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Why is it important?
Overall, results indicate that now as in the past people generally use commuting to distance their residences from more polluted areas of employment. No matter how much the American city has changed over the past century, this fact seems relatively constant. Results also confirm that this tendency does not suppress or otherwise undo persistent racial injustices. Blacks and Latinos not only tend to reside in more toxic areas than whites reside, they also tend to work in more toxic areas than whites work. This double disadvantage holds true even after statistically controlling for other factors, including the relative presence of local manufacturing jobs. Consequently, many racial and ethnic minorities experience even higher levels of harmful pollution than commonly documented in prior, residence-only research. This pattern not only indicates elevated health risks; it also implies that residential segregation and related housing inequalities are not the only social drivers of racially unequal exposures to toxic industrial pollution. Something more hegemonic, or systemic, is also at work, as prior qualitative research on occupational health has suggested but not fully demonstrated. In addition, results also indicate that how areas are spatially connected to and separated from the rest of the metropolis via commuting powerfully predicts their local toxicity levels, even after controlling for the number of local users as well as their racial and class compositions. Specifically, findings indicate that the more an area’s spatial connection exceeds its spatial separation, the more toxic its air from industrial sources. Place-based inequalities in industrial pollution, in other words, are spatially dynamic. This dynamism occurs as millions of people commute daily in ways that both reflect and sustain today’s highly segregated metropolitan landscapes.
Perspectives
These findings, we think, have important implications for how we conceptualize and study inequalities in urban-industrial pollution going forward. With regard to racial inequalities in exposure, researchers have spent a great deal of effort determining which came first in more polluted areas, hazardous facilities or minority residents (e.g. Mohai and Saha 2015). While this line of investigation remains invaluable, our findings underscore the point that people do not just move by changing residences; they also move during the course of their daily lives. How this mobility occurs significantly predicts local pollution levels in ways that, until now, have largely escaped rigorous attention despite clues long tucked within classic models of urban sociology. Following these clues encourages us to extend analyses beyond the segregation of places to develop more dynamic conceptualizations of how such segregation is experienced and reproduced by daily mobilities. From this vantage point, more polluted areas are not just produced by powerful industrial and political interests; they are also maintained by daily flows that reproduce the spaces in which these places are embedded. As both classic and contemporary urban theory reminds us, these bottom-up dynamics play a significant role in how different areas develop and operate in relation to one another. As a result, the most and least polluted places in metropolitan regions are not separate and unequal. They are connected and unequal. The corollary is that not all minority neighborhoods are similarly polluted. Those that are more extensively tied to the rest of the metropolitan area are the ones that tend to be most toxic. Social and spatial isolation, in other words, is not the problem in these areas. Daily connection and separation is.
James Elliott
Rice University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Place, Space, and Racially Unequal Exposures to Pollution at Home and Work, Social Currents, April 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2329496517704873.
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