Browsing by Author "Frickel, Scott"

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    Future flooding increases unequal exposure risks to relic industrial pollution
    (IOP Publishing, 2022) Marlow, Thomas; Elliott, James R.; Frickel, Scott
    Climate change is increasing the probability that urban communities with lengthy histories of land-based industrial pollution and ongoing residential segregation will experience more frequent and destructive flooding in the years ahead. This paper investigates where these past, present, and future forces will converge to potentially produce a new type of climate injustice, as the flooding of former, or ‘relic,’ industrial sites threatens to transport sequestered industrial contaminants off site. Merging property-level flood-risk projections from the First Street Foundation with historical data on former hazardous manufacturing facilities in 6 U.S. cities, we identify more than 6000 relic industrial sites with elevated flood risk over the next 30 years. Exploratory spatial analysis reveals that these sites cluster spatially to create identifiable zones of cumulative impact, within which as many as 560 thousand residents and 229 thousand housing units are currently located. Spatial multilevel modeling further indicates that socially vulnerable groups (i.e. racial minorities, those with lower incomes, and those residing in less autonomous housing) are consistently and disproportionately likely to live in these areas. These findings highlight the need to develop new strategic plans to rethink site-based strategies of remediation and to engage residents of historically marginalized communities in planning efforts as government agencies at all levels work to make their cities more resilient and environmentally just in the age of climate change.
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    Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation
    (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Elliott, James R.; Frickel, Scott
    This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half centuryﾗmost of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processesﾗhazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containmentﾗintersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.