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Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott, Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018).

Scott Frickel is a sociologist at Brown; James Elliot is a sociologist at Rice. The two were junior faculty together at Tulane, where they conceived of this project in the course of asking questions about the history of New Orleans’ urban geography.

The book was published by the Russell Sage Foundation, in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology. “Books in the Rose Series are at the forefront of sociological knowledge. They are lively and often involve timely and fundamental issues of significant social concerns. The series is intended for broad dissemination throughout sociology, across social science and other professional communities, and to policy audiences.”

Methods of historical geography can provide a means of thinking about toxic places as sites of intertemporal relations shaped by historically specific political decisions as well as long-term, dynamic patterns of land use.“In brief, we argue that local urban change is driven by three fundamental processes: industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment. Industrial churning refers to ongoing temporal and spatial changes in a city’s active hazardous manufacturing facilities as those facilities go in and out of business or move from one location to another.

Frickel, Elliot, and a large team of student collaborators created what they call a “Historically Hidden Industrial Database” (HHID). This comprised comprehensive longitudinal series of data about the location (street address) and type of industrial activity of manufacturing in key sectors highly likely to produce localized hazardous wastes, as well as patterns of urban succession in which residential communities occupied sites where polluting manufacturing had once taken place.

“Although the HHID and resulting study, like all research, remains a work in progress, we believe it also offers a solid, innovative foundation from which others—inside and outside academia—can continue to build. This is so for several key reasons:“It is historically attentive.

Material features and infrastructures: Industrial, civil infrastructure, and residential activities in the same places at different historical periods, which including cross-temporal interactions mediated by persistent pollutants.The authors' umbrella concept for all of this is “socioenvironmental succession”: the cumulative effects of industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—a concept aiming to better undersand urban landscapes of toxic exposure by thinking about the long-term, intertwining processes of the production of hazardous contamination of urban sites, c

The book’s argument is sort of like the airborne toxic event of White Noise crossed with microplastics.  except with the drama and spatial order turned inside-out. As with White Noise, toxic risks are potentially about everybody everywhere, not just obvious sites of ongoing large-scale exposure shaped by social and economic inequality.