Shifts from manufacturing to services in older U.S. cities have brought important changes--well known to social scientists--in the ways that urban society is organized, but these shifts have also left behind industrial hazards that have slipped from view in ways underappreciated by scholars, policymakers, and residents. To the widely recognized social and economic consequences of post-World War II urban restructuring--rising income inequality, hyper-segregation, gentrification, and uneven redevelopment--this study adds environmental consequences, which require a new method of longitudinal data collection and analysis. The study's goal is to develop, demonstrate, and refine such a methodology in order to bring environmental changes in urban lands center stage and, in the process, improve understanding of urbanization as a critical and ongoing link between society, nature, and the human condition. This new methodology will extend beyond traditional concerns with political economic and socio-spatial processes to incorporate environmental concerns of known scientific importance: the accumulation and distribution of "relict industrial waste," that is, environmental hazards produced in earlier eras that have become hidden with time and may still pose significant health risks. Examining these dynamics requires a new approach?one that begins in the past, with parcels formerly occupied by hazardous industry, and proceeds to the present to examine what these sites have become, when, and where. Three propositions frame this effort, each subject to empirical investigation and refinement: 1) Prior to increasing environmental awareness and regulation of the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of manufacturers came and went in U.S. cities, dumping hazardous waste on site; 2) Many of these sites have now converted to other uses, effectively hiding relict waste from public view, government regulation, and scholarly inquiry; 3) How and where these changes in urban lands have occurred--first through manufacturing and onsite waste disposal, then through site conversion--depend greatly on social and economic processes happening around them, over time.
Regarding broader impacts, results from the study have the potential to transform how sociologists study cities in ways that not only enrich sociology but build bridges to related fields of environmental history, geography and regional sciences, science and technology studies, and public health. These contributions can offer important theoretical advances for understanding urban-environmental change, inform regulatory mandates involving environmental justice, and offer comparative insights that can help scholars and policymakers distinguish general from place-specific processes of industrial production, land use conversion, and environmental inequality.
Intellectual Merit Environmental social science scholarship has established that industrial hazards have social, economic, and health consequences for U.S. cities. Yet, for all the light that prior research has shed on these issues, many (perhaps most) urban industrial hazards remain hidden from view. This is because prior research on urban development and industrial hazards has focused on two types of polluting facilities: the operation or siting of contemporary facilities, often near poor, minority communities; and those facilities that have recently closed, leaving "brownfields," or derelict lots, in their wake. While both phenomena are important (each has its own federal legislation), they focus attention only on the most visible sources of urban-industrial pollution signaled by billowing smokestacks and blighted neighborhoods. From these cases we learn where environmental hazards are currently located, but not what past sites of hazard accumulation have become. Addressing the latter question requires a new approach. This study investigates the spatial, temporal, and socioeconomic distribution of relict industrial waste in four historic river port cities: Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Portland. In doing so, it advances, tests and refines a new methodology for investigating how historical processes of urbanization generate, overlay, and subsequently hide relict industrial waste and its consequences for public health and urban inequality. To date, this study has produced a unique three-part data set that links 1) organizational data on more than 40,000 historical industrial manufacturing sites, 2) contemporary site surveys from 400 randomly sampled sites from the historical data, and 3) state environmental regulatory agency data containing all officially recognized sites of potential and known hazardous waste in each of the four cities. These data are now complete, organized, and analysis is underway. Thus far, findings from our analyses have been presented at two professional conferences and developed into two written articles submitted for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals (one published in 2011; one currently under review); plans are underway for additional articles and a book manuscript. Key findings that emerged from a close study of our data in New Orleans and Portland include the following: hundreds of potentially contaminated former industrial sites are scattered throughout older U.S. cities, even in cities not known for heavy manufacturing, such as Portland and New Orleans public records and regulatory review fail to capture the vast majority of such sites, even in cities such as Portland where regulators have identified and assessed hundreds of "brownfields" since the 1980s these former hazardous industrial sites are most common in areas that are now predominantly white and lower-income, but the nature and extent of site conversion patterns depends on a constellation of factors operating at the organization, neighborhood and city levels. The study also finds, more specifically, that: at the organization level, smaller facilities were much more common than larger ones during the post-WWII period; are consistently more likely to have converted to other, non-hazardous uses over time; and pose distinct regulatory and redevelopment challenges as compared with the far fewer but larger and more visible sites that have attracted most attention from regulatory agencies to date at the neighborhood and city levels, changes in the social and built environment around former hazardous manufacturing sites matter but in different ways in different cities, suggesting that future regulatory and scholarly efforts to understand and address the challenges posed by relict waste must attend to neighborhood and urban contexts that together shape the likelihood of land use conversion over time. Broader Impacts Our project advances a new way of thinking about contemporary urbanization, one that links social, economic and environmental change. This approach has the potential to transform how sociologists study cities in ways that not only enrich sociology but build bridges to related fields of environmental history and public health. These contributions can offer important theoretical advances for understanding urban-environmental change, inform regulatory mandates involving environmental justice, and offer comparative insights that can help scholars and policymakers distinguish general from place-specific processes of industrial production, land use conversion, and environmental inequality.
