and income inconsistencies of food-desert initiatives; and the mixed-income public schools—to assist the flow of capital. Modern feeling is appealed to in order to legitimate rapid and autocratic measures, and it functions as a structure that creates new openings through which capital flows can pass. The social inequities and hierarchical arrangements defining the geography of Chicago intermingle with urban policies and developments whose primary aim is to attract investment and make possible capital accumulation.