Intersections of Race, Waste, and Space in the Production of Environmental Injustice

• In Event: 2441 - Environment, Oppressions, and Justice II

Abstract

Scholars have demonstrated how gentrification and urban change produce new social and economic inequalities. “Green gentrification” is proposed as a term referring to the ways these inequalities increasingly take place through discourses of nature and sustainability. This paper examines urban environmental changes in Bayview-Hunters Point, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of San Francisco. Based on ten years of engaged fieldwork, I show how long-time Black Bayview-Hunters Point residents live with, suffer the health consequences of, and protest the dusts of market-based redevelopment. Their experiences reveal how gentrification does not only produce social and economic inequalities, but can produce distinct forms of environmental injustice. This paper brings critical spatial theory and the “new materialisms” literature into conversation with environmental sociology, and specifically with scholarship on environmental justice. I contribute to an “intersectional environmental justice” framework (Malin and Ryder 2018) by considering the interlocking nature of race, waste, and space in the production of environmental injustices.

Author

• Lindsey Dillon, UC Santa Cruz