From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

By Diane Sicotte

SERIES: Nature, Society, and Culture

Rutgers University Press

Like many industrialized regions, the Philadelphia metro area contains pockets of environmental degradation: neighborhoods littered with abandoned waste sites, polluting factories, and smoke-belching incinerators. However, other neighborhoods within and around the city are relatively pristine. This eye-opening book reveals that such environmental inequalities did not occur by chance, but were instead the result of specific policy decisions that served to exacerbate endemic classism and racism.

From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Sociologist Diane Sicotte digs deep into the city’s past as a titan of American manufacturing to trace how only a few communities came to host nearly all of the area’s polluting and waste disposal land uses. By examining the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, she not only dissects what went wrong in Philadelphia but also identifies lessons for environmental justice activism today.

Sicotte’s research tallies both the environmental and social costs of industrial pollution, exposing the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and economic inequality. From Workshop to Waste Magnet is a compelling read for anyone concerned with the health of America’s cities and the people who live in them.

Strong, innovative, and timely, From Workshop to Waste Magnet beautifully demonstrates the necessity of understanding the dynamism of environmental inequality struggles. A truly important and ambitious book. David N. Pellow, University of California, Santa Barbara

From Workshop to Waste Magnet provides a rich analysis of how structures of class power and white privilege are the root causes of environmental inequality in Philadelphia. A critically important must-read for all those concerned with environmental justice. Daniel Faber, Northeastern University

A richly layered study of hazardous waste and its many discontents … Sicotte's book offers a model multicausal analysis of environmental burdening. At one level, she shows that environmental burdens are spread across Philadelphia in ways that might encourage activists, business leaders, and politicians to work together and address common problems. At another level, she challenges scholars to refine their analyses of environmental justice in ways that highlight the intersection of class, ethnicity, and race. It is a timely and rewarding book. H-Pennsylvania

Booming postindustrial neighborhoods often overlook polluted past' by Patrick Sisson Curbed

Justice in Chester' documentary, WITF Harrisburg (PBS affiliate), interview with Diane Sicotte Justice in Chester

DIANE SICOTTE is an associate professor of sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on environmental justice.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Maps

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Measuring Environmental Inequalities in the Philadelphia Area in 2010

2 Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality

3 The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia

4 Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969

5 From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Burdening After 1970

6 Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region