History: An (Un)sustainable Geo-History of Intercurrence

Abstract

The “Greater Seattle” area is built originally upon a process of land alienation from indigenous populations. Original dispossession led over time to new processes of (industrialized) urban-based accumulation, while ongoing modes of class, gender, and race segregation, concerted efforts in public organization (e.g., engineering, planning, services, war-making, institutional reforms), and continuing private innovations in product development (e.g., Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon) critically reshaped nature and society into an altered metropolitan space by the mid- to late- twentieth century. Now well into the twenty-first century, “Greater Seattle” is, following Alan Scott (A world in emergence: Cities and regions in the 21st century. Edward Elgar, Cheltonham, UK, 2012), an increasingly “digitized” and highly dynamic global city-regional economy of some four million people spread over four major counties, albeit still anchored around the core city of Seattle in King County. New efforts to build a new city-regional order around a more just resiliency, however, are shaped strongly by past orders constituted by both ideational and institutional forces.

The past is never dead, it’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun