Sustainability

Sustainability research invokes questions across a multitude of spatial scales and is deeply interrelated with the department's social justice, globalization, and geographic methods themes. Our work focuses on local quality-of-life and justice issues within larger political, social, and economic contexts. Current research foci include urban food systems, sprawled development patterns, land use/land cover analysis, urban ecology, environmental justice, public health outcomes, and comparative dimensions of environmental sustainability at the national and global scales.

An urban garden in North Philadelphia (photo by GUS graduate student Dana Bauer).

 

Faculty

Ben Kohl, Rob Mason, Jeremy Mennis

Research Projects

Physical and Spatial Manifestations of Neoliberalism (Ben Kohl)
This project looks at sustainability of cities under neoliberal regimes and begins with the understanding that there are social, political and economic dimensions to sustainability. In collaboration with Juan Arbona, I am looking at the physical and spatial manifestations of neoliberalism, and its impact on the (re)production or urban life and structure. This project aims not only to identify the physical manifestations of neoliberal cities but also to look at how ideology is mobilized through everyday practices to shape both urban form and daily life.

Environmental Justice of Urban Air Pollution (Jeremy Mennis)
Environmental justice is the principle that all people have equal protection under environmental laws and the right to participate in environmental decision-making in their community.  I am interested in the quantitative analysis of race, class, and other socioeconomic characteristics as they relate to indicators of environmental risk, particularly toxins produced from industrial and commercial activity.  Recent research has focused on the distribution of air toxic releases in New Jersey, as well as on racial equity in actions taken by agencies responsible for enforcing environmental policies. For more information, go HERE .

Recent Publications

L Farthing, J Arbona and B Kohl (2006) “The Cities that Neoliberalism Built: Exploring Urbanization in La Paz-El Alto,” Harvard International Review, web edition, available at http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/1433/, May 2006

J Arbona and B Kohl (2004) “La Paz - El Alto,” 21(8), 255-265, Cities

Mennis, J., 2005. Socioeconomic inequity in hazardous facility location and enforcement in New Jersey. The Professional Geographer , 57(3): 411-422.

Mennis, J. and Jordan, L., 2005. The distribution of environmental equity: exploring spatial nonstationarity in multivariate models of air toxic releases . Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2): 249-268.

Mennis, J., 2002. Using geographic information systems to create and analyze statistical surfaces of population and risk for environmental justice analysis . Social Science Quarterly, 83(1): 281-297.