Material features and infrastructures: Industrial, civil infrastructure, and residential activities in the same places at different historical periods, which including cross-temporal interactions mediated by persistent pollutants.
The authors' umbrella concept for all of this is “socioenvironmental succession”: the cumulative effects of industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—a concept aiming to better undersand urban landscapes of toxic exposure by thinking about the long-term, intertwining processes of the production of hazardous contamination of urban sites, changes in use of urban sites and neighborhoods, and multidimensional efforts to achieve the political containment of perceived risks arising from this contamination.
I find this source most useful as a concrete example of the application of methods of historical geography (at least that’s how I would describe it) to the study of toxic places. Its appendix provides a step-by-step guide to building a “historically hidden industrial database” – while this method is tailored to a specific kind of place (urban sites) and toxicity (localized hazardous waste), it might well be adapted to thinking in historical geospatial terms about other forms of place and toxicity that our projects are engaging.
“The narrative is not populated with heroes and villains, and our conclusions are not rendered with absolute clarity. Instead, the story is about impersonal processes and institutions, and the conclusions we draw are complicated by nuance and ambiguity. The results do not refute existing accounts, but they can sit uneasily on the shelf next to them and may raise discomfiting implications that can be emotionally and ideologically difficult to reconcile, especially for those who are committed to a particular narrative arc and ending.” (104)
