Engineering projects have disproportionately harmed the health and wealth of communities of color. Pioneering educators are training students on the need to consider equity and environmental justice in their work.
By Jennifer Pocock and Yara Palin
The Cross Bronx Expressway, a six-lane, 6.5-mile thoroughfare that connects Manhattan with New Jersey and New England, has left an indelible mark on New York City for generations. To some, the country’s first highway built through a dense urban environment represents an impressive engineering feat, a vital commercial artery whose realization required blasting through rock; redirecting rivers; and crossing streets, utility lines, and commuter railways. Others, however, view the perennially congested roadway as not only an open wound for the community but also the manifestation of a systemic infection: racism.
Built between 1948 and 1963, the Cross Bronx Expressway was the brainchild of New York City’s legendary “master builder,” Robert Moses. The highway segregated the borough into north and south sections, ousting an estimated 5,000 families. An alternate route, just one block south, would have displaced only 100 families—but despite protests and fuzzy official rationales, Moses’s original plan won approval. After the expressway tore through the city, many middle- and upper-income residents headed to the North Bronx and New York suburbs. For those who could not afford to move, property values plunged. By the early 1970s, the South Bronx had become synonymous with urban poverty and blight.
The effects of the expressway’s construction continue today. Vehicle pollution—15,000 trucks a day travel the Hunts Point neighborhood alone—has given the overwhelmingly Hispanic and Black population of the South Bronx an asthma rate that is the highest in the city and three times higher than in the rest of the nation, according to a 2018 Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems report. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the South Bronx has reported some of New York City’s highest hospitalization and mortality rates, aggravated by underlying conditions such as asthma and diabetes, which correlate with poor air quality and lack of green space for exercise.
The Cross Bronx Expressway demonstrates how engineering, influenced by politics and socioeconomic factors, can institutionalize racial and ethnic disparities. Seemingly basic structures such as highways can become physical representations—and drivers—of inequity. As the United States grapples with crumbling infrastructure, climate change, racial reckonings, and a prolonged pandemic, the interrelation of these issues has become increasingly apparent. (See “Syndemic Solutions,” p.17.) With mounting evidence that physical environments—both natural and human-made—affect people’s well-being in myriad ways, some engineering faculty and students are promoting approaches that consider a project’s equity impacts. They have an ally in the Biden administration, which has made environmental justice a focus across federal agencies and earmarked funds for racial equity in the recently signed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. The shared goal: help communities not only heal from past injuries but also prevent future harm.
Human Sacrifice
To some, the South Bronx provides an example of areas that have become internationally known as “sacrifice zones.” As defined by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, a professor of socio-spatial development and urban studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in these areas the “physical and mental health and the quality of life of human beings are compromised in the name of ‘economic development’ or ‘progress.’”
These regions are commonly populated by residents of lower socioeconomic status, who are overwhelmingly people of color. As de Souza wrote in the April 2021 Community Development Journal, sacrifice zones are judged to be more “suitable” for activities that are potentially dangerous and could result in “environmental disasters or environmental contamination (and hence health problems).”
Inhabitants typically lack industry’s political clout to fight the siting of factories, oil and gas pipelines, incinerators, or other operations that could affect community members’ health. While these industries generate jobs, they can also be sources of accidents or pollution. For instance, in 2017 DuPont and Chemours settled 3,500 personal-injury claims by residents in and around Parkersburg, West Virginia, that linked the leak of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)—a chemical used to make Teflon—to six diseases, including testicular and kidney cancers. The class-action lawsuit accused the companies of knowingly contaminating the water, land, and air around their plant. Chemours and its parent company split the $671 million payout but denied any wrongdoing.
Myrriah Gómez, an assistant professor specializing in comparative race and ethnic studies at the University of New Mexico, believes her entire home state has long been perceived as a sacrifice zone. She says that prior to achieving statehood in 1912, the area was viewed as a desolate territory with abundant natural resources and expendable populations of Native Americans and people of Mexican descent. According to the professor, whose most recent book project examines the nuclear industry’s effects on people of color in New Mexico, that legacy has continued. During World War II, the world’s first atomic bomb was built and tested in the state, forcing the relocation of Hispanic and Indigenous populations in Los Alamos. A proposed plan currently under review by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission would store radioactive waste from power plants across the country in southeastern New Mexico.
Gómez points to the 1987 report by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which found that communities with greater percentages of racial minorities were more likely to be the sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities. According to the report, three-fifths of Black or Hispanic Americans and about half of all Asian American/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans lived in communities with closed or abandoned toxic waste sites that the Environmental Protection Agency had identified as potentially harmful.
Change has been slow to come. The 2017 report by the advocacy group Clean Air Task Force, Fumes Across the Fence Line, noted that Black people are 75 percent more likely to live in communities bordering a plant or factory and are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than White people.
Gómez emphasizes that the calls to action in the 1987 report still apply. For instance, universities should help train and financially support students in “technical and professional fields related to environmental protection such as environmental engineering, medicine, [and] law” and create “a fully developed curriculum to study the intersections of race and environmental pollution and its effects.”
‘Vaccine’ for Healthier Neighborhoods
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden signed into law on November 15 may serve as a shot in the arm for environmental justice. For instance, it includes a $1 billion allotment for neighborhoods that have been divided by highways and overpasses. These communities have been primarily Black, a White House press statement on the bill noted. The “Reconnecting Communities” program provides for the removal or rebuilding of infrastructure based on community input. Citizen groups have long advocated such racial justice measures, though some experts worry that increased land values could accelerate gentrification.
The South Bronx could be an early beneficiary. At a press conference following the infrastructure bill’s passage, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stood near the expressway and said that addressing the detrimental effects of “one of the greatest examples of environmental injustice” was a high priority for the legislation. With him was Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat whose congressional district is located entirely in the Bronx and the champion of a proposal to “cap” a large section of the Cross Bronx Expressway with a deck park. When such green spaces are built above highways, vehicular traffic can be funneled through tunnels and particulate matter contained.
Peter Muennig, a Columbia University professor of health policy and management, has studied the decades-long effects of the Cross Bronx Expressway. In a 2018 research paper, he and his coauthors laid out the capping plan based on a microsimulation that found covering the highway could reduce not only diesel pollution but also accidents, injuries, and deaths. In addition, the community space would allow for exercise and recreation with potential benefits for both mental health and disease prevention.
Muennig describes the plan as a “vaccine for an entire neighborhood.” A solution engineered from concrete, steel, and soil that could increase people’s productivity and reduce health costs? “That is an idea that’s attractive to Texas Republicans and New York Democrats alike,” says Muennig. “It’s really difficult to erase racism with a stroke of the pen, but this is an example of how you can.”
Cultivating Young Leaders
On the other side of the country, Californians face the effects of climate change as warmer, drier conditions spark a growing number of wildfires. Because of Southern California’s unusual topography and wind patterns, neighborhoods far from the burning forests are often the ones most affected by wind-driven smoke, which can leave the region blanketed in a hazy brown fog and pungent, ashy air.
In the Long Beach/Los Angeles area, crowned the nation’s “Most Ozone-Polluted Metro Area” by the American Lung Association for 19 of the past 20 years, smoke from wildfires pairs with air pollution from cars and trucks driving down the 710 and 405 freeways, known colloquially as Asthma Alley. Cargo ships idling in both cities’ ports plus emissions from oil and gas extraction further compromises air quality. Like their South Bronx counterparts, Long Beach residents—the majority of whom are Hispanic, Asian, or Black—experience much higher rates of respiratory illness than others in their state.
Help may be on the horizon, however. In January, the Long Beach city council approved the city’s first Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP). As part of it, the city will work with the California Air Resources Board and the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma to monitor emissions from active oil wells and send air quality reports to regulators and the board for review. Recognizing the long-term health consequences for young people, Long Beach partnered with local schools, colleges, and youth-leadership programs to develop the climate plan.
Growing up in the age of digital and social media, young people have witnessed the effects of environmental injustice across the country and are pushing for greater accountability. Earlier this year, for instance, fourteen-year-old Long Beach student Stephanie Akinfolarin won second place in the World of 7 Billion global video contest with an entry highlighting the connection between a growing population and increased risks of environmental racism. Among the Nigerian American’s proposed solutions: more community green spaces and stronger laws to limit locations of factories.
At the University of California, Berkeley, environmental engineering professor Joshua Apte is bolstering—and building on—his students’ already “sophisticated understanding” of environmental injustice. “Hats off to the coming generation of environmental engineers,” he salutes. “They’ve grown up recognizing that these are problems that their communities face, that these are problems that need to be solved…not just in reducing the impact on our environment but reducing the unjust impacts on people.” Taking a cue from his students, Apte has made the need for technical experts to work with communities and grasp their sociopolitical dynamics a constant classroom topic. “Academics move in very high-flying circles and that’s great, but it can become an echo chamber,” he explains. “How you shift that balance of powers is an important question, and the students are so prepared to talk about this kind of thing.”
‘Start Showing Up’
Khalid Kadir, a UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineer and lecturer, agrees that students often take the lead on these issues. Kadir has led much of the engineering school’s justice-centered education over the past seven years and expanded his teaching to the University of Washington through the Burges Endowed Visiting Professorship, offering a lecture entitled “Engineering Justice?” He explains that his efforts parallel pressure from student leaders at the two institutions for more classes related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That’s exactly what Kadir offers in his course Engineering, Environment, and Society. The class—open to all majors, though engineering predominates—teaches students to recognize and prioritize the social and political components of technical problems. Topics include the relation of environmental engineering to “air, water, and soil contamination; race, class, and privilege; expertise and knowledge production; ethics; and engaged citizenship.”
In addition to participating in discussions based on case studies, students collaborate on multidisciplinary municipal projects that Kadir runs in Berkeley, Richmond, and Oakland. Assignments range from measuring and mapping pollution to studying contaminated sites and producing documentaries on environmental justice problems and solutions.
“When I first created this course, my department rejected it,” reflects Kadir. “They said ‘this isn’t what we do.’ Then, six, seven years later, they fought for it, saying ‘this is what we should all be doing.’ And that’s a sign of the change.”
Kadir asks students to think about “relationality” and question the ways they benefit from someone else’s suffering. “How is my ability to live in a clean neighborhood tied to the fact that other people live in dirty neighborhoods?” he probes. Kadir also emphasizes the power of technical experts at the front end of policies and projects that ultimately cause disproportionate harm.
“The way that engineers conceive of and engage in projects has to shift,” he argues, pointing to the increased poverty and mortality rates in Appalachia that research has linked to mountaintop removal and strip mining of coal. “Sure, it’s doable from a technical standpoint, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,” he cautions. “From a human standpoint or a climate standpoint, this should never have counted as a doable project.”
Community buy-in is also essential on projects that affect residents’ lives. “If I’m an engineer and I’m going to go to your neighborhood, I want you to have ownership over what happens,” Kadir explains. This approach, he contends, helps eliminate the paternalistic attitude that engineers sometimes harbor toward communities. For example, if residents say they want to eliminate all cars and build only dirt roads, Kadir will tell them why he thinks it’s a bad idea—but won’t get in their way. Ultimately, he contends, equity requires redefining success away from the “mythology of progress that technology and economic growth are always good.” For now, though, Kadir remains intent on helping students learn to make decisions “so that they don’t wake up one day and realize that everything they did was racist.”
Another shift in mindset Kadir seeks to foster in his students, who he says feel pressure to be heroes and save the world with one grand project, is that change rarely happens overnight or in solitude. Civil rights icon Rosa Parks, he reminds them, was an organizer for a decade before famously refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955. “She showed up to boring meetings every week and made time in her schedule day in and day out,” Kadir observes. Joining Parks were dozens of other organizers who boycotted local buses and lined up lawyers to free her from jail. It took another nine years before the Civil Rights Act became law. Contemplating these details, Kadir says, can help students realize that “maybe I don’t need to save the world. Maybe I just need to start showing up.”
People First
In contrast with a student-driven approach, the University of Michigan is working toward systemic change from the top, with an interdisciplinary “equity-centered mindset” formalized by the school’s dean of engineering, Alec Gallimore.
The effort expands upon research and evidence-based best practices developed by the college’s Center for Socially Engaged Design. Founded in 2014, the humanitarian-engineering hub established a people-first engineering design process, which encourages questions and reflections for engineers on how personal motives, privilege, and biases might be influencing decisions at crucial points in projects. The center’s workshops help other engineering departments incorporate these methods and teach students how to approach fieldwork in more thoughtful ways.
Now, equity-centered engineering (ECE) courses will roll out across disciplines at the University of Michigan with both new offerings and revamped courses that incorporate the ECE model. The initiative includes professional development to help faculty implement the model and specialized courses for first-year students to make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of their everyday thought processes. Meanwhile, an $11 million grant, received in October, will enable the establishment of a new Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment, two endowed professorships, and two scholarships. Details of how the centers and college will interact remain to be worked out, but their objective already seems clear. “We don’t want to be a party to activities that unwittingly open the gap between the disenfranchised and the others,” Gallimore stresses. “We want to improve the human condition for as many people as possible.”
Central to achieving that goal are active-learning projects with equity at their core for all engineering students—regardless of discipline. From their first year, students will work to integrate lessons on racial bias, ethics, and empathy into their designs. Capstone projects will include at least one option addressing issues of injustice. “Our goal is to have engineers who are socially conscious and intellectually curious, who are wise beyond their years of experience,” Gallimore explains. “We believe the element of that wisdom comes from experience … solving or addressing authentic, complicated engineering problems while they’re students, with the right support.” Faculty and staff will also receive support, with tools such as sustainable design principles, questions to reflect upon when making crucial design decisions, and ways to work with community stakeholders in the design process.
Experiential learning will play an important role as well. Michigan engineering students already have embraced human-centered design principles, applying them across the state and world on projects ranging from water sampling in Flint to collaborating with indigenous cultural leaders in India on building chimneys that reduce smoke inhalation from traditional chulha stoves. Rather than swooping in as outside experts proffering high-tech remedies, the students made sure the new chimneys were built with locally available resources, easily operated and repaired, and aligned with village culture and traditions.
Systemic Solutions
Gallimore wants to similarly transform engineering education beyond Michigan’s campus. He has joined forces with dozens of other deans to advocate for ABET accreditation changes, recently penning an open letter to the organization’s board urging the inclusion of people-first education as a baked-in requirement for all engineering schools. All of the Big Ten engineering deans, along with many others, provided input and signed the letter.
Unlike the tooth-and-nail fighting that has accompanied proposed changes to ABET accreditation guidelines in years past, reports Gallimore, “what we discovered was they were already having these kinds of discussions as well.”
Gallimore believes that the accreditor has often been ahead of the curve on pitching changes related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, while schools and professors have been more reticent. Faculty often are focused on teaching technical skills and assume industry will polish graduates’ professional skills. But climate change, health and income disparities, and other societal challenges are fueling a new sense of urgency—and support for—equity-centered engineering at many institutions. Instead of a fight, “it’s a meeting of the minds,” says Gallimore, who hopes that including justice in teaching and fieldwork might quickly become the systemic norm, with schools and the accreditation board now largely on the same page.
The interplay between environmental justice and engineering is complex, however, and includes forces and consequences far beyond those that professionals or educators are accustomed to calculating. It took engineers to design and build the Cross Bronx Expressway, for example, but the location—and the associated economic and medical fallout—was a political decision. Highways also are part of a complex commercial and social ecosystem. To devise equitable solutions, engineers must assess the potential impact of their designs on commuters, school bus routes, public safety, asthmatic children and their caregivers, and other aspects of a greater social equation—not just figure wind shear and weight limits.
Ensuring that equity considerations are standard engineering practice, as Gallimore envisions, may require adjustments not only in what institutions teach but also in who is teaching. Women and people of color, traditionally underrepresented in industry and the engineering professoriate, contribute perspectives and experiences that could dramatically broaden which problems are brought to light and the novel ideas for solving them. Gallimore, who is African American, has seen massive changes in conversations as the faculty has diversified. He has appointed women to half of the engineering school’s chair and associate dean positions, and people of color occupy many of the top spots. Without such diversity, Gallimore emphasizes, default thinking takes hold. For example, he notes, women are more likely to die or be injured in car crashes, since vehicles have traditionally been designed with male occupants in mind. Blood pulse oximeters, so critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, often don’t work as effectively on people with darker skin tones.
Here again, the Cross Bronx Expressway offers both lessons and opportunities for engineers. The push to cap one of the country’s busiest roads with green space is being led by local mom Nilka Martell. The founder and director of Loving the Bronx lived by the road when she was pregnant with the youngest of her three children—the only one with asthma, she told Fox 5 NY recently. With the federal government promising $2 million to study the capping plan’s feasibility, a new engineering project driven by the communities affected could one day help reverse a toxic legacy of technological progress.
Jennifer Pocock is the associate editor and Yara Palin the assistant editor of Prism.
Design by Francis Igot