The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS): Miriam Greenberg

From Urban Displacement to Exurban Wildfire: Tracing relational spaces of housing and climate crisis
In this presentation I argue that two spatially distinct phenomena—worsening housing crises in cities and climate disasters in urban hinterlands— are growing increasingly and dialectically related. I do so by tracing the role of affordability-driven urban displacement, and the related political ecology of housing crisis, in the growth of the Wildlands Urban Interface, or “WUI” of California. WUIs are areas where housing and human development abut or mix with undeveloped vegetation, and are now recognized as the land-use type that is both most prone to wildfires and the leading cause of them. This dynamic has intensified as WUIs have become the areas of greatest housing growth in the U.S., and as climate change has increased the scale and scope of disaster. Yet due to siloed research and bounded understandings of city limits, the drivers and socio-environmental dynamics of WUI growth have gone unstudied. California, a state at the national epicenter of housing crisis, wildfire activity, and WUI growth, and where these phenomena have increased in tandem over the last 30 years, is a strategic site to understand their relationship. I draw on two years of mixed methods, collaborative, community-engaged research based on California’s Central Coast to trace urban-WUI spatial relationships across three conjunctural ‘moments’: 1) as urban housing markets drive both affordability and amenity migrants to proximal WUIs, and intensify race and class inequality in these areas; 2) as this growth and inequality intensifies WUI disaster risk—including by putting vulnerable residents in harm’s way and obstructing rural and indigenous land stewardship practices, and 3) following disaster, as new waves of “uneven redevelopment” and displacement in the WUI and back to urban areas exacerbate underlying housing crisis and disaster risk. Ultimately, I argue for increased analysis of the role of housing crisis in the origins and outcome of climate disaster, and for critical urban-rural scholarship, planning, and politics centered on housing and land justice in the face of climate change.

Miriam Greenberg is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz, and co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and is author of Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008) and co-author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford, 2014); and co-editor of The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Tactics in an Urban Age, (Cornell, 2017). She has undertaken a series of engaged, collaborative, public-facing research projects exploring urban and environmental justice issues in California, including most recently as P.I. on WUI Research for Resilience, exploring the relationship between urban housing crisis and the growth of the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI). A recent publication in PNAS lays out the conceptual framework for this project: “Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change.”(2024).

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is co-organized by the MSUP Program and second-year PhD students in Urban Planning: Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Rossella Asja Lucrezia Ferro, rf2930@columbia.edu and Daniela Perleche Ugas, dp3167@columbia.edu.