The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA

This paper discusses the historical geographical construction of a contaminated community in the heart of one of the largest and fastest growing Sunbelt cities in the US. Our focus is on how racial categories and attendant social relations were constructed by Whites, in late 19th and early 20th century Phoenix, Arizona, to produce a stigmatized zone of racial exclusion and economic marginality in South Phoenix, a district adjacent to the central city. We consider how representations of race were historically deployed to segregate people of color, both residentially and economically in the early city. By the 1920s race and place were discursively and materially woven together in a mutually reinforcing process of social stigmatization and environmental degradation in South Phoenix. This process constructed a durable zone of mixed minority residential and industrial land uses that survives into the present day. ‘Sunbelt apartheid’ has worked to segregate undesirable land uses and minorities from ‘Anglo’ Phoenix. Class and racial privilege has been built in a wide range of planning and investment decisions that continue to shape the human ecology of the city today.