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Research

Research

Research

Summary

Through an interdisciplinary, longitudinal, intensive case study of Baltimore, the proposed research will identify the spatiotemporal dynamics of environmental-equity patterns and processes in a large, postindustrial city that has undergone profound socioeconomic change. The study will employ three key innovative methods that will yield results never before possible to discern. The first is a combined longitudinal analysis of outcome and process equity over the long term (1880 to present). The vast majority of environmental justice studies focus on outcome equity with only a cursory treatment of the processes that create those patterns. This study will systematically examine equity patterns and processes over the long term, using proximity to Toxics Release Inventory and heavy manufacturing sites as a disamenity and parks and greenspace as an amenity. The results will provide a robust, documented, and accessible dataset that will reveal much about relationships between population characteristics and amenities/disamenities, their changes over time, and the impact of the legacies of past dynamics on present patterns. Second, this study will be the first to 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. Third, long-term data collection and analysis will permit an analysis of the social dynamics of environmental equity. With 120 years of data, the team will be able to test if there are global relationships between amenity/disamenity densities that relate to shifts in neighborhood characteristics. The longitudinal dataset also permits an analysis of temporal lags, to test if population characteristics change one or two decades after amenity/disamenity thresholds are reached.

This study will make substantial contributions to environmental-justice research, where longitudinal studies are rare, and those that are published usually span a single decade (1990-2000). A short-term analysis of environmental equity simply does not allow the type of analysis envisioned in this proposal, nor does it permit the kinds of tests that explain the underlying dynamics of environmental equity. A combined, long term, systematic analysis of outcome and process equity will be the first of its kind. The results of the research will yield new insights into the social dynamics of the urbanization process, particularly the social drivers of uneven and heterogeneous patterns that emerge over time.

Personnel

Funding

National Science Foundation

Timeline

September 2006 — August 2011