What is environmental racism for? Place-based harm and relational development

Abstract

This paper argues that observed environmental racisms are instrumental to the development of white places. Rather than limiting the view of environmental harms to Black communities as spatial violence enacted via white NIMBYism, we argue that such spoilage is what produces white places. We call this process ‘creative extraction,’ the taking of resources from Black places to invest in white places. Those resources range from regressive sales tax revenues to water and sewer infrastructure to land devalued through waste disposal. Creative extraction involves seemingly unconnected actors reinforcing mutual interest in white spatial control and placemaking. Drawing on our case study of Montgomery County, Texas, we show how development, infrastructure, and environmental harm are intimately linked through legal and political contestation, and resource redistribution. We focus on Texas’ mechanism for creating new water infrastructure through ‘Municipal Utility Districts’ to illustrate how apolicy can create literal and symbolic boundaries to enable overdevelopment and underdevelopment. Our proposed vantage point on the relationship between communities can improve future research on both environmental racism and ‘the city’.

Keywords:

• Environmental racism
• Black towns
• relational development
• underdevelopment
• water infrastructure

Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Notes on contributors

Louise Seamster

Louise Seamster is an assistant professor of Sociology and African American Studies at theUniversity of Iowa. Her research focuses on race and political economy, particularly racialgovernance, urban development, and debt.

Danielle Purifoy

Danielle Purifoy is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Her research traces the racial politics of development and environmental inequity in Black communities.