| John Gulick's dissertation “Landside Risks: Ecological Contradictions of Port of Oakland Globalism” apprehends the past, present, and future of the Port of Oakland from an unorthodox lens, that of the “landside”. The “landside” is that set of ecological, economic, and cultural relationships which obtains between the Port and a built and social space over which it has no jurisdiction and hence little control, the adjacent neighborhood of West Oakland. The significance of the “landside” for the Port is that it constitutes a possible barrier to the Port's physical expansion, an expansion that is ostensibly required for the Port to remain fiscally solvent. The putative contradictions between the Port's growth imperative and the environmental integrity of its “landside” compel a three-sided exploration. First, the thesis identifies the structural forces which forced and continue to force the Port to expand into a “global” port; second, it examines why and how West Oakland residents resisted the hazards generated by this expansion; third, it speculates about the short-term and medium-term consequences of this resistance for both West Oakland and the Port.; Drawing on diverse sources such as specialist journals and bond rating documents, the dissertation first shows that the Port is forced to “go global” because it has fallen woefully behind its West Coast rivals for extra-regional market share, and because it must generate the revenues necessary to pay down previously accrued debt. Second, historical monographs indicate that West Oakland has long been a dumping ground for ecological ills connected to Port-related transportation infrastructure, hence sowing community resentment toward the Port; environmental impact statements, interviews, and field research reveal that neighborhood public health advocates eventually leveraged the Port into mitigating the most egregious of these ills. Third and finally, extrapolating from current trends tracked in newspaper articles and policy reports, the thesis notes that the mitigation settlement brokered between the public health advocates and the Port is bound to expedite gentrification already occurring in West Oakland, thus laying the groundwork for strengthened community resistance to future Port capacity expansion projects. |
