“Although the HHID and resulting study, like all research, remains a work in progress, we believe it also offers a solid, innovative foundation from which others—inside and outside academia—can continue to build. This is so for several key reasons:
“It is historically attentive. Unlike prior research that starts with current sites of concern and then works backward in time to discover what else had operated there in the past, our methods historicizes sample selection as well as data collection by tracing forward, over time, the fate of all sites that once operated in locally hazardous industries.
“It is spatially refined. Unlike prior work on urban-industrial hazards, our method treats parcels (or addresses) as the primary unit of analysis, rather than blocks, block-groups, or census tracts. Yet, it still remains amenable to using data from these sources as a means of analyzing and contextualizing important historical processes of residential churning that have co-occurred with industrial churning.
“It is transportable to other cities. Unlike prior in-depth case studies of a specific area, our method can be readily applied to many cities, providing a middle path between large-scale quantitative studies that track known hazards across the nation as a whole and more fine-grained, site- and neighborhood-specific historical analyses.
“These innovations, we believe, can be leveraged by a wide range of stakeholders to develop and promote a more historically grounded and environmentally attuned understanding of the urban environments we call home. In the academy, these advances can contribute to a new generation or urban studies that links urban and environmental sociologies not only to each other but also to allied fields of environmental history, public health, geography, and planning. Outside the academy, related insights can be used to better inform public and environmental policy at the local, state, and national levels. Such policy can help not only inform residents of risks related to relic hazards in their own neighborhoods but also facilitate bridge-building across communities throughout the nation. Such work is important because, as our research has shown, underlying processes are ubiquitous and ongoing.” (124)
