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This project documents through an ethnographic comic how air pollution becomes entangled with everyday life. By following the stories of three people in one of Cuenca’s most polluted streets, I show how urban expansion and gentrification sit against precarious work and limited mobility. El Vado was a neighborhood marked by poverty, limited infrastructure and street-level drug dealing until the end of the 20th century, but even then, local craftsmen and neighbors came together to limit growing air pollution through local advocacy.

The Litani River flows along the northern edge of the town of Bar Elias. It forms a natural border, and contributes to the sense of Bar Elias as a unique place in Lebanon. Residents are currently witnessing the shift of the Litani from being a vital source of life - irrigating the fields and being a centre of social life for young people and families in the region - to becoming a non-living existent which carries polluted waters from upstream into the town. The images in this essay comment on the Litani's transformation: showing its continued importance to people's lives as it changes.

General Motors’ Buick City complex in Flint, Michigan was once a symbol of the city’s industrial might, comprising a massive cluster of factory buildings staffed by some 28,000 workers. The shuttering and demolition of the factory in the early 2000s left behind one of the largest brownfields in the country. As difficulties with environmental remediation—particularly of soil and groundwater contaminated by recently-discovered PFAS—complicate plans for redevelopment of the site, Buick City has also come to represent the stubborn and toxic legacy of industrialism.