The archive can be viewed as a literal place in the sense that these materials are stored in physical and digital archives. The use of "archive" for this essay is more of an imagined place of the totality of archives.
The federal government’s funding for land development in the 1960’s, which established the legal framework for taking land and deferring the social and economic cost of expanding the university, had a significant impact in increasing the capacity of research universities to expand spatially (Tretter 2016). With the help of this federal funding, the University of Texas quickly shot up the national rankings, and the city of Austin began to attract investment and development in technology: including software design, semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, biotechnology, and computer equipment (Tretter 2016). While part of the attraction came from Texas’ lax lending economy, bolstered by large reserves of money from the high price of oil in the 1980’s, the university also played a prominent role by providing incentive packages to attract investment from national research firms.
The potential for Austin to develop into the tech hub of Texas was dramatically increased when the Microelectric and Computer Corporation (MCC) and the Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Sematech) chose Austin as the location for their national headquarters (Tretter 2016). Austin’s ability outshine the numerous other cities competing for these investments was largely due to the state’s ability to raise money for the construction of new research facilities through the university. The university used is authority to sell bonds against its Permanent Utility Fund to raise around $50 million to be spent on land and construction of new facilities. This “opened up new possibilities by connecting a state university’s endowment, and its bonding authority, to land development schemes designed to subsidize for-profit business and support the state government’s industrial policy” (Tretter 2016, 78).
The rapid growth of Austin’s tech industry was also facilitated in part by the developing of a legal infrastructure to patent/copyright knowledge in order to secure rents. The University of Texas “has been a leader in commercializing its research discoveries, connecting its patenting ability to regional growth and attracting venture capital financing” (Tretter 2016, 31). This has encouraged investment in the university as a site of R&D, as venture capitalists have a higher chance at garnering profit from the production of knowledge and technology.
Massive transportation infrastructure with super high density of personal cars and freight traffic. Oil and gas extraction alongside homes. Refineries. Miltary technology production. Active and abandoned military installations. Adjoining ports -- Long Beach and Los Angeles -- which are the top two busiest container ports in the United States. Rapidly expanding warehousing|distribution sector.
Material features and infrastructures: Industrial, civil infrastructure, and residential activities in the same places at different historical periods, which including cross-temporal interactions mediated by persistent pollutants.
The authors' umbrella concept for all of this is “socioenvironmental succession”: the cumulative effects of industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—a concept aiming to better undersand urban landscapes of toxic exposure by thinking about the long-term, intertwining processes of the production of hazardous contamination of urban sites, changes in use of urban sites and neighborhoods, and multidimensional efforts to achieve the political containment of perceived risks arising from this contamination.
I find this source most useful as a concrete example of the application of methods of historical geography (at least that’s how I would describe it) to the study of toxic places. Its appendix provides a step-by-step guide to building a “historically hidden industrial database” – while this method is tailored to a specific kind of place (urban sites) and toxicity (localized hazardous waste), it might well be adapted to thinking in historical geospatial terms about other forms of place and toxicity that our projects are engaging.
“The narrative is not populated with heroes and villains, and our conclusions are not rendered with absolute clarity. Instead, the story is about impersonal processes and institutions, and the conclusions we draw are complicated by nuance and ambiguity. The results do not refute existing accounts, but they can sit uneasily on the shelf next to them and may raise discomfiting implications that can be emotionally and ideologically difficult to reconcile, especially for those who are committed to a particular narrative arc and ending.” (104)