The Regulatory Nature of Urban Ports: The Case of Houston

• In Event: 530 - Regular Session. Urban Sociology: Infrastructure and the Environment

Abstract

Classic urban ecology argues that cities grow by connecting economically with other places. As they do, zones of locally similar land uses emerge, producing “natural areas” as a result not of deliberate planning and regulation but market forces and needs of certain land users for certain types of spaces. While still valuable, this paradigm and recent efforts to rehabilitate one of its core concepts – (ecological) succession – fails to adequately explain how certain urban zones, born relatively free of government regulation, come to be increasingly defined by it over time. The present study illuminates this blind spot and its relevance to urbanization more generally. Using the case of Houston’s Ship Channel, it investigates the broad question of how a locally important zone, once established, develops not only spatially and commercially but also politically through successive regulation intended to contain risks associated with its own continued development. In this way we seek to extend classic insights of urban ecology to consider how government not only leverages development of urban infrastructure that gives rise to certain local zones, or natural areas, but also comes to wrap them in regulation that both promotes and insulates their continued development, at significant risk and obfuscation to local residents.

Authors

• James R. Elliott, Rice University

• Kyle Shelton, Rice University

• Lester O. King, Rice University