Spatial and Environmental Injustice in an American Metropolis: A ...

in order to make Tampa Bay a more livable metropolitan area defined by high-quality, natural landscapes with fewer environmental and technological risks. Without a coherently organized collective will to power of a new generation of progressive local and regional citizens and leaders, the many urban challenges ahead could sow the seeds of even greater disenfranchisement of minority and low-income communities and ecological disaster in the not-too-distant future. It is the potential consequences of the cumulative realization of these economic and environmental outcomes which elevate the study of spatial and environmental justice to an urgent research and public policy issue for counties in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area and the state of Florida for the foreseeable future.

This book represents a point d’entrée for a detailed and systematic analysis of spatial and environmental justice by exploring how social science research, especially human geography, might make a timely and original contribution to spatial and environmental justice in Tampa Bay. The signs of malignant growth abound in southwest Florida, particularly across the coastal neighborhoods of Tampa Bay. The situation confronting southwest Florida today is daunting, and it is patently clear that what is needed are real limits, restraint, regulation, sustainability, but most important of all, spatial and environmental justice. More attention will need to be devoted to the many victims of the last several decades of ecocidal and urbicidal growth—the environment and the poor—who were clearly regarded as surplus or disposable resources. Although the evidence is still inconclusive at this stage, it does suggest that low-income urban (and a few rural) neighborhoods in Tampa Bay are more likely to suffer the adverse environmental impacts of commercial and residential growth. What is required, therefore, is exhaustive empirical research and the articulation of prescriptive critiques which