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Richard Walker
Hopkins in 1971, I hoped to pursue some kind of resource economics program.
That misbegotten notion faded under the influence of David Harvey and Reds
Wolman, who opened my eyes to the broader horizons of geography. Although
David is seen as a Marxist above all, he was deeply
steeped in British Geography
and managed to transmit that affection to me without any formal drills. Harvey
also introduced me to Marx’s
Capital, which we struggled through together. My
economics and economic geography are still inescapably Marxist, though always
open to extension and hybridization. After all, I was a Green before I was a Red.
This may be why I am not usually cited as a classic Marxist Geographer like
Harvey or his later student, Neil Smith.
I came to geography as an environmentalist owing to the influences of my
youth in the Bay Area, a hearth of American environmentalism in the 1950s
and 1960s. At Hopkins, my first piece of serious research was on a woeful
reclamation project in Nebraska (which helped in its defeat) and the misuse of
benefit-cost analysis to justify dams. The first iteration
of my dissertation was an
inquiry into the National Land Use Control Act, then under consideration by
Congress (which spoke to my keen sense of personal loss in the paving of Silicon
Valley, where I grew up). When the Act died and my draft proved boring, Harvey
suggested I expand the first chapter, a history of suburbanization, into the whole
thing.
When I went out on the job market in 1975, I was hired to teach environmen-
tal courses, not economic ones. The Chair at Berkeley,
David Hooson, told me
it would be the kiss of death among his colleagues to talk about economies or
cities, so my job talk was on wetlands on the Chesapeake Bay, another project
from graduate school. After being hired at Berkeley, I taught such courses
as Water Resources, Open Space, and Population and Natural Resources. In
those years, I wrote about the Clean Air Act, water projects in California, a Dow
Chemical
petrochemical complex, the logic of industrial pollution, and land use
controls – all of which had an important element of economic analysis to them.
Unfortunately, I bolted from environmental studies before the field took off.
A wrong turn, perhaps, but it would lead me to economic geography.
My dissertation, The Suburban Solution (1977), had a great deal of economic
geography in it. There were three main elements of analysis: the land market,
business cycles, and class struggle. The first gave the immediate impetus to devel-
opers to push and pull the urban fringe outward; the second provided the larger
impulse for property booms and development excesses; and
the third explained
the buy-off of the working class through consumerism and housing in the subur-
ban context. What was missing, however, was any sense of the role of industry in
the outward flux of the American city. I spun off a couple of articles on the logic
of American suburbanization (e.g. 1981), but, unfortunately, never turned it all
into a book – thereby being forever scooped by Kenneth Jackson’s
The Crabgrass
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