The city of Seattle and surrounding metropolitan communities—nearby cities, suburbs, towns, Native American nations, port authorities, regional transit providers, and counties—are collectively nestled along the comparatively deep, well-mixed fjordal estuaries and bays of Puget Sound within the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest. Built across re-engineered hills beneath majestic mountains, Seattle traverses bodies of both salt and fresh water. It draws on multiple river basins for sustenance. The wider region's mild marine air environment has encouraged prolific vegetation and abundant natural resources. These include the seemingly endless cedar trees and beaver pelts that first attracted European interests in the 1830s and then, in the 1850s, permanent American colonizers, initially from the Midwest. Like Cape Town, Rio, or Vancouver, Seattle is physically stunning—known in popular culture as “The Emerald City” for its lush rain forest canopies, wet-green hues, and relatively mild climate.

How did Seattle get here—and how do its various pasts still shape where it is going today or might go tomorrow? The broad outlines of Seattle's overall “development story,” about which more below, are generally well known. That said, synoptic, synthetic, well-theorized accounts of Seattle's longer-running historical geography and key urbanization patterns are rare, especially when “Seattle” is embedded within its wider “post-metropolitan,” institutional, and ecological contexts (Dierwechter, 2017; Sale, 1976).

My central argument in this chapter is that policy patterns associated with contemporary Seattle's post– carbon development choices remain shaped by “multiple orders” of development (Dierwechter, 2017), a term derived from the work of Orren and Skowronek (2004) in historic institutionalism. The larger goal is to help situate contemporary development problems and carbon policy patterns explicated in Chapters 3 and 4, where the ARC3.2 framework's emphasis on the multiple “pathways” of urban transformation in American cities is further engaged.

As stated in Chapter 1, the ARC3.2 framework advanced by UCCRN treats cities like Seattle as “complex socio-natural systems” whose constitutive components—physical, social, natural, and virtual—are “dynamically interactive at multiple temporal and spatial scales” yet also “have their own internal processes” (p. 7).