Baltimore is a bewildering city with sometimes puzzling social ecological relations. This paper contributes to a growing call over the last two decades for environmental justice research to attend to sociohistorical process in the formation of environmental inequalities. Drawing on a set of moments across Baltimore’s history of segregation, we examine the ways in which different environmental inequity formations, focusing primarily on urban tree canopy, heat islands, and vacancy, have become constituted through dual and dueling processes of (de)valuation in racialized communities and Black resistance.
Results/Conclusions
Through our historical analysis we show how relationships between race, nature, and space have been constructed in powerful and lasting ways that undergird the production of the city and its social ecological configurations. For more than a century, homogeneously white residential spaces have been discursively constructed as “natural” and materially produced as green and canopied, while Black spaces are depicted as industrial and blighted and (re)produced as such. These dichotomous relationships have become historically sutured with the capitalist logics of property, such that they inform processes of real estate valuation, devaluation, and revaluation and the concomitant social ecological transformations of space that result from capital (dis)investment. We argue that understanding these underlying processes of racialized (de)valuation can us help better contextualize snapshots of patterns of environmental inequality within a wider temporal frame of uneven development, and ultimately move beyond a politics of (dis)amenity redistribution towards addressing the root causes of inequality in the first place. Finally, we consider future possibilities for environmental justice in the unmaking of racially harmful landscapes.