Environmental activism and the urban crisis : Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago / Robert Gioielli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gioielli, Robert, 1977- author.

Series:

Urban life, landscape, and policy

Urban life, landscape and policy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Urban ecology (Sociology)--United States--Case studies.

Urban ecology (Sociology).

Sociology, Urban--United States--Case studies.

Sociology, Urban.

Sustainable urban development--United States--Case studies.

Sustainable urban development.

Environmentalism--United States--Case studies.

Environmentalism.

United States.

Genre:

Case studies.

Physical Description:

ix, 211 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : Temple University Press, 2014.

Summary:

" Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis focuses on the wave of environmental activism and grassroots movements that swept through America's older, industrial cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Gioielli offers incisive case studies of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago to show how urban activism developed as an impassioned response to a host of racial, social, and political conflicts. As deindustrialization, urban renewal, and suburbanization caused the decline of the urban environment, residents--primarily African Americans and working-class whites--organized to protect their families and communities from health threats and environmental destruction. Gioielli examines various groups' activism in response to specific environmental problems caused by the urban crisis in each city. In doing so, he forms concrete connections between environmentalism, the African American freedom struggle, and various urban social movements such as highway protests in Baltimore and air pollution activism in Chicago. Eventually, the efforts of these activists paved the way for the emergence of a new movement-environmental justice. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

1 The Breakdown of the City 11

2 "Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities": St. Louis and the Fight against Lead Poisoning 38

3 "We Must Destroy You to Save You": Baltimore's Freeway Revolt 73

4 The Knee-in-the-Groin Approach: The Citizen's Action Program and Environmental Protest in Chicago 104

5 "City Dwellers Are in the Greatest Danger": Urban Environmentalism in the 1970s 137.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781439904657

1439904650

OCLC:

863200206