The book’s argument is sort of like the airborne toxic event of White Noise crossed with microplastics. except with the drama and spatial order turned inside-out. As with White Noise, toxic risks are potentially about everybody everywhere, not just obvious sites of ongoing large-scale exposure shaped by social and economic inequality. The twist is that these sites of exposure are hard to recognize, localized, and ever more increasingly scattered.
“In our story, the vast majority of potentially risky industrialized lands are located on smaller urban lots, not larger ones, and whatever hazards remain on those sites today were likely deposited some time ago, perhaps decades earlier by manufacturers who are not gone. Most of these sites have not been redeveloped for other, mostly nonindustrial uses. Thus they do not look, feel, or smell like risky places today. Instead, these lots may contain houses, retail stores, parking lots, restaurants, and even a few playgrounds. Importantly, many tend not to be in predominantly low-income or minority neighborhoods, and the proportion of those that are has been declining over the past few decades, as new generations of white residents churn back into the nation’s urban cores….
“Both stories [a) urban environmental racism, and b) the steady dispersion of risk across social groups through “churning”] are accurate and meaningful—and inextricably related. The unjust exposure of marginalized groups to industrial hazards, especially large, active ones in particular neighborhoods, is a big part of the contemporaneous process, the now…. Environmental injustices of today beget and hide systemic risk of tomorrow, as past and present continue to unfold atop one another, against and again.” (104-105)
Material features and infrastructures: Industrial, civil infrastructure, and residential activities in the same places at different historical periods, which including cross-temporal interactions mediated by persistent pollutants.
The authors' umbrella concept for all of this is “socioenvironmental succession”: the cumulative effects of industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—a concept aiming to better undersand urban landscapes of toxic exposure by thinking about the long-term, intertwining processes of the production of hazardous contamination of urban sites, changes in use of urban sites and neighborhoods, and multidimensional efforts to achieve the political containment of perceived risks arising from this contamination.
I find this source most useful as a concrete example of the application of methods of historical geography (at least that’s how I would describe it) to the study of toxic places. Its appendix provides a step-by-step guide to building a “historically hidden industrial database” – while this method is tailored to a specific kind of place (urban sites) and toxicity (localized hazardous waste), it might well be adapted to thinking in historical geospatial terms about other forms of place and toxicity that our projects are engaging.
“The narrative is not populated with heroes and villains, and our conclusions are not rendered with absolute clarity. Instead, the story is about impersonal processes and institutions, and the conclusions we draw are complicated by nuance and ambiguity. The results do not refute existing accounts, but they can sit uneasily on the shelf next to them and may raise discomfiting implications that can be emotionally and ideologically difficult to reconcile, especially for those who are committed to a particular narrative arc and ending.” (104)
“Although the HHID and resulting study, like all research, remains a work in progress, we believe it also offers a solid, innovative foundation from which others—inside and outside academia—can continue to build. This is so for several key reasons:
“It is historically attentive. Unlike prior research that starts with current sites of concern and then works backward in time to discover what else had operated there in the past, our methods historicizes sample selection as well as data collection by tracing forward, over time, the fate of all sites that once operated in locally hazardous industries.
“It is spatially refined. Unlike prior work on urban-industrial hazards, our method treats parcels (or addresses) as the primary unit of analysis, rather than blocks, block-groups, or census tracts. Yet, it still remains amenable to using data from these sources as a means of analyzing and contextualizing important historical processes of residential churning that have co-occurred with industrial churning.
“It is transportable to other cities. Unlike prior in-depth case studies of a specific area, our method can be readily applied to many cities, providing a middle path between large-scale quantitative studies that track known hazards across the nation as a whole and more fine-grained, site- and neighborhood-specific historical analyses.
“These innovations, we believe, can be leveraged by a wide range of stakeholders to develop and promote a more historically grounded and environmentally attuned understanding of the urban environments we call home. In the academy, these advances can contribute to a new generation or urban studies that links urban and environmental sociologies not only to each other but also to allied fields of environmental history, public health, geography, and planning. Outside the academy, related insights can be used to better inform public and environmental policy at the local, state, and national levels. Such policy can help not only inform residents of risks related to relic hazards in their own neighborhoods but also facilitate bridge-building across communities throughout the nation. Such work is important because, as our research has shown, underlying processes are ubiquitous and ongoing.” (124)
Frickel, Elliot, and a large team of student collaborators created what they call a “Historically Hidden Industrial Database” (HHID). This comprised comprehensive longitudinal series of data about the location (street address) and type of industrial activity of manufacturing in key sectors highly likely to produce localized hazardous wastes, as well as patterns of urban succession in which residential communities occupied sites where polluting manufacturing had once taken place. They drew this data from census records and from annual state-level commercial registers—works with titles like Oregon Directory of Manufacturing. The researchers found that these registers contained much more information about historical industrial activities than government-generated databases, enabling them to assess gaps in government-generated registries used for regulatory purposes and to provide present-day community members with more extensive information about possible legacy pollutants in their neighborhoods.
Methods of historical geography can provide a means of thinking about toxic places as sites of intertemporal relations shaped by historically specific political decisions as well as long-term, dynamic patterns of land use.
“In brief, we argue that local urban change is driven by three fundamental processes: industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment. Industrial churning refers to ongoing temporal and spatial changes in a city’s active hazardous manufacturing facilities as those facilities go in and out of business or move from one location to another. Over time, these movements in time and space generate aggregate patterns of current and former industrial land uses that are specific to each city, for example, clustering along a river that cuts through a downtown or spreading more diffusely toward a city’s outskirts, or both. By tracing these patterns over time and focusing on sectors known to release hazardous wastes to local lands, we can learn a lot about how, when, and where industrial practices are successively transforming urban environments.
“Residential churning is similar to industrial churning, except it refers to human groups rather than industrial facilities….
“Risk containment refers to the tendency of government agencies to selectively manage risks associated with these lingering, or relic, industrial wastes in ways that are politically expedient….
“Bringing these three processes together in Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Portland allows us to watch them unfold over time and to see how they entwine and scale up spatially to produce cumulatively significant changes in local environments. Our contention is that for decades, the unprecedented changes wrought by the gradual but ongoing contamination of urban lands by industrial hazardous waste is but one manifestation of a more general process of urban-ecological transformation we call socioenvironmental succession.” (6-7)
The book was published by the Russell Sage Foundation, in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology. “Books in the Rose Series are at the forefront of sociological knowledge. They are lively and often involve timely and fundamental issues of significant social concerns. The series is intended for broad dissemination throughout sociology, across social science and other professional communities, and to policy audiences.”
Scott Frickel is a sociologist at Brown; James Elliot is a sociologist at Rice. The two were junior faculty together at Tulane, where they conceived of this project in the course of asking questions about the history of New Orleans’ urban geography.
Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott, Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018).