Sze, Julie (Author)
New York University
Ross, Andrew
Edition Details: Advisor: Ross, Andrew
Physical Details: 330 pp.
Language: English
Beginning in the late 1980's and through the 1990's, a number of environmental justice campaigns emerged in response to land use development proposals for noxious facilities in predominantly low-income and minority areas of New York City. These facilities were for sanitary or environmental services, and included: the building of incinerators (medical waste and municipal), sludge and sewage treatment plants, and solid waste transfer stations and power plants on the industrial waterfront as a result of the privatization of residential solid waste management and energy deregulation. I examine the politics of urban development, environment and health through community- based activism in four minority and low-income communities in New York City: Sunset Park and Williamsburg/Greenpoint in Brooklyn, West Harlem in Manhattan and the South Bronx. I look at how and why these specific neighborhoods were home to such a large number of noxious polluting facilities, and the implication of this concentration in terms of environmental health. I argue that the national discourse of the environmental justice movement has been used by New York City activists as a way for low-income minority communities to negotiate their place and identity in the face of urban change. Environmental justice activists emphasized their local and racialized identity in the face of the politics of globalization, municipal retrenchment, privatization and deregulation. This study illuminates the larger social and political meaning of urban environmental justice activism by looking at how city-wide coalitions re-defined the meaning of the local, and by examining how environmental justice organizing operated and was sustained over time, across neighborhoods and in multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalitions, as well as how community organizations and coalitions strategically used science, law and politics. Lastly, I examine how these actors engaged with the politics of community planning and community-based environmental health research and in doing so, proactively engaged the politics of urban development and created new knowledge about health in the urban environment, particularly in response to the air pollution problem and high rates of minority asthma.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 3345. UMI order no. 3105917.
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