Award Abstract # 0624159

ABSTRACT

Urbanization is one of the most significant changes in the human condition over the last century. As cities become habitat for the majority of the world's people, new challenges arise. Bringing together diverse groups in relatively compact areas has led to inequities based on class, race, and other social dynamics. Segregation and clustering of people and land use and the uneven distribution of environmental amenities and disamenities mean that some groups will suffer more from living near undesirable land uses, while others groups may enjoy disproportionate benefits from residing near desirable land uses. Unmasking such patterns of inequity and the processes responsible for creating them falls under the broad rubric of environmental justice, a growing field of scholarship to which this project will contribute in new and innovative ways. Through an interdisciplinary, longitudinal, intensive case study of Baltimore, the researchers will identify and explain the spatial and temporal dynamics of environmental equity patterns and processes in a large, post-industrial city that has undergone profound socioeconomic change. The project will employ three new methods: (1) The investigators will combine a longitudinal analysis of the patterns of environmental inequity (outcome equity) and the processes that lead to those patterns (process equity) over the long term, from 1880 to the present, a period of rapid industrialization as well as significant economic and population change. The vast majority of environmental justice studies focus on outcome equity with only a cursory treatment of the processes that create those patterns. A systematic examination of equity patterns and processes over the long term, using proximity to Toxics Release Inventory, heavy manufacturing sites as a disamenity, and parks and greenspace as an amenity, will provide a robust, documented, and accessible dataset that will illuminate the relationships between population characteristics and amenities/disamenities, their changes over time, and the impact of the legacies of past dynamics on present patterns. (2) The investigators project will integrate Geographically Weighted Regression with temporal analysis of equity patterns. This method will answer the fundamental question in environmental justice research of whether environmental equity patterns display spatial and temporal nonstationarity, where the relationship between dependent and independent variables may vary over space and time. (3) Long-term data collection and analysis will allow the team to test if there are global relationships between amenity/disamenity densities that relate to shifts in neighborhood characteristics. The longitudinal dataset also will permit an analysis of temporal lags to test if and when population characteristics change after critical amenity/disamenity thresholds are reached.

In broad terms, findings from this study will strengthen scientific understanding of the dynamic relationships among population, land use, and built form of metropolitan areas. Results from this project will provide key new knowledge and data for urbanization models as well as necessary understanding to support meaningful attempts to mitigate environmental injustice. The data, findings, and educational activities from this study will actively contribute to long-term understanding of environmental justice legacies, discrepancies, and potential levers for remediation. The research will build upon existing research and resources from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) and the Urban Ecology Collaborative (UEC), an expanding network of public and nonprofit partners across seven cities in the northeast U.S. that seek to create healthy urban ecosystems. The project will encourage active stewardship of Baltimore's environment by diverse racial and ethnic groups through the BES's extensive partnerships with public and nonprofit agencies. Dissemination of research results to managers of environmental initiatives will be expedited by these partnerships, and the BES and UEC will incorporate data and results from this study into their respective high-school curricula efforts. Graduate and undergraduate students will be active participants in the project research, workshops, and meetings and will be trained in integrated urban ecology research, a core education and research principle of the participating institutions.

An award resulting from the FY 2006 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.

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