Fugitive Dust: The Indeterminate Trajectories of Urban Development’s Present Past

As Philadelphia’s postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects settles on surrounding parks, gardens, and homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area’s toxic history—especially the material legacies of lead refineries—and its impacts on their children’s health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the risks associated with the circulation of this “fugitive dust.” In this article, I examine latent and emergent risks of urban redevelopment by tracing the indeterminate, intimate trajectories of toxic dust as it traverses the spatial and temporal boundaries of property and proprietary subjects. In doing so, I consider the ways it disrupts racialized notions of improvement and refigures questions of socioenvironmental justice. Finally, in considering the possibilities for more just urban futures informed by present pasts, I attend to the fugitivity of dust: how its indeterminacy not only unsettles, but potentially escapes, the improvement–waste dichotomy in urban development praxis.