Greening the color line: historicizing water infrastructure redevelopment and environmental justice in the St. Louis metropolitan region

ABSTRACT

In 2011 the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District developed a geographically bifurcated gray and green approach addressing aging sanitary and stormwater infrastructure in the region. This approach maps tightly to the region’s persistent patterns of racial segregation allocating green infrastructure to areas of North St. Louis which is majority Black and where significant disinvestment has taken place. While green infrastructure often is hailed as a more equitable way to address urban flooding, a crucial question remains as to how urban greening strategies grapple with persistent urban inequities. This article examines the relationship between geographically uneven infrastructural investments and persistent urban inequities. Drawing on six months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork on St. Louis’s wastewater redevelopment project, I argue that racial capitalism must be incorporated as a framework through which to analyze the equity dimensions of infrastructure redevelopment projects. I found that rather than contend with path dependencies of structural racism, St. Louis’s approach to wastewater redevelopment relies on geographies of racial capitalism to save costs, subjecting marginalized communities to cost-saving approaches with no measures or plans to measure benefits beyond stormwater retention.

KEYWORDS:

• green infrastructure
• equity
• racial capitalism
• environmental justice
• stormwater infrastructure

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and three anonymous referees for their helpful and insightful comments on this article. I would also like to thank Melissa Gilbert, Hamil Pearsall, Elizabeth Riedman, and Dirk Kinsey for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Finally, I thank Rob Call for assistance with GIS and general support during the research and writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Sarah Heck

Sarah Heck is a doctoral candidate in the department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University.