Environmental Roots of Urban Inequality

My primary research investigates the formation and development of racial-environmental inequality in cities, linking spatial, quantitative, and computational and machine learning methods to produce novel longitudinal data. My dissertation presents the first analysis of urban environmental inequality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, corresponding to the initial formation of neighborhood-scale racial segregation. This research is enabled by historical social-environmental data extraction techniques using a variety of computational methods (see this article on machine learning approaches to analyzing archival data). In a case study of the Providence, RI, area, I find that environmental inequality shifted from a class-based phenomenon to one structured primarily by race and ethnicity, as residential segregation began to solidify at the neighborhood level at the turn of the 20th century (see this article). My dissertation extends this research to a comparative sample of US cities, and finds that racialization of environmental inequality emerged alongside and in relation to the formation of segregated and unequal neighborhoods. Supported by a research award from the National Science Foundation Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons project, I am extending this work to a broad census of U.S. urban energy production during the height of industrialization and urbanization in the early 20th century.

Image source: Newham Photos.