Repackaged “urban renewal”: Issues of spatial equity and environmental justice in new construction, suburban neighborhoods, and urban islands of infill

《Repackaged “urban renewal”: Issues of spatial equity and environmental justice in new construction, suburban neighborhoods, and urban islands of infill》

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来源: JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue4,P.464-485

语言: 英文

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作者单位: Texas Tech University

摘要: This study examines environmental justice issues; the tie between infill, sprawl, and inequity; and race and class discrimination as a hindrance to urban sustainability in newly constructed “starter home” neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina, commonly called “cookie-cutter” development. Major findings include a discriminatory practice of locating neighborhoods meant for lower-income and workforce families adjacent to preexisting locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), including environmental hazards and other negative elements in the built environment such as industrial uses or heavy manufacturing, thus placing the most vulnerable populations at greater risk. We find that new construction surrounding the Interstate 485 loop spurred economic development in exurban areas but syphoned it from older inner-ring areas and that the worst location for new starter home neighborhoods is within predominantly low-income urban neighborhoods already challenged on a number of fronts. Rather than acting as a catalyst for positive change, the opposite occurred, and the surrounding problems, instability, and disinvestment spread into the new areas. In such situations, starter homes embody repackaged urban renewal as a new model: islands of suburban-style infill surrounded by decline.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMelissa Anne CurrieMelissa Anne Currie is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Texas Tech University. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in landscape architecture from Cornell University and a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in geography and urban regional analysis. Her research interests include community resiliency, foreclosure effects from the Great Recession, and the impacts of the built environment on health with implications for how communities rebuild following disaster. She utilizes a variety of mixed methods in this research with a focus at the neighborhood level. Her work has recently been published in the Journal of Urban Design, Community Development Journal, and Action Research. Before transitioning into a career in academics, Dr. Currie worked in the civil engineering field building expertise in site design, master planning, low impact development, and new urbanism design.Janni SorensenJanni Sorensen is an Associate Professor in Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. She earned a PhD in urban and regional planning from the University of Illinois at Champaign–Urbana in 2007. She founded and directs the Charlotte Action Research Project (CHARP), a community–university partnership in Charlotte, North Carolina, that has earned national awards for its innovative approach to meaningful community-based research and teaching. Central to CHARP’s approach is capacity building in and knowledge exchange with residents of underresourced neighborhoods. She conducts her research using principals of participatory action research (PAR), with a research focus broadly on participatory processes in urban planning, empowerment/radical planning practice, and community health and on the challenges and benefits of community–university partnerships focused on neighborhood-scale planning. She teaches courses in planning theory, neighborhood planning workshops, and asset-based community development.