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. This research is enabled by historical data extraction using a variety of computational methods (see this article on machine learning approaches to analyzing archival data). I use these original data to conduct the first comparative analysis of urban environmental inequality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see this article in Social Forces), finding that the racialization of environmental inequality emerged alongside and in relation to the initial formation of segregated and unequal neighborhoods. This research further suggests new directions to embed urban sociology within a social-environmental perspective.

Image source: Newham Photos.