Over the course of the twentieth-century, the primary path toward the ‘good life’ in the United States involved the purchase of a single family home in the suburbs, which promised financial security, social independence and access to a healthy environmental and verdant greens-pace. But the system that developed was also built on racial exclusion and unsustainable and environmentally destructive levels of resource consumption. An examination of the spaces of the single-family home shows the challenges in creating a just and sustainable good life, as the social meaning and material realities of the system become intimately tied together.

Recenserat verk/The reviewed work:

Rector, Josiah (2022). Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit. [Chapel Hill]: University of North Carolina Press.

ISBN: 978-1-4696-6576-4, 978-1-4696-6575-7, 978-1-4696-6577-1, 979-8-8908-5940-2

As scholars from the fields of history, anthropology and animal studies, as well as landscape planning and management, we discuss various forms of urban and urbanising infrastructures and their political entanglements. Questioning and illuminating how various actors and their practices build and shape urban environments, we address topics ranging from the black soldier fly - used as biotechnological infrastructure to manage waste - to other nonhumans, like macaques -developing and negotiating their own urbanisms; from plants and community gardens - used as green infrastructures to provide shade and food, and social infrastructures to endure and resist - to the transportation infrastructures that humans have built to both segregate and divide, as well as to live and unite. In case studies situated across the world, we present different conceptualisations of infrastructures as complex human-nonhuman co-productions that shape the modern city.

Recenserat verk/The reviewed work:

Elizabeth Grennan Browning. Nature's Laboratory: Environmental Thought and Labor Radicalism in Chicago, 1886–1937. [Baltimore]: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.

ISBN 978-1-4214-4521-2.

Some of America's most severe environmental inequalities occur in its cities. This was especially the case in the decades immediately following World War Two, when white flight, deindustrialization and disinvestment, urban renewal and highway construction led a massive increase in particular types of urban environmental issues, especially in the country's older industrial cities. In response, city residents organized a series of highly local, grassroots but robust movements to address immediate harms but also create more just and livable cities. This chapter tells the story of that activism, while also placing it within the context of the longer history of urban environmental activism in the United States, the environmental movement and the emergence of environmental justice activism in the 1980s.

This article explores the connections between racial inequality and fossil fuel-intensive sprawl in the post-civil rights metropolitan landscape, through a case study of the Blackjack housing controversy. In 1970, a local religious group tried to build a low-income housing project in Blackjack, Missouri, a bedroom community four miles northwest of the city of St. Louis. Local residents opposed to the project argued that public housing would bring the crime, poverty, and social disorder of the city to the suburbs. Although they were forced to strip their opposition of overtly racist language, these White suburbanites were part of a nation-wide project to racialize, and thus delegitimize, the extension of urban form into American suburbs, including public housing and public transportation. When these efforts failed, as they did in Black Jack, inner-ring suburbs began to desegregate, and in response, Whites again fled, further out, to second-ring suburbs and exurbs. This process, which has played out across American cities from the 1960s until the present day, has had devastating consequences for racial and economic inequality, but also on the global climate. Millions of White Americans, driven by their desire to maintain metropolitan racial segregation, have become hostile to the forms of urban infrastructure that would create less carbon-intensive cities, recreating racist, auto-intensive sprawl farther out into the countryside.

By the late 19th century, American cities like Chicago and New York were marvels of the industrializing world. The shock urbanization of the previous quarter century, however, brought on a host of environmental problems. Skies were acrid with coal smoke, and streams ran fetid with raw sewage. Disease outbreaks were as common as parks and green space was rare. In response to these hazards, particular groups of urban residents responded to them with a series of activist movements to reform public and private policies and practices, from the 1890s until the end of the 20th century. Those environmental burdens were never felt equally, with the working class, poor, immigrants, and minorities bearing an overwhelming share of the city’s toxic load. By the 1930s, many of the Progressive era reform efforts were finally bearing fruit. Air pollution was regulated, access to clean water improved, and even America’s smallest cities built robust networks of urban parks. But despite this invigoration of the public sphere, after World War II, for many the solution to the challenges of a dense modern city was a private choice: suburbanization. Rather than continue to work to reform and reimagine the city, they chose to leave it, retreating to the verdant (and pollution free) greenfields at the city’s edge. These moves, encouraged and subsidized by local and federal policies, provided healthier environments for the mostly white, middle-class suburbanites, but created a new set of environmental problems for the poor, working-class, and minority residents they left behind. Drained of resources and capital, cities struggled to maintain aging infrastructure and regulate remaining industry and then exacerbated problems with destructive urban renewal and highway construction projects. These remaining urban residents responded with a dynamic series of activist movements that emerged out of the social and community activism of the 1960s and presaged the contemporary environmental justice movement.