Changing Spaces

Abstract

Environmental historians have tended, until recently, to overlook how inequality is generated and reinforced in the metropolitan landscape. One way to historicize urban environmental justice is to analyze the transformation of property through space and time. This article explores how engineers and reformers in early twentieth-century Seattle launched several earthmoving projects, called regrades, to renovate the downtown core. The regrades removed millions of tons of earth, flattened hills, and erased tidelands, but they also unleashed landslides and ripped apart neighborhoods populated by poor and minority residents. Environmental volatility and social inequality thus reinforced one another to shape Seattle’s political and physical geography. By telling spatial stories about property, urban environmental historians can better map social power against shifting landscapes.