blighted areas and OBNOXIOUS INDUSTRIES: CONSTRUCTING ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY ON AN INDUSTRIAL WATERFRONT, HAMILTON, ONTARIO, 1890-1960

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Cruikshank, Ken, Bouchier, Nancy B

IN 1947, WITH apparent concern about the environmental hazards associated with a wartime industrial boom, town planner E. G. Faludi created a master plan for the port city of Hamilton, Ontario, a place affectionately known as "Steeltown." Faludi's plan was to undergird Hamilton's first comprehensive zoning regulations. It aimed to isolate residential districts from industry by designating existing neighborhood areas as "declining," "blighted," and "slum," while identifying appropriate locations for the placement of "light," "heavy," and "obnoxious" industries.1 Unfortunately, it proved insensitive to dilemmas faced by many working-class Hamiltonians who sought affordable housing nearby their industrial workplaces. According to the 1947 plan, a number of Hamilton's working-class neighborhoods either did not exist by definition, or were blighted areas in need of transformation. Both views had serious social and environmental consequences for local residents.

The failures of Faludi's 1947 plan were not unique by any means. From the first years of Hamilton's rise as a major industrial port city, both private and public decision-making had created environmental inequalities for the city's residents. Throughout the twentieth century, town planners like Faludi had repeatedly promised to make the city's growth more orderly and attractive, yet their initiatives did not solve the environmental and social problems caused by the city's urban growth and industrial development. Indeed, the efforts of planners often ratified and even exacerbated the burdens born by the city's working class residents. The environmental costs and benefits of urban and industrial growth were not equally shared or agreed upon by all who lived there.

Twentieth-century urban planners like Faludi sought to harness public authority in order to allocate separate spaces for different kinds of human relationships with nature. In thinking about urban nature, as Matthew Candy argues, historians need to be attentive to nature both as a "biophysical fabric" and as a cultural construct. Nature and natural processes played a role in shaping the development of cities, but they inevitably interacted with human conceptions of nature.2 Hamilton's planners saw the environmental and social problems of the city in spatial terms. In their view, problems inevitably arose when private and public decisions jumbled together industrial, residential, and other land uses, and when urban dwellers did not have access to rural or even wilder forms of nature. They and their political allies presented their vision as a corrective to the chaotic, and therefore unhealthy, development of the city: They were allocating urban space in a more rational manner for the benefit of all residents.3

Urban planners and their allies bore a complex relationship to social power in cities, as a number of historical studies have demonstrated. Historians continue to pay planners considerable attention, often focusing upon their lack of power. Greg Hise and William Deverell, in reprinting the Olmsted-Bartholomew plan for the Los Angeles region, and Bruce Stephenson, in studying John Nolen's plan for St. Petersburg, Florida, offer readers alternative urban visions, and show how powerful economic and political actors undermined these schemes.4 Christine Buyer's provocative work agrees that planning visions did not shape the actual structure of the city, but that is not her point. The city was never meant to be planned, she contends, but the planning mentality was "simply used to reinforce a type of disciplinary power to the ends of capitalist development."5 She therefore focuses on urban planning as an example of "capitalist thinking," changing in response to particular phases of economic development, but always necessarily abstract so as to overcome "contradictory capitalist interests" and "speak for the general interest of capital."6 As capitalist thinking, Boyer concludes, urban planning was "not capable of grasping the actual substance of life."7 Although her analysis is very different, then, she forwards similar conclusions about the impact of planners on urban development.

Viewed from the perspective of less powerful interests-like the working-class immigrants who settled in Hamilton's industrial waterfront neighborhoods-planning, and even the abstractness of planning, looks very different. We situate our study of planners and urban development in the context of the literature on environmental inequality. Those focused upon environmental inequality have raised important questions about the distribution of the environmental costs and benefits in the city. Some contemporary environmental justice scholars and activists have drawn attention to the unequal impact of particular environmental hazards: toxic waste sites and dumps. Others dispute a number of important issues, such as the means of measuring endangered communities, the relative significance of race and class, and, because it has important legal and policy implications, the explanations about why some communities became hosts to such dangerous sites.8 As Craig Colten shows in much of his work, however, there are significant problems with contemporary analyses, which concentrate on the period after World War II, since some industrial wastes produced before 1940 are hazardous substances still lingering in the environment today.9 Moreover, as historian Andrew Hurley shows in his outstanding work on postwar Gary, Indiana, a fuller assessment of environmental equality needs to consider the social allocation of a broad range of environmental hazards and environmental amenities, including people's access to beaches and other outdoor recreational facilities.10