Today’s cities still buffeted by an old trade winds story

The fact that eastern districts of former industrial cities such as London, Bristol, Paris and New York tend to be poorer than their western neighbours has been well-observed for some time. But the fact that those east ends still lag behind is a reminder that urban development often leaves marginalised groups worse off.

Thanks to academic research, we now say for sure it was the factory smoke and odours blown east by the trade winds during the industrial era that made those areas less attractive to live in and thus to be shunned by the wealthier.

While that might be no surprise, the research is interesting because, as the authors note, those effects “are still felt to the modern day” even now that deindustrialisation has meant that industrial pollution no longer blows across the city.

Although the lack of industrial pollution no longer determines the siting of residential developments for different income groups, the legacy of that now-absent pollution is still relevant in current times because, as the authors point out, they

Deindustrialisation means that factory chimney snoke no longer divides the city but as areas such as the East End of London is still less highly valued than the West End, inequalities can still be found in the way modern cities are built.

Different forces are at play in cities in both the advanced world and in emerging and developing economies. For instance, the Texan city of Austin put in a strategy to make itself a sustainable city that balanced the need for economic growth with demands be more environmentally conscious.

It certainly appeared to pay off with strong rates of economic growth delivered at a tie of repeated recessions in the United States and several awards for the city’s environmental performance included being selected the Greenest City in America by MSN and number one in renewable energy sales by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

But as one of several studies found, the developments that were agreed with the city authorities focused on downtown areas of the city that led to the marginalisation of working class minorities in East Austin, the homeless, and African-American communities, many of whom were concentrated in the downtown and were displaced from the central areas of the city.

One depressing finding was that despite seeing more than 20% population growth rate between 2000 and 2010, Austin witnessed a 5.4% decrease in its African-American population. The author says that the “Black Flight” from the northern sections of East Austin was “particularly alarming”.

Finding such as these has led to emergence of the idea of environmental racism, as part of the development of a city. This not so much simply racist acts directed at non-white people — although that certainly happens — but the idea that that people of colour are disproportionately exposed to a particular set of environmental hazards, not as the result of any single decision or particular act but because of an unspoken organising system – what in the UK we might call institutional racism.

Instead, they are the result of urban development in a highly racialised society over the course of 150 years, as one study of Los Angeles found. Most industrial hazards in southern California were concentrated in the greater central and southern part of Los Angeles County which is inhabited by people of colour.

Overall, the worry is that there is a notion of urbanisation produced in unequal spaces where some groups are more exposed to environmental risk.

In the global South the outcome can be even more extreme. In Indian cities, research has shown that the poor tend to be pushed into areas where there's less access to open resources and environmental risk is more predominant.

For example, in a large unplanned area of peri-urban Delhi, shanty households are unconnected to the city’s main water network, public water supply is characterised by ad hoc inadequate provision, which compounded by rent-seeking middlemen and political calculation.

The burden of dealing with this reality often falls on the women of the household who not only have to fetch the water but as well as a lot of different tasks which involve water usage such as cleaning clothes, doing the dishes or cleaning the house or cooking are feminised tasks.

The type of analysis, which is known in the trade as urban political ecology, does a good job of stripping away some of the varnish around the idea of sustainability, ad discussed in a previous blog.

Combatting it will involve ensuring that all segments of a city’s society are brought into the discussion about its development. But doing that will be much easier said than done.