This dissertation will examine the rise and fall of the Polish immigrant enclave of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over the past 30 years (1980 to 2010), focusing on the changing social relations of housing within the Polish immigrant community during this time. Greenpoint today stands at the cusp of disintegration as classic immigrant enclave, with property values and residential and commercial rent levels that prohibit new immigrants from settling, while forcing out many of the old immigrants who did so years ago. The political economy of immigrant housing in Greenpoint, I will argue, was both creator and destroyer of the Polish enclave - engine of its growth and barrier to its further expansion. A central argument of this dissertation is that the housing market is a social construct, embedded within and conditioned by social relations specific to a particular place and time. Though socially-embedded, however, the immigrant housing market is never fully divorced from the wider urban housing market; it is in fact structured by this impersonal market and its imperative to realize profit. There is an ongoing tension or dialectic between two forms of housing relations -one subordinated to the social utility of housing, another driven by the profit motive - that is manifest within any socio-spatial formation. In the pages that follow I will explore this dialectic as it drives the evolving social relations of housing within the Polish immigrant enclave of Greenpoint, where the political economy of immigrant housing has undergone significant and rapid change in the face of a real estate boom, the likes of which New York City - and the country as a whole - has perhaps never seen before.

Scholars have largely overlooked the formative role of industry in both California's economic development and the San Francisco Bay Area's metropolitan expansion during the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1880s, leading firms in San Francisco's specialized industries, such as the iron and chemicals sectors, dispersed to the metropolitan periphery. This process of industrial suburbanization created an integrative metropolitan economy, as well as individual suburbs. In this dissertation, I explore the creation of one of the Bay Area's earliest industrial suburbs, Emeryville. I argue that an analysis of industrial dynamism on the regional scale is integral for understanding metropolitan development and industrial suburbanization. Symbiotic relations between resource extraction and industrial dynamism structured California's distinct mode of capitalist development. The expansion and diversification of resource extraction and processing industries fueled metropolitan growth. Within the broader context of regional capitalism, I examine the process of industrial suburbanization and the formation of Emeryville. I show how two processes greatly influenced industrial dispersal and factory relocation: the creation of an industrial property market and the endogenous logic of industrial production. A coalition of land developers, politicos, and transportation entrepreneurs created a new suburban industrial space. High rates of innovation and accumulation, as well as fierce competition, enabled certain firms to eschew the industrial core and locate their factories in early Emeryville. I draw on array of archival material and primary sources to weave together this distinctive story of California landscapes and industries, and cities and suburbs. My examination of the formation of Emeryville also presents a case study of how industry engenders metropolitan transformation. This dissertation provides insights into the necessarily conjoined processes of city development and industrial suburbanization.

The Making and Unmaking of Southeast San Francisco

This project historicizes the recent convergence of private and public development interests in Southeast San Francisco, a place that was once dismissed as too risky for investment. Emphasizing the importance of race and gender in this history, I ask how an unexpected story of urban change shifts our sense of possibility for San Francisco and, more broadly, for the future of the American city.

Historically, the Southeast was the place where San Francisco cloistered industries and people that were unwelcome by the mainstream. After years of industrial concentration, the area became home to a naval shipyard that played a central role in World War II, and that drew in thousands of African American families to live and work. The residential character of today's Southeast was further shaped by waves of urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s and by the activism of African American women in the 1970s. Development plans that emerged in the late 1990s revealed that the poor, industrially polluted, and violence-ridden Southeast would be pivotal in formulating San Francisco's 21st Century growth patterns.

Today, the city is moving forward with a massive redevelopment plan for the Southeast under a partnership between the Redevelopment Agency and the Lennar Corporation, one of America's largest private homebuilders and a key player in the mortgage crisis. Lennar's Southeast is a largely poor yet racially diverse place, with a recent influx of Chinese-American and Latino families. Nested amid San Francisco's extreme real estate-driven wealth, the Southeast has a long history of alliances defined by political patronage.

In sum, through three case studies that reveal interlinked histories, this dissertation unpacks the ways that the politics of urban development and racial exclusion shape places, even in apparently progressive regions like the San Francisco Bay Area. This work extends and contributes to conversations about the role of government in urban growth, the co-production of urban space and racial hierarchies, and the ways that race-class politics are shifting in the newly multi-ethnic context of the American city.

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Port Chicago came to international attention on July 17, 1944 when two ammunition ships exploded, killing 320 military personnel. Two-thirds of those killed were African American stevedores ordered to load munitions under a segregated Navy. It was the worst domestic disaster during World War II. Three weeks after the blast, hundreds of survivors refused to return to work in a spontaneous wildcat strike. Fifty of these men were convicted of mutiny charges by an all-white military tribunal, a catalyst for the 1948 Executive Order that desegregated the Armed Forces. When President Barack Obama signed the 2010 defense budget, he also approved a subsection that created a new national park: The Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. While the creation of the national park could be conflated with a symbolic closure to these struggles, my research finds that the memory of Port Chicago is contested through various spatial imaginaries. Furthermore, because the site is ensconced within an active base, the military controls access to this memorial--a rare case. As such, it crystallizes usually unnoticed tensions between public space and national memory. I study these tensions at Port Chicago and other Bay Area sites of the World War II home front related to the popularized "Port Chicago story." I find that different groups create their own narrative of the military past, sometimes challenging National Park Service narratives, and sometimes also exacerbating social and racial separation.

A century ago, foreign governments and their actions were essentially beyond U.S. judicial reach. In the 1950s, however, U.S. courts began to govern more and more activities of foreign governments leading to a transformation in the modality of U.S. power directed abroad. Legal historians describe this as a transition from an “absolute” to a “restrictive” practice of sovereign immunity, and one dominant narrative explains the transition as a pragmatic move away from an obsolete model of “territorial sovereignty” to a more flexible, “de-territorialized” or even “de-spatialized” sovereignty better suited for a globalized economy. Through tracing key U.S. legal changes involving foreign sovereign governments from 1898 to 2014, with a focus on sovereign debt law, I argue that transnational sovereign economic activity in fact remains dependent as ever on national borders — albeit borders that are continually reconfigured through minute changes in U.S. common law.

Far from representing a homogeneous de-territorialization of the contemporary international legal order, I show that there has been an uneven re-territorialization that reduces the authority of most countries over their own economic decisions while expanding the judicial reach of a few — primarily the United States — and that New York state law has been especially important in this process. This has resulted not in a general restriction of state sovereignty in the face of “globalization,” but in a differential displacement of economic sovereignty from post-colonial, poor and indebted states to rich, industrialized ones. The legal structures developed since the 1960s have aimed at entrenching and extending U.S. dominance over the global capitalist order and presently function to perpetuate exploitative relations between sovereign debtors and private creditors.

U.S. judicial power has been a crucial and largely overlooked pillar of post-war U.S hegemony. I show how judicial transformations of the past half-century have occurred in relation to changing economic conditions, including threats to U.S. property posed by Third World nationalizations in the 1950s to the 1970s, rising indebtedness since the 1970s, and an ongoing overaccumulation crisis. The expansion of U.S. judicial power has simultaneously been driven at every step by U.S. geopolitical interests, including, importantly, the desire to contain Communism and maintain the colonial status quo in the context of the Cold War, widespread de-colonization and Third Worldist movements, and the reconstruction of U.S. dollar hegemony in the 1980s.

I argue that the expansion of U.S. judicial power in the past half-century should be understood as territorial insofar as it has defined the space over which the state (in the form of courts) may exercise authority. Through a critical analysis of this legal history I show how the reconceptualization of key legal dichotomies — most importantly, foreign/domestic, public/private, and political/legal — has been a fundamental spatial mechanism through which these legal territories are produced and contested. Since the 1960s, U.S. — especially New York — courts have increasingly reclassified foreign sovereign transnational activities as “private” (rather than “public” or “sovereign”) and therefore as properly within the scope of U.S. judicial (“legal”) rather than executive (“political”) authority. Foreign sovereign activities have also increasingly been reclassified from “foreign” (meaning outside the United States) to “domestic” (meaning inside the United States). Together, these interlinked changes have been used to bring activity that would previously have been considered beyond the authority of U.S. courts within U.S. judicial reach. This has expanded U.S. authority as a whole through the modality of judicial power, while simultaneously de-politicizing important social questions and removing them from even the possibility of democratic debate.

Until recently, this process has unfolded with explicit support from the U.S. executive branch, but tensions between the interests of the U.S. executive and those of the U.S. judiciary have grown. In NML Capital v. Argentina, despite strenuous objections from the executive branch, the New York and U.S. Supreme Courts inverted the reigning spatial logic of U.S. law in order to extend U.S. judicial authority over most of the world outside Argentina – with important ramifications for U.S. economic and geopolitical interests, for sovereign debt crises and restructurings, and for the global financial order. The critical genealogy of the expansion of U.S. juridico-economic territory since WWII that I present in this dissertation is crucial for understanding the transnational operation of U.S. judicial power today and how it might most effectively be contested.

This study examines the role of Fairtrade certification and labeling in mediating the socio-ecological relations of banana production. Bringing to bear ideas from literature on agro-industrial development and restructuring, agrifood governance, agrarian change, agricultural labor relations, and sustainability, it examines how banana farmers, workers, and their communities are affected by participation in Fairtrade commodity networks under conditions of market liberalization. It concludes that, while, under certain conditions, Fairtrade can benefit some farmers and workers, it fails to address the broader social and ecological conditions of banana production. It attributes the challenges facing the Fairtrade system to the internal dynamics of its consumer-driven, market-based, and developmental model. Specifically, I argue that Fair Trade actors' focus on the terms of exchange fails to address the imperatives of growth and accumulation inherent in capitalist commodity production, which shape outcomes for banana farmers, workers, and environments.

The analysis is based on research conducted at two key sites in the banana sector: Ecuador's South Coast and the Urabá region of Colombia. These regions have played an importation role in the expansion of Fairtrade banana supply, albeit under different conditions. In Ecuador, Fairtrade protection has primarily been extended to small farmers under the Fair Trade Labelling Organizations (FLO) Small Producer Organization standards. Meanwhile, the majority of Urabá's producers are certified under FLO's Hired Labor standards. Drawing on in-depth interviews with farmers, workers, administrative and technical staff of Fairtrade-institutions, as well as labor representatives, I find that Fairtrade certification generates uneven outcomes for different groups participating in the system. Activists and researchers have critiqued the expansion of certification to plantations and to the enrollment of transnational agribusiness companies, which they argue has undermined the position of small farmers within the Fairtrade system. Yet these critiques overlook significant socio-ecological complexity and differentiation in Fairtrade banana production. They also obscure the critical role of hired workers on small and large farms alike. The study, thus, attempts to reframe the mainstreaming debate, to place workers at the center of the Fairtrade banana story. In so doing, it argues that international Fair Trade actors must engage more fully with banana unions and labor solidarity movements in order to achieve their purported goals of supporting social and environmental justice in the global banana economy.