Infrastructures
and Relationships in Urban
Environmental Protection: A Tale of Two Cities
David N. Pellow, Allan Schnaiberg,
and Adam S. Weinberg
Abstract
Many environmental protection activities require substantial physical
infrastructure to accomplish their goals. For many decades, urban
areas have routinely operated a variety of waste management and
water purification plants, which have had pronounced physical presence
in these communities. Ironically, these two examples are quite different
in terms of the nature of their built components: waste disposal
sites (e.g. urban landfills) have been placed in remote sites to
protect urban environments (while sometimes polluting rural environments).
In contrast, urban water treatment plants have often been prominent
features of the urban landscape, becoming municipal "showpieces",
designed to inspire faith in the capacity of the community to clean
up polluted water and produce clean drinking water. We note that
both of these infrastructure forms have been characterized as locally
unwanted land uses (LULUs) that are often sited in or near politically
disempowered communities.
Interestingly, the infrastructure for recycling falls somewhere
between the examples of landfill operations and water purification.
On the one hand, recycling involves some "dirty work", and thus
recycling operations are often kept out of prime office/factory
areas, for reasons of appearance (and economics). Yet on the other
hand, recycling has also become a modern municipal "showpiece",
since it is touted as a progressive or even a sustainable form of
modern production designed to "save resources." In this paper we
contrast two extreme examples of the labor process and ecological
outcomes of urban recycling: Chicago's "BlueBag" program and Evanston's
social-ecological recycling center. In addition to their differing
degrees of accessibility to our research, these two facilities represent
dramatically different approaches to recycling along social, economic
and political measures. Only the Evanston program shows any semblance
of what might eventually become a sustainable form of production,
while the Blue Bag's social, ecological and economic costs are exorbitant.
These findings have implications for policy-making around urban
planning, community development, urban poverty, and environmental
protection.
David N. Pellow,Department of Sociology,
Northwestern University Allan Schnaiberg, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University Adam S. Weinberg, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Colgage University
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