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Double Exposure in the Sunbelt: The Sociospatial Distribution of Vulnerability in Phoenix, Arizona

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Urbanization and Sustainability

Part of the book series: Human-Environment Interactions ((HUEN,volume 3))

Abstract

The Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area’s relentless pursuit of urban growth for more than a century has produced a durable racialized landscape, with minorities concentrated in an environmentally degraded urban core and a largely white and relatively privileged population in the expanding zone of peripheral ­suburbs. As suburbanization has marched outward, new and different forms of ­environmental insecurity are appearing. While vulnerable people in the central city are exposed to a concentration of industrial hazards and victimized by the construction of ­transportation infrastructure, some peripheral populations face an emergent double exposure to both an imminent water resource shortfall as a result of regional climate change and ­localized effects of the crisis of finance capital and resultant foreclosures and plunging home values. We explore how historic sociospatial and political economic processes produced the current landscape of environmental injustice in the urban core and led to suburban expansion and the foreclosure crisis and how predicted climate change in the West has begun to reconfigure existing patterns of environmental risk and security due to its effects on water resource availability. Through an integration of these domains, we analyze the shifting patterns of sociospatial vulnerability and extend the ­conception of environmental injustice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.azdeq.gov/environ/waste/sps/phxsites.html#mot52a

  2. 2.

    There are more than 100 water providers in the metro area, from small privately owned ­distribution systems serving a small subdivision to those that deliver to the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, and others (see Bolin et al. 2010, for a complete list). The geographies of providers in many cases does not map on to municipal boundaries very well. For example, Buckeye has 4 providers serving different sections of the city, a characteristic of many of the outlying suburbs that have recently annexed large areas of land in anticipation of growth that has now ground to halt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Bob Bolin, Juan Declet Barreto, Michelle Hegmon & Abigail York

  2. Department of Anthropology, College of Idaho, Caldwell, ID, USA

    Lisa Meierotto

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  1. Bob Bolin
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  2. Juan Declet Barreto
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  3. Michelle Hegmon
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  4. Lisa Meierotto
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  5. Abigail York
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Correspondence to Bob Bolin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, S Forest Ave 1151, Tempe, 85287-5402, Arizona, USA

    Christopher G. Boone

  2. , College of Business and Economics, Boise State University, University Dr 1910, Boise, 83725, Idaho, USA

    Michail Fragkias

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Bolin, B., Barreto, J.D., Hegmon, M., Meierotto, L., York, A. (2013). Double Exposure in the Sunbelt: The Sociospatial Distribution of Vulnerability in Phoenix, Arizona. In: Boone, C., Fragkias, M. (eds) Urbanization and Sustainability. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5666-3_10

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