Making local environmental policy in Los Angeles

Pergamon

0264-2751(96)00018-2

Cities, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 303-313, 1996

Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0264-2751/96 $15.00 + 0.00

Making local environmental policy in Los Angeles Roger Keil Gene Desfor York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 (e-mail: rkeil@orion,yorku, ca) In this paper we attempt to illuminate the process of making urban environmental policy in Los Angeles. We suggest that in the current post-Fordist period, a multiplicity of voices in civil society contribute to the construction of a local environmental policy space. Within this space, struggles occur concerning the regulation of societal relationships with nature. Copyright (~) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

During the current period of economic restructuring - like no prior period - local policy makers often frame urban development projects in an ideology and discourse which seem to be their apparent opposite, that is, urban ecology. In this way, 'environment' and 'ecology' have become central ideological concerns in discourses of urban development. This does not imply that future cities will be green paradises. Rather, urban 'natures' are prime sites of struggle over the meaning of the urban. The articulation of development with ecology may mean total hegemony of capitalism over nature and an uncompromising colonization of the conditions of production. The development-ecology linkage has helped conservative ideologues of post-modern urbanism to discredit the large scale modernist urban reform projects of the Fordist period. Neoconservative models of a merit-based rather than a needs-based society, new urbanist designs for postsuburban form, as well as non-humanist preservation, have characterized the conservative agenda in this shift. At the same time, the post-modern turn toward identity politics, an ideological defense of inner city urbanism (against a suburban middle class monoculture), a discovery of the bioregion as home in a globalized environment, and an increased interest in environmental justice have characterized a progressive agenda at this conjuncture. The contention of this paper is that urban environmental policy

is crafted under the influence of these conflicting ideologies and discourses, which play themselves out in civil society, the state and the economy. This contention stems from our initial research findings on an ongoing comparative study of environmental policy making processes in Toronto and Los Angeles. We posit that urban environmental policy is concerned with regulating societal relationships with nature (Desfor and Keil, 1996). Two categories of these policies are distinguished in this project. The first, pollution policies, includes all legislation, practices, procedures and other institutional arrangements for regulating pollution of air, land and water. The second, land-use policies, focuses on the multitude of ways urban space comes to be used, un-used, regulated, un-regulated or deregulated. For this paper, we focus on air pollution policy in Los Angeles, and for the land-use category, we examine proposed changes along the Los Angeles River.

Civil society, societal relationships with nature and local politics As environmental concerns have entered development discourse, civil society has become an important terrain on which social-ecological relationships are being defined. Recently, m ~ h has been written about civil society. In this paper, it is initially described as a multi-layered concept which can be thought of as a space where individuals enter contract-like relationships which are not immediately subject to the economy or the state. In this space many organizations operate (e.g. neighbourhood,

~ Research for this paper has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, grant nurrrber 41094-0925.

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church, voluntary associations, etc.) and play an important role in social regulation and social change. We recognize that civil society has not, traditionally, included the regulation of societal relationships with nature. As Becker et al (1991, p 489) have explained, "in terms of power or legitimacy, civil society is related to the regulation of the relationships of state and society, not to the regulations of the relationships of society with nature." Thus, there cannot be an a priori inclusion of the regulation of the societal relationships with nature into the realm of civil society. In this context, it is important to test notions of civil society for their capacity to draw certain h e r e t o f o r e unavailable (unverfiigbare) realms of society into the political discussion on social agency (Becker et al, 1991, p 489). In our understanding, there are predominantly two kinds of 'unavailabilities' (Unverfagbarkeiten) we have to take into account when investigating relationships between civil society and nature. First, there are those issues or policy fields which have historically been removed from civil society and have become the responsibility of the state." Second, such 'unavailability' refers to areas that have not yet become politicized - neither in the realm of the state nor in civil society. Both cases can be found in the area of urban environmental policy making. We also need to remind ourselves at this point that both nature and civil society are needed by capitalism for its reproduction as a whole (Duncan and Goodwin, 1988). In interpreting Jim O'Connor somewhat freely, nature and civil society can be called "conditions of production". Their construction, exploitation and depletion in the process of capital accumulation can be considered the "second contradiction" of capitalism. Capitalism creates neither nature nor civil society, but neither are they independent of it (O'Connor, 1988). This point is made very succinctly by Duncan and Goodwin: [P]rocesses of uneven development in capitalism paradoxically lead to a structured coherence in social activities in space and time, and people try to build on these coherences by creating 'spatial fixes' of nation, region or locality. The same thing happens through the uneven development of nature and civil society. Reinforcing sets of natural processes and cultural practices can coalesce to produce on the one hand, spatially organized ecological systems and, on the other, particular ways of living in particular places. Neither sort of coherence is likely, in the late twentieth century, to be independent from capitalist development but, paradoxically, this gives good reasons for state institutions to get all the 2 At this point, we exclude the discussion of the democratization of the administrative state which, to a certain degree, can be interpreted as a intrusion of post-Fordist civil societies' demands on the immobile monster of the fordist welfare state (see Albo et al, 1993).

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more involved in these spatially constituted systems (Duncan and Goodwin, 1988, p 70). • Extending our understanding of nature by accepting that it is subject to regulation by civil society and by creating ecologically sustainable social relationships, therefore, potentially enhances the critical and antihegemonic character of local policies. In the current period during which societal relationships with nature are in crisis, policy-making needs to respond both to social and to ecological components of the crisis. Although this double challenge for environmental policy is not always apparent to policy makers, the character of the crisis and current shifts in the structure of civil society may require participants in the policy community to live up to this challenge. Any approach or analysis which only speaks to nature or to society is extremely difficult to sustain. Hence our emphasis on civil society (and its reaches into the spheres of the state and of the economy). Civil society is not a space in which individuals and social collectives have equal power and access to the powerful sections of that space is frequently problematic. Definitions of policy agendas are exercises of inclusion and exclusion of certain items through which the interests of competing classes and other social groups find expression and empowerment. Heinelt and Schmals (1995) distinguish between the two interpretations of civil society as either emerging ( " n o r m a t i v e s L e i t b i l d " ) or existing ("vitales Strukturmerkmal"). For the purposes of this paper, both have some relevancy. Consider, for example, the case of the Frankfurt GreenBelt which can be read as somewhat of a model for the kind of work on which we are embarking in Los Angeles. On one hand, the project has been seen as an almost utopian effort to redesign societal relationships with nature in that city, and by doing so, to reform and democratize society. The GreenBelt Charter first drafted in 1990, and later reworked, reads: "The greenbelt is the vision of an open green area in which urban society with its diversity of lifestyles can develop its increasing awareness of the environment" and "planning in the greenbelt encourages and supports self-organization and participation of the users" (Husung and Lieser, 1996). In this view, the GreenBelt as both an ecological and a social area, as nature and as civil society is to be created in a complex interplay of societal relationships with nature in Frankfurt. On the other hand, the GreenBelt is considered an existing network of mediating institutions in which civil society is a living and functioning reality of citizen participation, community activism, conservationism, planning etc. (Lieser et al, 1992; Keil and Ronneberger, 1993; Selle, 1991). In our investigation of Los Angeles, we want to determine the extent to which urban environmental

Local environmental policy in Los Angeles: R Keil and G Desfor

projects of the local state have this double character. D o they constitute limitations for or extensions of existing processes of local democracy based on civil society? D o they convey a general normative image of how urban societies in North America are supposed to develop? 3 In investigating both these questions, we accept that the local state encompasses m o r e than the activities of elected municipal governments and their administrations. As Heinelt and Mayer have shown, local policy and political research has to m o v e beyond a narrow conception of city governments and look at local politics in its varied entirety. O u r approach looks at "the entire net of institutions, agents, and systems of negotiation, including their supralocal dimensions. It is through this multiplicity of agents that new forms of proactive and coordinated spatial m a n a g e m e n t b e c o m e urgent" (Heinelt and Mayer, 1992, p 26; translation R.K.). Urban environmental policy With this discussion of civil society, nature and local politics in mind, let us turn our attention to issues of policy making. Initially, we note the following textb o o k definition of policy:

Policies are efforts to address problems. Problems are socially and politically defined; they are 'conditions' which a significant portion of society acknowledge as undesirable and wish to see changed or improved (Wolman and Goldsmith, 1992, p 170). Although this definition provides a reasonable point of departure, ultimately it poses m o r e questions than answers. In particular, what constitutes "a significant portion of society" has to be determined. Often in policy analysis, society is not problematized at all. But our civil society centred approach necessitates a close look at this fundamental concept, and for the case of urban environmental policy this determination is particularly complicated. Just as we cannot presuppose a notion of 'society' in our research, so we cannot presuppose any fixed representations or articulations of 'the environment'. The subject as well as object of urban environmental policy and the space where such policy is made need to be estab3 From a different perspective, the local state in North America may be considered in decline. As Gottdiener (1987, p 13) has shown, "a burgeoning literature continues to document what can best be described as the death of local politics in America. People still vote, representatives continue to be elected year after year in locally run contests, parties still seek out funds and run slates, even patronage positions and charges of bossism can still be heard across the American landscape. But, the very heart and soul of local politics has surely died. A form without content remains. The present shell of politics surrounds a progressively empty centre. The democratic life of the polis sucks out through a vacuum at the very core of the city". Although there is some currency to this argument, we believe it is more reflective of local electoral politics at the local level and not of local state activity nor local politics in general.

lished through a discursive process. Environmental policy in cities is urban policy which is why, for all intents and purposes, nature - itself without representation in the political process - is subject to social agency. U r b a n environmental policy, therefore, is necessarily an articulation of societal relationships with nature on an urban level (that is on the level of the local state) and never meant to regulate nature outside of urban society. Much of the recent literature on urban environmental policy starts from the assumption that cities have become important places where the ecological crisis can both be observed in its most pronounced form and be addressed in an efficient way. Arguments that support this assumption can be summarized in the following way. In the US and Canada, more than three-quarters of the population live in urban centres (Richardson, 1992, p 145; Gillett et al, 1992, p 378). Consequently, as Gillett et al. have reasoned with respect to the US, "[t]o the extent that urban environments are degraded, 75 percent of the nation's population are exposed to or suffer from problems associated with that degradation although the distribution of negative impacts is not even across the metropolitan population" (1992, p 378). This has more than local consequences, because a majority of the world's population live in cities and they can be expected to have a m a j o r impact on the global environment (Gillett et al, 1992). Global warming and the hole in the ozone layer can largely be considered problems which are being produced by the kind of urbanism that has characterized the previous regime of global capital accumulation (Fordism) and by its current form (post-Fordism, or flexible specialization). Since we are, in the eyes of many, an "urban species ''4 (Girardet, 1992, p 11), cities and urbanity themselves are often offered as solutions to global ecological problems. This assumes that the sophistication of urban organization and its cybernetic and systemic advantages will be able to confront environmental degradation better than non-urban social forms of organization. Although such an assumption is contrary to a traditional understanding of cities as 'unecological' (Trepl, 1996), it has gained much currency recently. In the existing debate, we distinguish two main perspectives. One is the rational, realist point of view which accepts the h e g e m o n y of the capitalist e c o n o m y and seeks the compatibility of economic development and environmental quality by way of 4 According to this conceptualization, the common separation of "city" or "urban" from "nature" or "environment" has to be given up. Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm has called cities "simply the specifically human environment" (1993, p 70), and David Harvey has ventured the thesis that there is "in the final analysis nothing unnatural about New York City" (1993, p 28). In any case, both the urban environmental problem and the solution has to do with humans being urban creatures.

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"integrated policies implemented through tangible incentives, backed by solid research, and sure and equitable enforcement" (Gillett et al, 1992, p 396). This anthropocentric approach is not insensitive to equity and social justice issues but it stops short of advocating fundamental change in the way human societies and nature interrelate. The other major perspective considers the current period of urbanization as a period of crisis of the societal relationships with nature (Jahn, 1996). This crisis stems from two important tendencies: the globalization of our cities and the subsequent evolution of 'worlds o f natures' in urban centres (Keil, 1995a, b); and the emergence of a new flexible or post-Fordist regime of accumulation which came with a more fragmented integration of nature into urban development processes (Keil and Ronneberger, 1991). The critical perspective suggests a counter-hegemonic rethinking of the environmental problematic in cities. The major consequence of this rethinking, for our purposes, is the emergence of civil society rather than the state or the market as the major point of entry into the discussion on the making of urban environmental policy. In the process of re-articulating societal relationships with nature, new opportunities for subaltern forces present themselves to make claims in areas of social and economic justice. In these ways, the critical perspective counters the a r g u m e n t a t i o n which approaches policy from a rational-realist perspective. In much of that literature, the problems of policymaking in and for urban environments are posed in a classical sense of governance and manageability, where contradictions of state (as the collective warden of civil society) and the monadic and decontextualized individual prevail. Consider the following assessment by Robert Bellah et al (1991, p 270) as an example: The Los Angeles basin, which covers an area nearly the size of Ohio, was once one of the most beautiful and is now one of the most economically and culturally dynamic regions on earth. Yet today there are few places anywhere in the United States in which governmental curtailment of individual choice reaches so intimately into the lives of citizens. On any given day, government, not the individual, decides whether factories will operate, and even whether - in a region dedicated to the ideal of suburban outdoor living - people can light up a barbecue in their own backyards. All this has come about in a desperate attempt to curb the lifethreatening air pollution generated by the region's dependence on automobile transportation. Ironically, the draconian measures of government are directly traceable to earlier government indifference to or encouragement of the people's half-centurylong pursuit of one of the American Century's leading goals: unrestricted individual mobility.

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The significance of this passage is the conceptual void between the individual and the state. Bellah and his co-authors bemoan "individual frustration and collective distraction" as the "contradictory outcomes of the unlimited pursuit of individual purposes. Metropolitan gridlock visibly illustrates many of the social tendencies of postwar A m e r i c a . . . But what we can now also see, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, is the enormous social and environmental cost of growth directed by such narrow goals without the counterbalance of integrating purposes" (Bellah et al, 1991, p 270). The account of Bellah and his co-authors underrates the role of capitalist hegemony over the economy and the state, and it also overlooks the potential of solutions coming from collective activities in civil society - as well as in the economic sector and the state. Individual consumerism cannot be blamed for the foul air without mentioning the purposeful activity on the side of auto and tyre companies to build up Los Angeles' car based economy and to integrate it into the Fordist industrial complex of subsidized housing and freeway construction. Moreover, integrative counter-hegemonic strategies have been formulated by communities to create liveable places in the Los Angeles area in the face of adverse conditions. The selection of the barbecue example to explain the character of pollution regulation by the local air quality management district distracts from the major conflicts in this field around lax or nonexisting enforcement of regulations against major industrial polluters and issues of public health that were foregrounded by environmental and social justice groups. Using the same empirical case - air pollution control in Los Angeles - Andrew Kirby develops a perspective which is similar to ours. He mentions the general problem of air pollution in US cities and the policy framework of the Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1973 and amendments in 1990 as generic conditions of regulation and clean up which will have to occur at the local level: These problems continue in specific places because federal law has not been implemented. EPA studies suggest that in order to bring Los Angeles into compliance with the CAA, tough regulations would have to be introduced, dealing explicitly with the ways in which Los Angelinos live. But basic legislation remains unacted upon because environmental issues are reconstituted as problems of jobs and personal freedom, which make it hard for residents to develop an independent risk calculus that permits them to identify the serious problems associated with present practices. In consequence, growth and development questions have to be struggles over in situ, and they must be resolved - collectively - using local tropes and a common sense . . . . In short, the struggles that emerge within the local state are cast

Local environmental policy in Los Angeles: R Keil and G Desfor

within the histories and the experiences of its residents; despite their universality, neither the struggles nor the outcomes are uniform (Kirby, 1993, p 89). This account shifts the emphasis away from the relationship of governments to individual citizens and closer to relationships of communities and social collectives both to the state and to corporations. But it also forces us to be specific in the way we look at policy arenas in cities. Local environmental policies in Los Angeles

Focussing on characteristics of local regulatory traditions, we begin to sketch how relationships of conflict and compromise are played out in Los Angeles. In the area of environmental planning and policy, Los Angeles has been both "an example of the disastrous environmental consequences of modern urban growth" and "a locus of successful innovations in environmental management. Over time, these innovations have created a complex of specialized agencies managing local and imported water, air quality, and other regional environmental problems." These agencies together have been constituting an ever changing "institutional government of the southern California regional environment" (FitzSimmons and Gottlieb, 1993, p 63). FitzSimmons and Gottlieb identify two categories of environmental agencies: those which are primarily responsible for infrastructure development, and those responsible for pollution control. In accord with this categorization scheme, we are examining policy making procedures for regulating the Los Angeles River (the infrastructural category) and for air pollution. The plans regulating the Los Angeles River through the Los Angeles County Drainage Area (LACDA) 5 and through an emerging Los Angeles River Master Plan can be considered well within the category of infrastructure development. The infrastructure requirements of the Los Angeles County Drainage Area project are huge. This is because flood control, protection of personal property values and securing long-term economic stability are core responsibilites in the mandates of the agencies proposing this project. In the case of the Los Angeles River Master Plan, recreational infrastructures are planned to be interlaced with economic regeneration and ecological improvements: The Master Plan is intended to enhance the river environment and reflect the needs and ideas of diverse communities, groups and individuals with an interest in the future of the River. One means of accomplishing this is through the participation of the Los Angeles River Advisory Committee, which is comprised of cities, state and federal agencies and 5 Documents that describe LACDA are US Army Corps of Engineers (1991) and Woodward-Clyde(1995).

community groups with an interest in the river (Los Angeles County, Department of Public Works, 1995, p 1) At the centre of both initiatives is the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works which is supported by federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service. Local agencies like the Los Angeles River Advisory Committee are set up to manage the Master Plan process and to facilitate and channel citizen participation, critique and opposition. For the case of air pollution, the most important pollution control agency is the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). Created in 1977, it is a voluntary association of air pollution districts in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The agency which is governed by a board of nine members (most of whom are appointed) has the mandate of developing plans and programs for the region to attain federal air pollution~standards by the dates specified in federal law. Under pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District in March 1989, published a detailed plan for cleaning up the air in southern California by the year 2007. This plan to clear the dirtiest air in America had a three-tier approach: first, it urged the full use of existing technologies, second, it relied on a significant advancement of existing technologies plus stricter controls, and, finally, it hoped for major technological breakthroughs to be developed. In 1991 and 1994 the South Coast Air Quality Management District together with the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) published updated and significantly altered plans which now define the discourse on air pollution in southern California. Airpollution

In earlier work on the Los Angeles air management district, Bloch and Keil have shown that air quality management in Los Angeles can be understood on three related levels: as part of restructuring the regional regime of accumulation in southern California, as part of the redefinition of the local mode of regulation of that regime and the search for an elite consensus on the future of the region and, lastly, as part of a practical and discursive framework for emancipatory projects in Los Angeles (Bloch and Keil, 1991). The authors assumed, at the time, that the 1989 Air Quality Management Plan was a clear sign that the debate around air quality management was going to become a central discourse for the future of the urban region overall. Indeed, a plethora of groups jumped on the environmental bandwagon and used the popular attention given to the Air Quality Management Plan to attract the public's interest to their respective causes. Political 307

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elites formed their agendas around the plan whose more than 100 proposed measures were designed to regulate everything under the smog-eclipsed sun from private consumption to urban land use and governance. Business and employee groups rallied to stem what they perceived as a wave of externalized costs in the shape of employee parking fees, retrofitting of industrial facilities, etc. Simultaneously, the environmental movement reacted strongly to the new Plan rejecting, on the one hand, its lopsided business oriented agenda and demanding, on the other hand, a democratization of the air quality management process. The 1989 Air Quality Management Plan's proposed regulations would have had immediate and tangible consequences for many communities in Los Angeles, and this led to the formation of new ecological-social coalitions like the ones represented by the Labor/Community Watchdog. New alliances within civil society were formed between labour, community and environmental groups and an environmental justice agenda took shape. Conflicts arose between these new alliances and the Air Quality Management District, whose members tended to adhere to a business agenda (Bloch and Keil, 1991; Mann, 1992; Keil, 1993, pp 246-251). With the onset of the 1990s, local air pollution policy making changed drastically. Starting with the 1991 Air Quality management Plan and continuing in the 1994 Plan published by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the discursive space created by the previous plan was violently disrupted. The window of opportunity to find a new regulatory mode for southern California's economy, ecology and society with the help of the Air Quality Management Plan seemed to slam shut. The explosive events of the urban uprising of 1992, the onset of the recession in 1990, the dynamics of the political process itself and also the occurrence of major "natural" disasters such as earthquakes, floods and fires changed the way economic, ecological and social forces constructed policy. In terms of air pollution regulation this meant that moderate environmental policies to regulate and restructure the economy - propounded and supported by political and business elites only a few years earlier - now gave way to a staunchly antienvironmental, anti-regulatory positions. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan's business oriented politics, which turned City Hall into another corporate enterprise, fit hand in glove with the efforts of industrial leaders and their environmental advocates to derail any attempt at an increase in regulatory command and control measures in the Air Quality Management Plan. In an unprecedented appearance of Mayor Riordan before the South Coast Air Quality Management District board on 12 August 1994, he pleaded to lower the speed with which the District would pursue policies to decrease nitrogen

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oxides in the air basin (Cone, 1994b; Riordan, 1994). For Riordan as well as for the business elites of the southland, what was conceived as "excessive" regulation became an undeniable culprit in the economic malaise of the region. One influential publication, the New Economy Project of the New Vision Business Council of Southern California under the directorship of David Friedman, cites numerous examples of "counterproductive economic regulation", prominent among which are environmental regulations such as those imposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (New Vision Business Council, 1994, Chap IV). Even more explicitly directed against any form of command and control type regulation of environmental problems in southern California was a business consortium which came into being in 1990, the Regulatory Flexibility Group, under the strategic leadership of environmental lawyer Robert Wyman. This group which included the major utilities, refineries, manufacturers and even theme parks, proposed a regulatory framework based on tradeable permits to replace the command and control measures put in place by the 1989 plan. This package of measures, called Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM), was adopted with barely any change by the South Coast Air Quality Management District as their official policy in 1991 and again in 1994. 6 On the popular side, some successes in making the Air Quality Management District more responsive to community and labour demands - like a temporary reversal of the District's policy on toxics in residential neighbourhoods - were entirely eclipsed in the eyes of many activists by the appointment of openly business oriented candidates to the Board of the agency. Although attempts at democratization had failed, the new market mantra of the District together with lax enforcement of anti-toxic legislation threatened to create more "toxic hotspots" in poor neighbourhoods in the air basin (Cone, 1994a; Wallach, 1992; Mann and Mathis, 1994). While business groups were forcing their agenda on the District, environmental justice issues became more prominent. The policies of RECLAIM helped create closer links between certain environmental and social justice demands. During the latter part of the 1980s, environmental justice issues had come to the fore in social and political struggles in Los Angeles. Women-led, inner-city activist groups like Mothers of East Los Angeles and Concerned 6 While the Regulatory Flexibility G r o u p (RegFlex) represented some of the major polluters in the area, other businesses were opposed to R E C L A I M . Led by the Gas C o m p a n y of Southern California - originally a m e m b e r of RegFlex - business groups including regional chambers of commerce and central city and ethnic business associations attacked R E C L A I M early on for its expected costs and regulatory d e m a n d s on - particularly smaller firms. A t the same time, environmental groups assailed R E C L A I M as unworkable (Cone, 1993a-c).

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Citizens of South Central Los Angeles were highly successful in blocking large projects in their neighbourhoods (such as the East Los Angeles prison and two proposed incinerators in the south and the east of Los Angeles). Based on strong ties to territorial community, ethnic identity and their status as mothers and women, these groups "not only emerged as 'poster women' of the environmental justice movement, but also broadened their agendas to include community development, housing, antigraffiti projects, and scholarship programs" (Pulido, 1995b, p 11). The 'environment' became the transmission belt on which social justice issues were transported into the local policy agenda. 7 Since the late 1980s, the L a b o r / C o m m u n i t y Strategy Center (L/CSC), a multi-racial organizations with ties both to the labour movement and to communities of the working class and of people of colour, has been instrumental in forcing environmental justice concerns onto the agenda of regulatory agencies and policy making bodies. The Center grew out of an earlier labour and community coalition to keep the General Motors plant in Van Nuys open. After a 'summit' type orientation meeting in the summer of 1989, which brought together many activists for a weekend to discuss the relationship of social justice and the environment, the Center decided to launch a broad campaign to influence the draft language in and implementation of the regional air quality plan. The 1989 Air Quality Management Plan (and its successor in 1991) became the focus of the Center's activities in the following years. In 1991, L . A . ' s Lethal Air, a comprehensive study on public health aspects, community, gender and class issues of air pollution control and alternative policies was published by the Center (Mann, 1991). Interventions of the Center have been primarily successful in terms of procedural justice and general consciousness raising (Pulido, 1994, p 925). Although the Labor/Community Strategy Center was able to influence local environmental policymaking from an environmental justice point of view, the recent shift to market-based regulation and to less accessible democratic procedures has all but turned the organization away from mobilizing around the air quality issue. The organization had flourished at a time when the public and decisionmakers were generally more critical of polluting businesses, as expressed in a landmark vote of the District's board defeating nine business-backed measures to reduce the anti-pollution costs borne by industry (Stammer, 1992). By 1994, however, the tide had turned, and 7 We are unable, in the confinesof this paper, to discuss the full extent and some of the problems and conflictsrelated to environmental justice activismin Los Angeles. See Pulido (1996, 1995a, b, 1994) for an excellent discussion of multiracial organizingfor environmental justice and research on environmental racism in the US in general and Los Angeles in particular.

powerful local corporations had succeeded in greatly influencing the Air Quality Management Plan that was published in the fall of that year, and the District's board had been staffed by an overwhelming conservative pro-business majority. Air quality regulation in Los Angeles has come under the influence of "a complete roll-back of any commitment to public health. Efforts have centred on reducing both environmental regulation and citizen participation. This can be seen as both a contraction of established environmental rights and a loss of procedural justice" (Pulido, 1994, p 926). Precisely at the time when local environmental policy became more important to the general development doctrine of the region (as expressed in the 1989 plan, see Bloch and Keil, 1991), the hegemonic powers of southern California retrenched and insisted on their political and socio-economic privileges - using the environment as a battle ground on which more comprehensive policy initiatives in the urban region were initiated. In what seemed to have been its last major public show of strength in the air pollution fight to date, the Labor/Community Strategy Center disrupted a Board meeting on 13 May 1994 to protest an earlier decision to retain relatively lax anti-toxics regulation in residential neighbourhoods, the general weakening of controls in the new plan and the perceived sell-out of the agency to big business (Jacobs, 1994). 8 The defeat - for the time being - of environmental justice groups in the air pollution issue, thus, will have larger consequences for the landscape of restructuring in southern California. Political polarization, the end of dialogue (or multilogue) in civil society among diverse groups, the hegemonic enclosure of the political space created by 1989 plan, which allowed other views on environmental policy making (as it allowed alternative views of nature, ecology and environment), were fallouts and strategic parts of the success of a business agenda of dismantling regulation. The Los Angeles River

Let us now look briefly at our second Los Angeles case: proposed land use policies regarding the Los Angeles River. The Los Angeles River dissects Los Angeles County from the San Fernando Valley in the north, along the Glendale narrows, passes the downtown and flows straight from there into the South Bay west of Long Beach. Once a natural river that meandered through the southland, it was channelized and concreted in a giant governmentsponsored project between 1936 and 1954 by the Army Corps of Engineers as part of the Los Angeles 8 The Labour/CommunityStrategy Center is still a mainstayon the stage of local environmentalpolitics. It is highlyinvolvedwith an important campaignwith the Bus Riders Union, a struggle to which the Center brings its experience in environmental and social justice. 309

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County Drainage A r e a Project (Turhollow, 1975, pp 154-175). 9 The channelling was both a temporal solution to control the recurring floodwaters (particularly in its lower segments) and to provide a continued basis for the residential, commercial and industrial development (with special mention to military industries) of the floodplain along the river. The Los Angeles County Drainage A r e a project included 17 debris basins on 53 miles of tributary streams, three m a j o r flood control basins, 48 miles of channelization and m o r e than 100 bridges over the main and tributary channels (Turhollow, 1975, p 171). According to Turhollow (1975, p 187), approx. $2.6 billion was spent by the federal and local governments on land acquisition, planning and construction of the project. A combination of natural forces, in the form of torrential rainstorms in the early 1990s (especially in January of 1995, see Goldin and Davis, 1995) and politics pushed the river (and the flood control issue) out of its obscure existence in the geographical centre of the urban region to the editorial and front pages of local newspapers. 1° Independently of the floods at the time, in 1991 a new flood insurance rate m a p of the Federal Emergency M a n a g e m e n t Agency ( F E M A ) , which issues flood insurance for properties in the river plains, had reassessed the possible danger from the stream and d e m a n d e d higher insurance rates from property owners in the zones considered in danger by floods. From the point of view of traditional flood control as represented by the A r m y Corps of Engineers' approach, this meant demanding higher peak capacities for the channel. 1~ This assessment basically questioned the validity of the flood control regime in place since the 1940s and 9 The story of the concrete history of the river has recently been retold by a number of authors, among them are: Davis (1989), Goldin and Davis (1995), Dermitzel (1993), Turhollow (1975) and Coburn (1994). Obvious restrictions of space do not allow us here to discuss these histories in detail. lOAs early as 1969, the Corps began evaluating the adequacy of the Los Angeles County Drainage Area project. By the 1980s, The Army Corps of Engineers started to sound the alarm bells. In a 1987 publication, for example, they stated, referring to a 1980 flood that allegedly reached the top of the levees in Long Beach in the South Bay: "Disastrous Flooding Could Return to Los Angeles County" (US Army Corps of Engineers, 1987). 11The federal agencies involved in the Los Angeles County Drainage Area project, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Army Corps of Engineers (ACoE), did not always pull in the same direction. It is unclear what caused FEMA to reverse a 1983 report which considered the flood control measures in place sufficient and which saw only minimal risk of damage by future floods. Both agencies seem to have had vested interests in changing the designation by the beginning of the 1990s. FEMA, which administers the national flood insurance program, reacted to rising real estate prices during the 1980s which opened the gap between assessed and real insurance values. ACOE felt the budget constraints of the 1990s and realized that if Los Angeles County Drainage Area project funding was not obtained, a project of similar magnitude could not be secured for the foreseeable future.

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called for a change in the built environment of flood control. The A r m y Corps of Engineers used the insurance liability argument in their own favour and pushed for a half-billion-dollar Los Angeles County Drainage A r e a Project ( L A C D A ) which would result mainly in heightened levees and improved concrete structures in the lower part of the river. Separate from the L A C D A project, the County of Los Angeles Public Works D e p a r t m e n t has been working on a Master Plan for the entire Los Angeles River which is intended to incorporate minimal ecological concerns into its scheme to manage leisure, recreation and flood control along the river. One of the m a j o r issues with respect to both policy initiatives - the Los Angeles County Drainage A r e a project and the Los Angeles River Master Plan - is relationships between them. Surprisingly, despite overlapping individual, organizational and institutional participation in both projects, little conceptual and practical boundary crossing seems to have occurred. Although some community activists feel that the Master Plan is just a diversion from the concrete regime of the Los Angeles County Drainage A r e a project, other participants emphasize the different nature (flood control vs recreational infrastructure) and different geographical scale (the Tujunga Wash and L A River for the Master Plan as opposed to only the lower L A River and the Rio H o n d o for the Los Angeles County Drainage A r e a project) of both projects. Scope, mandate and character of environmental policy have been subjects of debate in both cases. Both plans to alter the Los Angeles River make explicit reference to their economic context, and both are informed by a regional discourse on urban restructuring - particularly those policies related to the booming South Bay and its port economy. In particular both plans relate to a m a m m o t h transportation construction project which is envisioned to connect the port area and northern Los Angeles via a rail corridor along Alameda, parallel to the Los Angeles River. Efforts to secure the well-being of this project influenced the discourse on the plans for flood control measures on the L A River. In April 1995, the County Board of Supervisors (the agency which can activate the federal dollars needed for the project) appeared to take a m a j o r step toward L A C D A approval. After sufficient pressure had been exerted on politicians in downstream cities (some of the most active supporters of the project), the Supervisors approved the Master Environmental Impact Report, which would have cleared the way for construction of the project to begin within 3 months. But the Supervisors' approval of this study set in motion a stronger and even more united opposition. Envirx)nmental and community groups which had been active in the L A River struggle for more than 10 yr came together to join, in their perception, a

Local environmental policy in Los Angeles: R Keil and G Desfor

last-chance battle to block the L A C D A project. For years, environmental organizations had suggested alternative flood control techniques that would have integrated natural features of the river landscape into the project. The Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) had come forward with a comprehensive proposal to renaturalize the river and to provide flood control. Attempts were made by FoLAR to enlist support for their environmentallyfriendly proposal to redesign the LA River, by stressing the economic benefit (urban renewal, waterfront renewal) and social benefit (create parks in areas with lack of green space) (Green, 1995a, b). The County Board of Supervisors in their April 1995 decision gave assent to the logic of the L A C D A project, which would have walled the river out of sight rather than seeing it become more integrated, aesthetically and environmentally, into future land uses of the area. Opposition to the Supervisors' decison on the L A C D A project was, however, widespread and well-organized. Lewis MacAdams, founder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River, called the LACDA project "The last statue of Stalin" (Coburn, 1996). FoLAR joined with other prominent environmental groups (Heal the Bay, TreePeople, the Wrigley Residents Association of Long Beach, Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, American Oceans Campaign, American Rivers, Citizens for a Better Environment, Los Angeles Audobon Society, the Sierra Club, Eco-Home Network and the League for Coastal Protection) in a law suit challenging the L A C D A project. The suit alleged the County Department of Public Works and the Army Corps of Engineers violated the California Environmental Quality Act in not seriously considering alternatives to channelization and the state's prohibition against unreasonable use of state waters (FoLAR, 1996). Although some activists were convinced LACDA should not be constructed at all, a number of prominent members of these environmental organizations were using the suit as a strategy for obtaining a voice in the formulation of an alternative and compromise plan. They saw the compromise as a way of ensuring that recreation, naturalization, water conservation as well as flood control would be part of the LACDA plan (Coburn, 1996). The Friends of the Los Angeles River reported that by October 1995 the County Department of Public Works reached a conceptual agreement with the co-petitioners to settle the suit, and by December the US Army Corps of Engineers supported the action. FoLAR indicates the agreement creates an "independent task force funded by the Corps and the County [that would] take a fresh look at the L A C D A project . . . . The Task Force would be charged with researching and recommending to the Corps of Engineers and County Board of Supervisors ways to implement LA Basin-wide watershed

management techniques." (FoLAR, 1996, pp 1, 4). The Watershed Task Force is composed of representatives from the lead environmental groups in the suit as well as from the US Corps of Engineers, the LA County Department of Public Works, other government agencies and from cities on the LA River.

Summary In this paper we have attempted to illuminate the process of making urban environmental policy in Los Angeles. We have suggested that in the current post-Fordist period, a multiplicity of voices in civil society contribute to the construction of a local environmental policy space. Within this space, struggles occur concerning the regulation of societal relationships with nature. We have examined two cases of urban environmental policy making in Los Angeles. Both cases, air pollution control and land use plans for the Los Angeles River (including flood control schemes) allow us to look at cross sections of the urbanized region. Both are geographically, ecosystemically and socio-economically as well as politically comprehensive projects that cross borders in many ways. The complexity of both cases demands equally complex policy solutions that can only (if at all) be achieved in a process of social struggle and conflict. Many agents address multiple spatial and temporal layers of problems in the material and the symbolic regulation of the societal relationships with nature (Jahn, 1994). In both cases, adverse decisions by governing agencies on how to proceed with regulation - the adoption of both the Air Quality Management Plan of 1994 and the Los Angeles County Drainage Area project of 1995 - occurred in a business-oriented, technocratic, non-democratic fashion directed at delegitimizing or even crushing the counter-proposals and opposing agendas. However, in both cases considerable pressure was exerted by subaltern forces in the environmental, community and neighbourhood movements, and a struggle around the meaning of policy and the relationships of the individual projects to social, natural and economic aspects has begun.

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