City Under Steam: Toxic Facilities as a Site of Negotiation and Contestation

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Pollution, Materials, and Metabolic Rift

Abstract

This paper discusses how community leaders in Chester, Pennsylvania a community that is predominantly Black and bankrupt navigates their relationship with the nation’s largest incinerator. The current literature on social movements against environmental racism often highlights opposition or ignorance to toxic facilities. This paper expands on this work by analyzing how community leaders in Chester, who serve as racial middlemen between the predominantly Black space and white capital, oppose, support, and negotiate the presence of an incinerator in the community. This project broadly asks, 1) How does Chester’s stigmatization shape the way community leaders navigate the presence of the incinerator? 2) How does this navigation differ across actors and do they shift across time and space? 3) How does this navigation of community leader’s shape the town’s relationship with the incinerator? Decades of structural racism from redlining to white flight to disinvestment have created a situation in which Chester is a racially and economically stigmatized places. This reality has only been worsened by recent bankruptcy. This stigma makes it harder for the town to attract external economic investment. In that space, the incinerator, a facility which is often classified as a LULU (Locally Undesirable Land Use) that harms local health becomes a site of both contestation and negotiation over the town’s present and future political economy. It serves as a focal point for this deliberation both externally (between the town and the greater regional/global economy) and internally (between community leaders in the town).

Author

• Major Eason, Harvard University