CHAPTER
Shiloh Krupar, 2022, “Brownfields as Waste/Race Governance: U.S. Contaminated Property Redevelopment and Racial Capitalism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies, eds. Zsuzsa Gille and Josh Lepawsky (Routledge), 238-253
ABSTRACT:
“Brownfields” are a mechanism of land redevelopment and techno-managerial waste governance. The term refers to reused land or property complicated by the (potential) presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant. Such land may stem from former military occupation and its hazardous remains, or, more generally, from industry’s contaminated properties. The acquisition, remediation, and adaptive reuse of a brownfield site requires advanced and specialized appraisal techniques, including spatial demarcation and accounting produced by GIS databases and other forms of data optimized for capital planning. Brownfields also support a spectrum of land recycling efforts tied to anticipated use, from minor remediation necessary for wildlife refuge use to the techno-utopian containment of waste supporting premium housing and infrastructure. Critical brownfield studies have emphasized their role as new frontiers of surplus value production, similar to colonial enclosures or urban renewal and their respective racialized logics of “improvement” and “blight.” This scholarship has also underscored modernist assumptions about waste as quantifiable, measurable object that can be separated and removed—and the role of this thinking in maintaining the illusion of a border between contamination and social life upon which capitalism and the revival of profitability depends.
This chapter will explore how brownfields operate as a form of racial governance in relation to waste management. Brownfields dis-embed the land market from material conditions of waste, converting waste’s stubborn presence/excess into mere financial, legal, and technical matters; deepen private sector presence through amenities and immunization from financial risk and biopolitical consequences; and serve as the primary means for generating liquidity by cash-strapped, predominantly minority cities with little tax base that face decaying infrastructure due to disinvestment and (near) municipal bankruptcy conditions. The chapter will position brownfields within urban austerity conditions that prioritize fiscal solvency and discursively vilify the public sector as excess/waste, in order to excavate/investigate the racialized feedback loop of “toxic debt” and “distressed property” that drive such land market agendas. The discussion will also consider a new iteration of brownfield: “healthfields” that indicate the “greening” of austerity, municipal bankruptcy, and poverty. Originating in Florida, healthfields target contaminated land and Superfund sites located in minority communities, who suffer from the presence of waste and who are underserved by health care providers; the initiative aims to convert such areas into hospitals, wellness centers, and grocery stores, perversely lowering cleanup standards while offering tax breaks that invite “green health” projects to remedy toxic blight.
The chapter concludes by considering racial capitalism’s intersections with waste studies, and the potential value of brownfields as a heuristic for understanding austerity, debt, and waste in the context of land use and race. It draws on the justice orientation of much waste studies scholarship to suggest that brownfield policy could be different. Brownfields could operate as a heuristic of racial justice against the prevalent understanding of (white) property and health: They could open up discussion of the legacies of racist land policies—settler-colonial seizure, eviction, blight removal, redlining, predatory mortgages, highway constructions, pollution, hospital location/segregation, urban renewal, business opportunity zones, and so forth—and their racially disparate harmful effects on bodies, lands, and futures. To that end, this chapter models how brownfields might serve to galvanize research on racial capitalism and land reuse within waste studies. It advocates for the transdisciplinary method of antiracist soil exegesis within waste studies of land reuse, to document the sedimented power relations and physical geographies of the “color line” that allow for value creation through racialized property financialization and transfer.