Joe Pierce
I am an urban geographer based in Worcester, Mass.
My research is focused on the politics of siting, use rights and sustainable practices in urban contexts.
Urban Land Tenure
While geographers have spent a fair amount of effort talking about "the right to the city" (Mitchell, Harvey, Purcell), that right is most often discussed using universalist language and, at times, seems aspirational rather than descriptive--it is a right that we would like to have. When discussing concrete rights that already exist in the city, most geographers continue to adopt a discourse that links rights primarily to a conventional notion of ownership. By adopting the nuanced vocabulary regarding use rights and land tenure from scholarship in Global South contexts, I hope to encourage new thinking about the many overlapping, socially constructed rights which the residents of American cities negotiate among themselves, such as the use of stoops for community gathering or of particular lawns as informal pocket parks. I am currently developing a research case to examine the social construction of tenure rights in Portland, Ore.
Sustainable Urbanism
Developing an agenda for more sustainable urban practices is a critical goal for American city governments, but many of the measures for evaluating sustainability depend on metrics which only obliquely capture people's participation in more sustainable practices--that is, a more sustainable urbanism. I am pursuing research that focuses on the interaction between policy interventions (like land use regulation) and the kinds of everyday practices in which urban residents engage. By focusing on practices, I also hope to emphasize the social equity "dimension" of the conventional sustainability triad (economic, ecological, and social), hopefully leading to a more nuanced and possibly critical view of what Krueger has called "actually existing sustainability."
Siting Group Homes
With my adviser Deborah Martin and her co-PI Alex Scherr at Georgia, I am pursuing research on the politics surrounding group home siting. In the aftermath of the "de-institutionalization" of social service provision in the 1970s/1980s, residential social service facilities provide critical services to urban communities. However, the process of choosing where these facilities will be located is both political and social, with many of the most complex negotiations playing out at the local scale as communities grapple with questions of spatial/social identity. We are exploring case studies in Massachusetts and New York.