Elsa Noterman, Queens' College, University of Cambridge
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Abstract
As Philadelphia’s post-industrial ‘River Ward’ landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects is settling on surrounding parks, gardens, homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area’s toxic history – especially the material legacies of former lead refineries – and its impacts on their children’s health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the circulation of this ‘fugitive dust.’ In this paper, I examine emergent and latent 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 socio-environmental justice. Finally, in considering the possibilities for more just urban futures informed by present pasts, I attend to the fugitivity of proprietary 'waste': how its indeterminacy not only unsettles, but potentially escapes, the improvement/waste dichotomy in urban development praxis.
Fugitive dust: the indeterminate trajectories of urban development's present-past