Methods of historical geography can provide a means of thinking about toxic places as sites of intertemporal relations shaped by historically specific political decisions as well as long-term, dynamic patterns of land use.
“In brief, we argue that local urban change is driven by three fundamental processes: industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment. Industrial churning refers to ongoing temporal and spatial changes in a city’s active hazardous manufacturing facilities as those facilities go in and out of business or move from one location to another. Over time, these movements in time and space generate aggregate patterns of current and former industrial land uses that are specific to each city, for example, clustering along a river that cuts through a downtown or spreading more diffusely toward a city’s outskirts, or both. By tracing these patterns over time and focusing on sectors known to release hazardous wastes to local lands, we can learn a lot about how, when, and where industrial practices are successively transforming urban environments.
“Residential churning is similar to industrial churning, except it refers to human groups rather than industrial facilities….
“Risk containment refers to the tendency of government agencies to selectively manage risks associated with these lingering, or relic, industrial wastes in ways that are politically expedient….
“Bringing these three processes together in Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Portland allows us to watch them unfold over time and to see how they entwine and scale up spatially to produce cumulatively significant changes in local environments. Our contention is that for decades, the unprecedented changes wrought by the gradual but ongoing contamination of urban lands by industrial hazardous waste is but one manifestation of a more general process of urban-ecological transformation we call socioenvironmental succession.” (6-7)
