Ken Cruikshank Nancy B. Bouchier

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Ken Cruikshank Nancy B. Bouchier | Blighted Areas And Obnoxious Industries: Constructing Environmental Inequality On An Industrial Waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890-1960 | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Blighted Areas And Obnoxious Industries: Constructing Environmental Inequality On An Industrial Waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890–1960

IN 1947, WITH apparent concern about the environmental hazards associated with a wartime industrial boom, town planner E. G. Faludi created a master plan for the port city of Hamilton, Ontario, a place affectionately known as "Steeltown." Faludi's plan was to undergird Hamilton's first comprehensive zoning regulations. It aimed to isolate residential districts from industry by designating existing neighborhood areas as "declining," "blighted," and "slum," while identifying appropriate locations for the placement of "light," "heavy," and "obnoxious" industries.¹ Unfortunately, it proved insensitive to dilemmas faced by many working-class Hamiltonians who sought affordable housing nearby their industrial workplaces. According to the 1947 plan, a number of Hamilton's working-class neighborhoods either did not exist by definition, or were blighted areas in need of transformation. Both views had serious social and environmental consequences for local residents.	1
The failures of Faludi's 1947 plan were not unique by any means. From the first years of Hamilton's rise as a major industrial port city, both private and public decision-making had created environmental inequalities for the city's residents. Throughout the twentieth century, town planners like Faludi had repeatedly promised to make the city's growth more orderly and attractive, yet their initiatives did not solve the environmental and social problems caused by the city's urban growth and industrial development. Indeed, the efforts of planners often ratified and even exacerbated the burdens born by the city's working class residents. The environmental costs and benefits of urban and industrial growth were not equally shared or agreed upon by all who lived there.	2
Twentieth-century urban planners like Faludi sought to harness public authority in order to allocate separate spaces for different kinds of human relationships with nature. In thinking about urban nature, as Matthew Gandy argues, historians need to be attentive to nature both as a "biophysical fabric" and as a cultural construct. Nature and natural processes played a role in shaping the development of cities, but they inevitably interacted with human conceptions of nature.² Hamilton's planners saw the environmental and social problems of the city in spatial terms. In their view, problems inevitably arose when private and public decisions jumbled together industrial, residential, and other land uses, and when urban dwellers did not have access to rural or even wilder forms of nature. They and their political allies presented their vision as a corrective to the chaotic, and therefore unhealthy, development of the city: They were allocating urban space in a more rational manner for the benefit of all residents.³	. . .

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