What was the role of environmental risk in the early formation of neighborhood-level segregation?

Keywords: environmental risk, fossil fuels, industrial development, segregation, urban change
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The late 19th and early 20th centuries are uncharted territory for research on urban environmental inequality: Most research on the social stratification of environmental risk is left-censored to the 1970s, coinciding with the formation of the regulatory and monitoring functions of the environmental state. To measure urban environmental inequality at the turn of the 20th century, I use a computational pipeline (Tollefson et al, 2021) to identify and geolocate sites related to early fossil fuel production in US cities. These sites are paired with geolocated historic census data to measure the social stratification of environmental risk in US cities in two waves - 1880 and 1930 - that correspond to the period in which urban racial segregation scaled up from a street-level to a neighborhood-level phenomenon. In this presentation, I will track the changing scale of environmental inequality in San Francisco and Oakland, using the Providence, RI area as a comparative case (Frickel and Tollefson, 2022). Results from Providence indicate that in 1880, environmental risks associated with urban energy infrastructure fell most heavily on working-class immigrants; by 1930, those risks disproportionately affected the city’s small population of African American and Latinx residents. Expanding this study to the SF Bay Area will make room for important comparisons across geographic region, sociodemographic settlement history, and industrial context.