Reviewed by: City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch William S. Swearingen City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas. By Andrew M. Busch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 336. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) What is about Austin, Texas, that makes people want to write histories about the place? On one hand, the political economy that drove Austin's [End Page 465] growth was similar to the forces that created other technology hub cities across the United States and the world, and Austin is, like them, just another example of how federal, state, and local actors produce a city. Yet Austin is unique in some respects because its environmental movement became a political force that helped shape the culture, space, and symbolism of the place. As must all histories of Austin, then, Andrew Busch's City in a Garden shows how the political economy interacted with physical geography to create knowledge industries instead of factories, and how that economy brought highly educated, white-collar workers to fill new jobs. These workers' ideas about the environment led to an environmental movement that then shaped a landscape unique among Texas cities. What makes this book a necessary addition to other histories is that Busch treats racial inequality as central to this process of growth. He details how early growth advocates in Austin consciously used segregation as a tool to separate blacks and browns from whites, using zoning to steer industry and pollution to minority neighborhoods in East Austin, thereby leaving an unspoiled environment on the west side to draw the white workforce they wanted. These inequalities caused, and still cause, whites and minorities to think about the environment in different ways. Whites on the west side saw it as recreation, enjoyment, and a valuable resource threatened by growth. For minorities on the east side, forced to live with industrial facilities, gasoline tanks, and polluting high-tech plants, "the lack of access [emphasis added] to nature . . . defined symbolic meaning." Defending their communities formed the core of any relationship between a sense of place and the environment, Busch argues. They connected "environmental injustice with economic, social, and other forms of inequity" (210–211). For whites to have the advantages of the Garden City—pristine environmental amenities created by early, pro-growth zoning and planning schemes—racial minorities would have to live with the disadvantages: poor health, substandard housing, and even the loss of community cohesion created by the eventual gentrification of East Austin. As the idea of environmentalism morphs into the concept of sustainability, gentrification is the latest iteration of environmental inequality in Austin. As did environmentalism, sustainability has a very different meaning for city elites (who use a pristine environment to lure high-tech workers) than it does for minorities for whom gentrification means they can no longer sustain a roof over their heads. In modern Austin, ideas about "smart growth" and "new urbanism" have allowed west side environmentalists to bridge the political divide between themselves and the growth promoters they fought for decades, encoding once again the idea of "the environment" as central to the meaning of Austin. Yet gentrification does exactly the opposite for racial and economic equity in Austin because the high-income workers attracted by an environmental ideal force lower-income [End Page 466] workers and minorities out of their homes, depriving them of both a community and their environment. "Sustainability" is composed of three E's: environment, economy, and equity. The first two have always gone together in Austin. Equity never has. And as Busch shows here, it still does not. William S. Swearingen St. Edwards University Copyright © 2018 The Texas State Historical Association