From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Tracing the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, sociologist Diane Sicotte uncovers how only a few communities came to host many types of polluting or waste disposal land uses. What she finds reveals the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and inequality.

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

7 Toward a “Rustbelt” Theory of U.S. Environmental Inequality
 

Appendix

Notes

Index

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