Geography

Gentrification research provides many important insights into the transformation of contemporary urban landscapes, yet more careful attention to nature's role in this process is necessary. This essay begins by highlighting how gentrification research has traditionally overlooked the environmental factors of gentrification and continues by showing how researchers are beginning to account for the urban natural environment in gentrification processes. Such an environmentally sensitive approach to gentrification—one that accounts for nature being used by powerful groups as a tool of social power but also leaves room for it to be a dynamic material actor—can aid scholars' understanding of this important urban process.

Abstract: I became chairman of the geography department in the Summer of 1994. I took over a department that was originally part of a combined geology & geography program in the college of natural sciences. This lasted until about 1985, at which time the geologists decided to go it alone. This was during a period when oil exploration in the Wyoming Overthrust Belt was booming and there was a great demand for geologists. The boom collapsed seven or eight years later and the geology program declined. In 1994 the Geology faculty began plans to restructure their program into a department of geology and environmental science. This was to have included geography. Our two departments occupied the same floor in the natural sciences building and to them putting the two programs back together seemed like a good match. What then unfolded was a not very well concealed plan by the then dean of natural sciences, in consultation with the geologists, to rescue the failing geology program by elimina...