Launched in Fall 2021, the People, Landscapes, Conflict, and Equity (PLACE) lab analyzes conflicts of “locally-unwanted land uses”—social conflicts around either policy designations or economic expectations that certain landscapes should be used as waste repositories, sustainable energy development sites, or other forms of the ‘commons’. Often, these land uses create externality costs, such as health hazards, poor aesthetics, or reduction in home values, on those living within close proximity. We know from decades of environmental research that such transformation of land for ‘common good purposes’ often result in sacrifice zones, wherein certain rural or peripherally urban communities bear disproportionate levels of environmental risks from the placement of industries, utilities, or other publicly-oriented developments. We focus on cases of mismatched priorities between three groups of social actors: those who make decisions about land uses, those who reap the benefits of those decisions, and those who bear their burdens in their bodies.

Approach: Utilizing a systematic case-study analysis approach, interdisciplinary collaborations, and trained undergraduate researchers, the PLACE lab is developing a set of tools intended to alter the top-down approach to land use conflicts currently employed by city planners, policymakers, and companies. Our outcomes will include a series of best-practices white papers, graphic models of successful and unsuccessful stakeholder engagement, and an interactive website to guide actors through practices of effective, stakeholder engagement.

This lab values: learning research skills through experience; building peer mentorship networks; supporting pragmatic research through a sociological lens

Our vision is: to create new ways of understanding the environmental marginalization that can be applied to real-world policy concerns. Through empirical research, we will develop practical tools that identify how spatial, economic, and policy conditions make certain communities more likely to accrue layers of environmental hazards over time.

We are affiliated with Drexel University’s Department of Sociology and Center for Science and Technology, and we have been funded in part by Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Rural Sociological Society.

Core projects

Repeat industries

Personnel: Amanda McMillan Lequieu; Devesh Chainani (Drexel ’23); Grace Zaborski (Drexel ’23); Kyle McDonald (Drexel ‘ 22); Aurora Wiley (Drexel ’22)

A highly-polluting metals recycling plant is relocating from a majority white neighborhood to an already-polluted, majority Latino and African American neighborhood in Chicago. A new industrial warehouse district in a former energy hub in Philadelphia. Why are certain communities repeatedly selected as locations for polluting industries? And how are local people resisting layers of environmental burdens? This nascent case study project will review examples of reindustrialization and environmental activism in 3-5 cases across the United States.

Data for this case study is still being gathered.

Energy justice in planning and practice

Personnel: Amanda McMillan Lequieu; Jin Wen, Professor, Drexel Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering; Kyle McDonald (Drexel ’22)

This conceptual project, seed funded by the inaugural 2021 Drexel College of Engineering Longsview grant, considers the intersections of renewable energy infrastructure design and environmental justice. This project aimed to understand how a renewable energy system might be engineered to promote equity and redress long-standing racial and socioeconomic disparities in energy service delivery across the rural-urban gradient.