Environmental Injustice in the Urban Southwest: A Case Study of Phoenix, Arizona - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 316

hazardous facilities in South Phoenix have been filed on civil rights grounds, and local
environmental justice organizations now frequently deploy the term “environmental rac-
ism” at site protests. 20 Because of their historical disenfranchisement, what people of color
have lacked is the political power to protect neighborhoods against industrial and trans-
portation encroachment. Once industrial zones and transportation corridors are in place,
as they were in Phoenix by the early twentieth century, those with political power will
do little or nothing to alter that built landscape to benefit low-income residents. 36 That
industries seek vacant land adjacent to both transportation corridors and waste disposal
facilities is well documented, insuring that an agglomeration of hazardous sites and other
residentially incompatible land uses will tend to develop around an initial transportation
corridors, unless zoning and planning begin to actively redirect it elsewhere, something
which has not occurred in Phoenix.
The persistence of these environmental burdens, in spite of major changes in federal
regulations, knowledge of toxic hazards, and emergence environmental justice principles,
underline, with only limited exceptions,* an ongoing official disregard for this region of
the city. In the absence of a managerial focus on these environmentally and economically
distressed regions, there is no indication that the trends of growing environmental
burdens, increasing poverty, and increasing percentage of Latinos in high-hazard areas
will be arrested anytime soon. In the absence of federal resources and programs targeting
environmental restoration in low-income neighborhoods, urban planners, policy makers,
and citizens have restricted options. As Harvey notes, 37 in cities today, “concerns for
environmental justice (if they exist at all), are kept strictly subservient to concerns for
economic efficiency, continuous growth, and capital accumulation.” Harvey's observation
is an apt description of the developmental process described here. In Phoenix there has
been strong support for industrial expansion and commercial development projects that
promise enhanced tax revenues, suburban growth, and private accumulation, irrespec-
tive of development's effects on environmental and social conditions in low-income and
minority neighborhoods.
Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was provided by the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term
Ecological Research (CAP-LTER) program, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State
University, Tempe, Arizona.
References
1. Bolin, B., E. Matranga, E. Hackett, E. Sadalla, D. Pijawka, D. Brewer, and D. Sicotte,
Environmental equity in a Sunbelt city: The spatial distribution of toxic hazards in Phoenix,
Arizona, Environmental Hazards 2(1): 11-24, 2000.
2. See Bullard, R., Dumping in Dixie (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990).
* cf. A Multi-media Toxic Hazard Reduction Program .