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

Abstract

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--most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes--hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment--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.

Bringing urban space back in: A multilevel analysis of environmental inequality in Germany

“…This process 'prevented' the black population from living in areas of newly emerging facilities and led to the conclusion that facilities were not sited selectively in black neighbourhoods between 1970 and 1990. Elliott and Frickel (2015) support this implication in a historical analysis of hazardous industrial sites in four U.S. cities, finding a persisting geographical accumulation of industrial sites around the urban core. Moreover, they conclude that the extent of environmental inequality diminished over time due to the increasing churning of white middle-class households into those central areas, where minorities have been overrepresented so far.…”

Human and biophysical legacies shape contemporary urban forests: A literature synthesis

“…Other geographers have written about spatio-temporal representation in geographic information systems (Couclelis, 1999) and measurement theories of time geography (Miller, 2005). In environmental sociology, Elliot and Frickel (2015) situated patterns of urban hazardous industrial sites in place through long-term iterative interactions between social and biophysical phenomena.…”

The Successive Nature of City Parks: Making and Remaking Unequal access over Time

“…These tract‐level data come from the U.S. Census Bureau's decennial population censuses from 1950 to 2010, which are compiled and made publicly available by the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). For all census years, we standardize data to constant 1950 tract boundaries, which means that we observe the same, constant spatial units over time for all analyses — an approach consistent with prior research on socioenvironmental succession (Elliott and Frickel , ). For this standardization, we utilized a spatial weighting method with visual inspection.…”

“…Rather, it views city parks more collectively and focuses on their ongoing accumulation through successive waves of urbanization characterized by ongoing intersections of local social and environmental change. Recent efforts to recast urbanization in this light are now breathing new life into the Chicago School's old concept of ecological succession (Elliott and Frickel , ; Freudenberg ; Rudel ). The aim of these efforts is not to depict the growth and change of cities as somehow “natural.” Instead, it is to return to the fundamental point that urbanization at the local level is a cumulative process of ongoing territorial transformation.…”

“…Recent efforts to revive this perspective emphasize not only the cumulative nature of these dynamics but how, in their unfolding, they entwine social and environmental systems at the local level. In this vein, Elliott and Frickel (, ) have advanced a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession that includes three processes of local, ongoing interaction: land‐based environmental change that accumulates and spreads through cities over time; residential churning that brings different groups in and out of relative proximity to these cumulative land‐based changes; and municipal governance that both engages and intercedes in both processes, often with limited resources.…”