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.
The present study has advanced a theory of urbanization as socio-environmental succession and initiated an empirical basis of support for this conceptual project. The theory holds that urbanization is usefully viewed as an endogenous process of historical change constituted through continuous entwining of urban social and natural systems. This socio-environmental succession unfolds in particular places and times to create temporally and spatially distinctive outcomes, with the accumulation of hazardous wastes from industrial sources being a characteristic of urbanization since the early 20th Century. Particularly after the Second World War, this form of socio-environmental succession has been driven by three intersecting and recursive processes. Industrial churning has continued to infill older areas of cities with land-based hazardous wastes that run in the billions of pounds annually and that continue to accumulate temporally in-place and spatially from parcel to parcel. Over time, this churning has scaled up to create "hazardous natural areas" that residential churning obscures by altering local residential groups, cultural routines and the built environment, thereby expunging collective memories of past land uses. In this way, once-visible hazardous industrial sites are gradually erased from view and become hidden, or relict. This ongoing production of relict sites is now reinforced by regulatory regimes guided by the logic of risk containment, whereby entrenched political-bureaucratic practices within well-meaning regulatory agencies systematically overlook the full extent of manufactured risks associated with ongoing industrial production. Intentionally or not, these processes converge to promote land reuse and preserve exchange values in urban areas that become more polluted with time. This understanding has important implications for urban residents and offers contributions to existing theory, methods, and policy.
