Not all pollution was distributed equally in a dynamic urban landscape. Using techniques to examine skewed riskscapes and socioeconomic urban geographies provided a foundation for future research on the connections among environmental health hazard sources, socially vulnerable neighborhoods, and health inequity.
This paper examines the spatial and temporal trajectories of Seattle's industrial land use restructuring and the shifting riskscape in Seattle, WA, a commonly recognized urban model of sustainability. Drawing on the perspective of sustainability as a conflicted process, this research explored the intersections of urban industrial and nonindustrial land use planning, gentrification, and environmental injustice. In the first part of our research, we combine geographic cluster analysis and longitudinal air toxic emission comparisons to quantitatively investigate socioeconomic changes in Seattle Census block-groups between 1990, 2000, and 2009 coupled with measures of pollution volume and its relative potential risk. Second, we qualitatively examine Seattle's historical land use policies and planning and the growing tension between industrial and nonindustrial land use. The gentrification, green cities, and growth management conflicts embedded within sustainability/livability lead to pollution exposure risk and socioeconomic vulnerability converging in the same areas and reveal one of Seattle's significant environmental challenges. Our mixed-method approach can guide future urban sustainability studies to more effectively examine the connections between land use planning, industrial displacement, and environmental injustice. Our results also help sustainable development practitioners recognize that a more just sustainability in Seattle and beyond will require more planning and policy attention to mitigate obscured industrial land use conflicts. OPEN ACCESS
This paper examines the tensions of sustainable development in Seattle, Washington, a commonly recognised urban environmental leader. Drawing on the perspective of sustainability as a conflicted process, this research expected a negative relationship between gentrification and environmental justice when affluent residents outcompete less affluent ones for neighbourhoods with fewer environmental hazards. The methods combine geographic cluster analysis and longitudinal air toxic emission comparisons to analyse socioeconomic changes in Seattle Census block-groups between 1990, 2000, and 2009 coupled with measures of relative potential risk and pollution volume. The property and development conflicts embedded within sustainability lead to pollution exposure risk and socioeconomic vulnerability converging in the same areas and reveal one of the 'Emerald City's' significant environmental challenges. Inequitable development and environmental injustice remain overlooked dimensions of sustainability that interdisciplinary research should address.
Concerns over India's dualistic patterns of urban-regional development and the complex issues surrounding them have been of concern for decades, and attracted much research interest, especially in the wake of the New Economic Policy of the 1990s. The current research, based on 13 selected states of India, explores the association of a number of developmental indicators with urbanization across three disaggregated size groups. Principal component analysis was used to extract four components followed by a cluster analysis to view the states' commonalities and differences. The findings are indicative of the perpetuation of past patterns as well as signs of a reconfiguration in the urban regional landscape of India, but must await further research.
The necessity of freshwater for sustaining human life has prompted the development of numerous estimation techniques and metrics for understanding where, when, and why water is used. While estimates are valuable, techniques for estimating water use vary, and may be difficult to replicate and/or unavailable on an annual basis or at the regional scale. To address these drawbacks, this paper proposes a series of regional indices for the continental United States that could serve as proxies for water use that are based on key variables associated with water use. Regional indices at the county level are computed, compared against each other, and compared to water withdrawal estimates from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). These comparisons highlight differences amongst the derived indices and the water withdrawal estimates. They also demonstrate promise for future development and implementation of related indices, given their similarities with water withdrawal estimates. Using only a small set of variables, these indices achieve some degree of similarity (~20%) to estimates of water withdrawals. The comparative data availability and ease of estimating these indices, as well as the ability to decompose the additive indices into their constituent use categories and constituent variables, renders them practically useful to water managers and other decision makers for identification of locally specific drivers of water use and implementation of more geographically-appropriate policies to manage scarce water resources.
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