Collaborative Research: Urban-Environmental Restructuring in the U.S.

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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.