Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism
University of Oklahoma Press
Few places symbolize the twentieth century American West like Silicon Valley. Stretching between the communities of Palo Alto to San Jose, this dense California region is home to the nation’s most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. In the four decades following World War II, the region rapidly transformed from an agricultural economy to an industrial one fueled by government funding into defense-related research and development. Boosters of the new industrialization promised a modern, clean, and future-facing economy in the wake of declining steel-age industries and an emerging space-age arms race. New industries drove new populations who flocked to the valley as much for work as they did for its pleasant environment.
Between 1950 and 1990, boosters, city councils, and business leaders outlined a vision that melded a bucolic naturalism of fruit orchards, pleasant weather, and green spaces, with metropolitan capitalism–modern industry, defense-related research, and technocratic jobs, that aspired to form an idyllic city. However, competing ideas about forming these idyllic communities led to widespread environmental degradation and social stratification. The pursuit of cities organized around high-tech industries, suburban growth, and urban expansion prompted intensified race and class stratification, strengthened the political power of elites, worsened human health, and introduced widespread pollution. Environmental advocacy attempted to resolve these challenges, but often merely shifted the problems to new places. Suburban capitalism and federal funding deeply transformed this place as new housing, the recruitment or founding of new companies, and urban infrastructure deeply reshaped the landscape.
A core argument throughout this book is the role of place: how they are defined, who defines them, and what happens in them. Just as important, the role of “nature” and who defines this illustrates who and what is included while also revealing who gets excluded in the conversation about the environment. Silicon Valley helps unravel this tension within land use regimes, social consequences, and environmental degradation, and American’s growing environmental awareness following World War II.
Praise
“With deep empathy and keen insight, Jason Heppler shows what lies beneath the sparkling high-tech campuses of today's Silicon Valley: a long and tangled history of environmental transformation and trade-offs, mythmaking and moneymaking, conservation and exclusion, and a western landscape remade many times over. This book is an invaluable addition to the literature.”
— Margaret O'Mara
“Heppler skillfully dissects people's shifting perceptions of the places where they lived, worked, played, polluted, and argued about the future. As subdivisions and science parks supplanted orchards and the Valley acquired more Superfund sites than any other American county, inhabitants produced a remarkably diverse range of commitments to 'nature.'”
— John M. Findlay
Reviews
“How this land would be used, who would have access, and who would decide which areas to preserve or let fall to the bulldozer's blade is at the heart of Heppler's book. This is a subversive view of Silicon Valley's history that keeps the usual suspects in the background. Environmental inequalities are in the foreground.”
— W. Patrick McCray, LA Review of Books
“Heppler's work provides a thought-provoking foundation for understanding the relationship between high-tech industries, urban development, and environmental inequalities. These topics will only become more relevant as computer chip manufacturing returns to the US.”
— Adam Quinn, H-Net
“A valuable contribution to urban environmental history. Heppler makes a convincing case that the valley's landscape — designed, contested, and unequally experienced — deserves as much attention as its tech economy and circuit boards.”
— Rachel Ameen, H-Net