1285 - ASA Rose Series. Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018) by Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott

Session Submission Type: Author Meets Critics Session

Description

In Sites Unseen, sociologists Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott uncover the hidden histories of former sites of industrial manufacturing to show how they are regularly produced and reincorporated into urban landscapes with limited or no regulatory oversight. By revealing this legacy of our industrial past, Sites Unseen spotlights how city-making has become an ongoing process of social and environmental transformation and risk containment.
To demonstrate these dynamics, Frickel and Elliott investigate four very different cities—New Orleans, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon. Using original data assembled and mapped for thousands of former manufacturers’ locations dating back to the 1950s, they find that more than 90 percent of such sites have now been converted to urban amenities such as parks, homes, and storefronts with almost no environmental review.
A wide-ranging synthesis of urban and environmental scholarship, Sites Unseen shows that creating sustainable cities requires deep engagement with industrial history as well as with the social and regulatory processes that continue to remake urban areas through time. In addition to its contribution to environmental and urban sociology, the book advances the social science turn toward artifacts and materiality as dynamic, joining contemporary geography of understanding settlement as a conjoined product of social organization and the natural world.

Sub Unit

• Author Meets Critics

Session Organizer

• Leslie S. Paik, City University of New York-City College

Authors

• Scott Frickel, Brown University

• James R. Elliott, Rice University

Critics

• Christopher Mele, State University of New York-Buffalo

• Jeremy Pais, University of Connecticut

• Lori Peek, University of Colorado-Boulder

• David Pellow, University of California-Santa Barbara