How Many Brownfields Are There? Building an Industrial Legacy Database

Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation

“…By risk containment, we refer broadly to the patchwork of environmental regulatory practices that restrict and direct public information about hazardous industrial processes to particular, often visibly contaminated parcels in ways that downplay broader, less visible systemic risks that, if known, would raise public concern, threaten local exchange values, and impede growth machines' profitable reuse of urban lands (Leigh and Coffin 2000). In this way, risk containment operates as a broad, political strategy for acknowledging the dangers of hazardous waste on particular sites while still allowing the core processes of socioenvironmental succession that contaminate such sites to continue, often behind a tangle of local, state, and federal regulations that do more to complicate and thwart civic input than invite and encourage it.…”

Characteristics and land use of contaminated brownfield properties in voluntary cleanup agreement programs

“…''The history of industrialization and urbanization is closely connected with the nation's central cities and has left them a legacy of environmentally contaminated sites'' (Leigh and Coffin, 2000). ''There are hundreds of thousands of brownfields in the US, mostly located in former industrial districts in cities, but many also found in older suburbs and small towns'' (Greenberg et al, 2001).…”

“…Many of the former industrial sites that are now contaminated brownfield sites experienced their peak levels of production in the decades before modern environmental laws were established to control the release or disposal of toxic inputs and byproducts of industrial activities. ''Because knowledge about environmental contamination associated with industrialization was lacking in the early decades of industrialization, those who prospered from previous urban economic growth did so at the expense of those who subsequently inhabited central cities'' (Leigh and Coffin, 2000). In the USA, The Resources Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1978 and the Comprehensive Environmental Response and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 put in place the beginnings of a powerful command and control regulatory scheme to protect against the creation of new contaminated land.…”

Environmental Dimensions of Urban Change: Uncovering Relict Industrial Waste Sites and Subsequent Land Use Conversions in Portland and New Orleans

“…It is likely that such processes played out largely unimpeded by federal and state regulations during the early post‐war period (1950s through the 1970s), and may (or may not) have slowed—not disappeared—with more recent federal and state regulations governing disposal of hazardous waste and more recent regulations that seek to identify, classify, and redevelop existing brownfields (Alberini et al, 2004; Yount, 2003). Moreover, the political economy of risk containment can generate interest among growth machine actors to limit information about relict industrial wastes that threaten local exchange values associated with urban renewal (Leigh & Coffin, 2000). Perhaps not surprisingly, the same dynamics that operate to hide historically accumulated hazards have also hampered research on relict industrial waste, which we discuss below.…”