James R. Elliott

The Historical Nature of Cities A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation

Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containing geospatial and organizational information on more than 2,800 hazardous manufacturing sites operating between 1956 and 2006 in Portland, Oregon. We pair these site data with historical data from the U.S. population census and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to examine the historical accumulation of hazardous parcels in relation to changing patterns of industrial land use, neighborhood composition, new residential development, and environmental regulation. Results indicate that historical accumulation of hazardous sites is scaling up in ways that exhibit little regard for shifting neighborhood demographics or existing regulatory policies as sites merge into larger, more contiguous industrialized areas of historically generated hazards, creating the environmental conditions of urban risk society.

Tracking Industrial Land Use Conversions: A New Approach for Studying Relict Waste and Urban Development

Research on urban development and environmental hazards has focused attention on problems associated with current industrial facilities, derelict industrial brownfields, and government-listed hazardous waste sites. Yet we continue to know very little about environmental contaminants remaining on past industrial sites that have since converted to other uses. This article develops a methodology for examining the prevalence of such sites and their historical conversion and then presents an illustrative case study of this methodology for New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1955 to 2006. Contrary to expectations, results show that most sites occupied by polluting industries in the past have since converted to other uses and that this conversion is most common in predominantly White neighborhoods. These findings extend and complicate extant research on urban industrial hazards and environmental justice, calling attention to the potential accumulation of historically generated contaminants not just in identifiable brownfields and lingering industrial corridors but also in neighborhoods throughout older cities.

Introduction: Social Organization of Demographic Responses to Disaster: Studying Population—Environment Interactions in the Case of Hurricane Katrina

This article introduces a special issue of Organization & Environment that uses the historic case of Hurricane Katrina to investigate the social organization of demographic responses to disaster. It begins by establishing natural disasters as a dramatic form of human interaction with the environment. It then goes on to advance a novel framework for understanding the different population movements triggered by such interaction in the context of broader organizational failures. These population movements include unequal resettlement of the disaster zone by former residents, prolonged displacement in other locales, and arrival of a new recovery labor force perceived as socially different from formerly established populations. Respective articles on the social organization of these different population movements are previewed and connections with allied subfields are discussed.

Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation.

This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half century—most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes—hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—intersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.

Developing spatial inequalities in carbon appropriation: A sociological analysis of changing local emissions across the United States

This study examines an overlooked dynamic in sociological research on greenhouse gas emissions: how local areas appropriate the global carbon cycle for use and exchange purposes as they develop. Drawing on theories of place and space, we hypothesize that development differentially drives and spatially decouples use- and exchange-oriented emissions at the local level. To test our hypotheses, we integrate longitudinal, county-level data on residential and industrial emissions from the Vulcan Project with demographic, economic and environmental data from the U.S. Census Bureau and National Land Change Database. Results from spatial regression models with two-way fixed-effects indicate that alongside innovations and efficiencies capable of reducing environmentally harmful effects of development comes a spatial disarticulation between carbon-intensive production and consumption within as well as across societies. Implications for existing theory, methods and policy are discussed.

Race, Place, and Unsolicited Job Leads How the Ethnoracial Structure of Local Labor Markets Shapes Employment Opportunities

Does the ethnoracial composition of local labor markets influence informal regulation of employment opportunities? To address this question, we link Census data on racial composition with survey data on unsolicited job leads in the 23 largest U.S. metro areas. The aim is twofold: (1) to operationalize three distinct conceptualizations of ethnoracial composition (general diversity, co-ethnic presence, and particularistic representation), and (2) to examine the influence of each at two distinct levels of local labor markets (the metropolis as a whole and occupational segments within each respective metropolis). Logistic regression results reveal that the odds of receiving unsolicited job leads do not vary by metro-level composition, but they do increase significantly with shares of white workers in local occupational segments. These results suggest that racial preference and privilege scale up to influence how employment opportunities are socially regulated in and across local occupational fields.

Letter from the Editors of Sociological Perspectives

University of Oregon, where the journal first began as the Pacific Sociological Review in 1958. While much has changed during the intervening years, the journal’s basic mission has not. As the new Co-Editors, and with the help of new Managing Editor Jessica Schultz, we will continue the journal’s tradition of encouraging submissions—empirical, theoretical, or both—that are written to appeal to a wide range of sociologists and that make a clear and distinct contribution to the discipline, regardless of subfield. In assuming these duties, we would like to thank members of the incoming editorial board for joining us in this collective pursuit. We also thank the outgoing editorial team of Charles Powers, Marilyn Fernandez, and Kay Boissicat for their generous assistance in helping us throughout the journal’s transition to Eugene and for continuing to answer questions we didn’t even know we had. With regard to content, we began handling new submissions in July of this year and expect the first set of articles that we accept for publication to appear in the third issue of Volume 55. In the meantime, the contents of this issue and the next will consist of articles processed by the outgoing editorial team at Santa Clara University. Below, they introduce the articles in this issue.

Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change: Houston, Flooding, and the Case of Federal Buyouts:

This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over recent decades. Drawing on data from Houston, Texas, we locate where these buyout zones have emerged and how their social ecologies have changed in ways that feed back to influence the number of local buyouts that occur. Results indicate that Houston’s buyout zones have an identifiable social ecology that has shifted over time, primarily from white to Hispanic working-class settlement as the city has grown and become more racially and ethnically diverse. Results also show that the extent to which this racial succession has occurred powerfully predicts subsequent numbers of buyouts in the area. Implications for developing an enhanced urban ecology for the twenty-first century are discussed.

Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities

Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities reads almost like a detective story. And as with all good mysteries, the authors—sociologists Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott—open with a series of provocative and unanswered questions. How many former hazardous industrial sites—often home to what they refer to as “relic wastes”—exist in the urban areas of the United States? Given the lack of a robust inventory of such former sites and the loose or non-existent regulation many of them operated under, how can residents and community leaders understand the scope of hazardous industrial siting over time and across place? Which populations are most exposed to these residual or lingering wastes? How do formerly toxic sites become lost or concealed as they are eventually replaced by other types of land uses?

Place, Space, and Racially Unequal Exposures to Pollution at Home and Work:

Research on racial inequalities in exposure to industrial pollution in U.S. metropolitan areas typically focuses on places of residence, ignoring the fact that most people work and commute to other areas to do so. To investigate what these daily commutes mean for understanding place- and space-based disparities in exposure, we merge federally compiled data on commuting and industrial air pollution with sociodemographic data on the home and work tracts of employed adults in Houston, Texas. Results from descriptive analyses and spatial regression models yield several insights often presumed but heretofore undemonstrated in prior research: (1) generally, people work in more toxic areas than they reside; (2) blacks and Latinos work as well as reside in more toxic areas than whites; and (3) unequal spatial relations via commuting powerfully predict a place’s level of toxic air pollution, net of other factors, including racial composition. Implications for current and future research are discussed.