Urban environments and segregated mobility in the early 20th century

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 16: Culture, Identity, and Environmental Meaning

Abstract

Sociologists increasingly recognize the role of socioenvironmental processes in neighborhood formation. Despite accumulating evidence linking environmental context and social outcomes, sociologists have limited understanding of the role of urban environments in local processes of neighborhood segregation in the early 20th century. Building on a growing body of work on the social-environmental dimensions of urbanization, this paper analyzes the relationship between environmentally hazardous neighborhood contexts, social mobility, and residential migration in San Francisco and Oakland, CA, between 1930 and 1940, through an approach linking individual-level census microdata with original information on early 20th century industrial geography. Results suggest that environmentally hazardous neighborhood contexts - specifically, the local accumulation of former industrial land uses - shape the probability that individuals would make at least one residential move between 1930 and 1940, and that this effect is significantly differentiated by race. Second, this paper identifies a consistent pattern of segregated social mobility conditioned on exposure to active, large-scale sources of air, water, and soil pollution, such that environmentally hazardous residential contexts interact with racialized patterns of social vulnerability to magnify racial inequalities in socioeconomic outcomes. Together, results suggest that historical patterns of racialized social and residential mobility developed in relation to the iterative transformation of urban built environments. These findings point to a broader intervention in theories of urban inequality formation and the formation of segregated neighborhoods - joining emerging research on the racialization of environmental inequality in the early 20th century with theories of neighborhood formation - and suggest specific mechanisms by which socioenvironmental relations may have contributed to early 20th century neighbohrood formation. By joining environmental sociology’s concern with environmental hazards to demography and urban sociology's focus on neighborhood formation, residential context, and segregated urban mobility, this paper seeks to deepen sociological understanding of the historical, longitudinal, and multi-scalar processes linking socioenvironmental relations and urbanization.

Author

• Jonathan Tollefson, University of Chicago