Infrastructures and Relationships in Urban Environmental Protection: A Tale of Two Cities

Many environmental protection activities require substantial physical infrastructure to accomplish their goals. For many decades, urban areas have routinely operated a variety of waste management and water purification plants, which have had pronounced physical presence in these communities. Ironically, these two examples are quite different in terms of the nature of their built components: waste disposal sites (e.g. urban landfills) have been placed in remote sites to protect urban environments (while sometimes polluting rural environments). In contrast, urban water treatment plants have often been prominent features of the urban landscape, becoming municipal "showpieces", designed to inspire faith in the capacity of the community to clean up polluted water and produce clean drinking water. We note that both of these infrastructure forms have been characterized as locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) that are often sited in or near politically disempowered communities. Interestingly, the infrastructure for recycling falls somewhere between the examples of landfill operations and water purification. On the one hand, recycling involves some "dirty work", and thus recycling operations are often kept out of prime office/factory areas, for reasons of appearance (and economics). Yet on the other hand, recycling has also become a modern municipal "showpiece", since it is touted as a progressive or even a sustainable form of modern production designed to "save resources." In this paper we contrast two extreme examples of the labor process and ecological outcomes of urban recycling: Chicago's "BlueBag" program and Evanston's social-ecological recycling center. In addition to their differing degrees of accessibility to our research, these two facilities represent dramatically different approaches to recycling along social, economic and political measures. Only the Evanston program shows any semblance of what might eventually become a sustainable form of production, while the Blue Bag's social, ecological and economic costs are exorbitant. These findings have implications for policy-making around urban planning, community development, urban poverty, and environmental protection.