Sustainability and Neoliberal Urban Development: The Environment, Crime and the Remaking of Austin’s Downtown

This paper explores the development of the smart growth programme in Austin, Texas. Drawing on growth machine theory, it documents the conflict in Austin in the 1980s and 1990s between pro-growth and anti-growth machine coalitions over urban sprawl. Around that time, the business community also began to focus on the redevelopment of city’s downtown and the need to address the problems of crime and homelessness. By the mid 1990s, the need to ‘clean up the streets’ was increasingly coupled with arguments about being ‘green’. It is argued that the development of the particular urban sustainability compromise that emerged in Austin, which has become a core part of the city’s competitiveness, was an institutional innovation made possible by struggles between the business community and local environmental activists. The institutional compromise, however, was achieved only by a spatial compromise that shifted the costs of growth from natural ecological onto the city’s homeless population.