Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in US Household Water Insecurity
Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in US Household Water Insecurity
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DOI：
10.1080/24694452.2018.1530587
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发表时间：
2019-07-04
影响因子：
3.9
通讯作者：
Meehan, Katie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Deitz, Shiloh;Meehan, Katie
家庭用水不安全是对人类健康和发展的全球性威胁，但现有指标缺乏对地理不平等和空间差异的系统考虑。在本文中，我们介绍了管道贫困的概念，作为一种概念和方法上的启发，以检查基础设施、空间和社会不平等的交叉性质。管道贫困在双重意义上被理解：首先，作为一种由社会关系产生的物质和基础设施条件，这种社会关系在空间上根本不同；其次，作为一种方法，将社会不平等的空间探索付诸实践。根据数以百万计的人口普查记录，我们将家庭用水安全剥离到一个重要的指标，即完整的家庭管道的存在，以评估其空间和社会人口趋势。我们确定了管道贫困的不同热点（高于平均值的地理集群），跟踪其社会和空间差异，并揭示了其根本的种族化本质。我们的研究发现，在美国，管道贫困在空间上和社会上都不是随机的。相反，管道不完备在空间上集中在国家的某些地区，并且明显是种族化的：生活在美国印第安人或阿拉斯加原住民、黑人或西班牙裔家庭中，管道不完备的几率会增加，这些预测因素在空间上是扭曲和混乱的。考虑到谁会经历基础设施功能障碍的缓慢暴力，这是一个在美国同时被忽视和不均匀表达的地理问题，我们认为空间和社会差异分析是理解家庭用水不安全的核心，必须优先考虑开发跨可比指标和全球测量工具。
Household water insecurity is a global threat to human health and development, yet existing metrics lack a systematic consideration of geographic inequality and spatial variation. In this article, we introduce the notion of plumbing poverty as a conceptual and methodological heuristic to examine the intersectional nature of infrastructure, space, and social inequality. Plumbing poverty is understood in a dual sense: first, as a material and infrastructural condition produced by social relations that fundamentally vary through space and, second, as a methodology that operationalizes the spatial exploration of social inequality. Drawing on millions of census records, we strip household water security down to a single vital measurethe presence of complete household plumbingto assess its spatial and sociodemographic trends. We identify distinct hot spots (geographic clusters of higher than average values) of plumbing poverty, track its social and spatial variance, and expose its fundamentally racialized nature. Our study finds that plumbing poverty is neither spatially nor socially random in the United States. Rather, plumbing incompleteness is spatially clustered in certain regions of the country and is clearly racialized: Living in an American Indian or Alaskan Native, black, or Hispanic household increases the odds of being plumbing poor, and these predictors warp and woof through space. In considering who experiences the slow violence of infrastructural dysfunction, a geography that is simultaneously ignored and unevenly expressed in the United States, we argue that analyses of space and social difference are central to understanding household water insecurity and must be prioritized in the development of cross-comparable metrics and global measurement tools.