Failing to Grow "Their" Own Justice? The Co-Production of Racial/Gendered Labor and Milwaukee's Urban Forest

• Published in: Urban geography Vol. 28; no. 8; pp. 732 - 754
• Main Authors: Heynen, Nik, Perkins, Harold A., Roy, Parama
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Silver Spring, MD Taylor & Francis Group 01-11-2007; Winston
• Subjects: America; Bgi / Prodig; Distributive justice; East North Central; Forestry; Gender; labor; Labour market structure; Milwaukee; Qualitative analysis; Race; Social inequality; U.S.A; United States of America; Urban environment; urban environments; Wisconsin; United States of America; Wisconsin; USA, Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Labour; Urban environment; Gender; Social reproduction; Racism; Forestry
• ISSN: 0272-3638; 1938-2847
• DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.28.8.732

Little attention is paid to the ways that labor market inequalities within urban institutions enforce governance regimes that (re)produce urban environmental unevenness. Milwaukee's Bureau of Forestry is one such institution that has historically been dependent on state-sanctioned labor market inequalities to perpetuate an explicitly White/male regime of environmental governance and production. Historically, the Bureau's management employed and promoted very few African Americans and women within its arboricultural workforce, based on its racist and gendered categories of laboring individuals. Furthermore, and for identical reasons, these workers-and by extension their communities-face distributional injustices as they are not allowed to channel their labors into the production of equitable and/or alternative forms of urban forests more suitable to their own social reproduction. This paper investigates the changing relations between Milwaukee's Bureau of Forestry and its African American and female employees as they attempt to legally (re)articulate their laboring identities and capabilities within a disempowering institution. We use in-depth interviews and archival materials to show that the Bureau of Forestry has consequently been forced to publicly confront its racist/patriarchal legacy in light of two recent high-profile lawsuits and an ambassadors program. We conclude by discussing how changes that allow some African Americans and women to work in Milwaukee's urban forest have affected the Bureau of Forestry and potentially the forest itself.