After the Flood: Retrofi tting Austin’s Urban Core to Accommodate Growth - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 83

the 1980s and 1990s to simultaneously reduce sprawl, protect environ-
mental quality, and develop a vibrant, mixed-use urban core. 56 The implicit
message is that urbanization does not need to be a zero-sum game—it
can be benefi cial to both humans and nonhumans if done prudently and
thoughtfully.
The Watershed Department's 2001 Master Plan explicitly supported the
SGI strategy for combating sprawl and called for the “use of engineered
strategies in the Desired Development Zone to minimize the need for
additional regulations that may restrict development in that area.” 57 As
such, the SGI program serves to strengthen the Promethean approach to
stormwater management in the urban core. However, the support of the
SGI by the Watershed Department is most likely an act of political expedi-
ency and a show of support for a citywide development vision rather than
a benefi t to the Watershed Department's goals, particularly those related
to water quality improvement. As noted previously, the plan states that
the water quality goals will likely not be met in the inner city due to a
lack of space to site, construct, and maintain BMPs, and that densifying
the inner core will only make this task more diffi cult.
From a water quality perspective, the strategy of directing growth away
from the Hill Country simply shifts the impacts of urban development
from one locale to another while reifying the modernist dichotomy of city
and wilderness. The SGI explicitly specifi ed a zone of nature protection
and a zone of nature destruction. A Watershed Department staff member
refl ecting on the implications of the SGI notes, “It means you are kind
of giving up on water quality in the central part of town to protect some
of the areas that are further away from the center parts of town. A lot of
times, in an urbanized area there is no space to put in some kind of water
quality treatment system. If you densify, you just can't put in those water
quality controls in certain areas.” 58
Beyond the water quality and technology issues of densifying the urban
core, the SGI has signifi cant social ramifi cations, particularly for those
residents whose neighborhoods are targeted as the Desired Development
Zone. The SGI was embraced by green romantics and growth machine
advocates in Austin but generated fi erce criticism from low-income resi-
dents in East Austin, home to the majority of Austin's African American
and Latino residents since the early twentieth century. The experiences in
Austin with Smart Growth refl ect larger concerns about these strategies
that generally further market preferences without addressing the under-
lying causes of the problems they are trying to solve, namely sprawl, con-
gestion, economic segregation, and environmental injustice. 59 The SGI's