Put It Somewhere — Environmental Justice Siting Lab

Put It Somewhere — Environmental Justice Siting Lab

Do Geography Lab · Environmental Justice

Put It Somewhere

Every metropolitan region needs infrastructure. Every facility occupies somebody’s geography. Choose a site, reveal the people already living nearby, and decide whether “efficient” and “fair” are describing the same place.

The regional truth

The service is shared. The burden is local.

A warehouse can shorten deliveries for millions while concentrating truck exhaust beside a few hundred homes. A data center can support a digital economy while drawing heavily on one utility system.

The political trap

The easiest community to defeat is not automatically the safest site.

Low land prices may record an old history of disinvestment. Weak opposition may reveal unequal political power rather than public consent.

01

What must the region place?

Choose a facility. The same site will not perform equally well for every use, and “need” does not erase consequences.

Planning brief

02

Read the region, then choose a parcel

This is an imaginary metropolitan area. At first, the planning packet gives you logistics and cost—not neighborhood demographics. Select any lettered site to inspect it.

Teaching map of a fictional metropolitan region with six candidate facility sites The map shows a river, two highways, a railway, airport, industrial areas, parkland, six neighborhoods, and candidate sites A through F. West Park Prairie Edge Eastbank Airport South Rail Triangle Old Mill regional park + wetlands airport industrial corridor Beltway 8 Route 41 Mill River N rail industrial land A B C D E F

Teaching geography: values and parcels are constructed, but the map now behaves like a planning map—showing street grain, land use, water, transport corridors, and orientation.

03

Now ask what the first packet concealed

Environmental justice begins where a conventional site-selection spreadsheet often ends: cumulative exposure, vulnerability, meaningful participation, and the distribution of benefits.

04

A buffer is not a time machine

Spend four protection points. Mitigation can reduce harm, share benefits, or improve legitimacy, but it cannot erase an inherited geography of cumulative burdens.

Protection budget: 4 of 4 points remain
05

The model meets three American metros

Each thematic map preserves the metro’s recognizable physical setting and transport structure, then emphasizes the corridors and neighborhoods most relevant to cumulative burden. They are regional teaching maps, not parcel-level permit maps.

06

Build the planning board’s finding

Select three pieces of evidence. The lab will assemble a defensible conclusion from your facility, parcel, protections, and metropolitan cases.

Draft finding

Three pieces of evidence are required

Select evidence cards to construct the finding.

Sources and model notes

The fictional metro uses instructor-built values. Scores are comparative teaching devices, not exposure models, permits, or health-risk assessments. Real projects require site-specific environmental review, legal analysis, and community participation.

Real-case framing draws on the City of Houston’s Magnolia Park Healthy Community Design Ideas Book; the Illinois EPA’s Environmental Justice Policy; the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s Regional Strategic Freight Direction; and South Coast AQMD’s WAIRE warehouse-emissions program.

An original Rand-McKay “Do Geography” lab · Infrastructure, cumulative burden, and political power

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