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

美国老城市从制造业向服务业的转变，给城市社会的组织方式带来了重要的变化——这是社会科学家所熟知的，但这些转变也留下了工业危害，这些危害以学者、政策制定者和居民未充分认识的方式从人们的视野中溜走。除了公认的二战后城市重构的社会和经济后果——收入不平等加剧、高度隔离、中产阶级化和不均衡的再开发——之外，本研究还增加了环境后果，这需要一种新的纵向数据收集和分析方法。该研究的目标是发展、论证和完善这样一种方法，以便将城市土地的环境变化置于中心位置，并在此过程中提高对城市化作为社会、自然和人类状况之间关键和持续联系的理解。这种新方法将超越对政治、经济和社会空间过程的传统关注，纳入已知的具有科学重要性的环境关注：“残余工业废物”的积累和分布，即在早期时代产生的环境危害，随着时间的推移而变得隐藏起来，可能仍然构成重大健康风险。检查这些动态需要一种新的方法吗？一个从过去开始，从以前被危险工业占领的地块开始，一直到现在，研究这些地点在何时何地变成了什么样子。这一努力的框架有三种主张，每一种主张都需要经过实证调查和改进：1)在20世纪80年代环保意识增强和法规出台之前，成千上万的制造商在美国城市进进出出，在现场倾倒有害废物；2)许多这样的地点现在已经被改造成其他用途，有效地将废弃的废物隐藏在公众视野、政府监管和学术调查之外；随着时间的推移，城市土地上的这些变化是如何以及在哪里发生的——首先是通过制造和现场废物处理，然后是通过场地转换——在很大程度上取决于周围发生的社会和经济进程。就更广泛的影响而言，这项研究的结果有可能改变社会学家研究城市的方式，不仅丰富了社会学，而且为环境史、地理和区域科学、科学和技术研究以及公共卫生等相关领域搭建桥梁。这些贡献可以为理解城市环境变化提供重要的理论进展，为涉及环境正义的监管任务提供信息，并提供比较见解，帮助学者和政策制定者区分工业生产、土地利用转换和环境不平等的一般过程和特定地方的过程。

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.