| Chapter 1: | Spatial and Environmental Justice in the Metropolis |
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hazardous waste sites (Kearney & Kiros, 2009; Stretesky & Hogan, 1998). This issue continues to languish on the fringes of the political and economic agenda of Florida's governing elites. State and local officials have yet to openly consider and seriously tackle the many real and potential environmental justice consequences of an unsustainable economic growth model, particularly in terms of a (sub)urban metabolism that has led to the production of increasingly privatized urban built environments along the state's metropolitan edges or rural fringes in combination with the willful abandonment and disinvestment-by-neglect of metropolitan centers. The resulting “doughnut effect” within the metropolitan built environments across Florida is a syndrome of ominous changes in the wider political economy of the United States, but is also a clear signal that economically aspiring city-regions like Tampa Bay are strategically being turned inside out as urban centers and margins, amenities and disamenities, are being reversed in increasingly inequitable ways.
It is within this broader trajectory of aggressive and uneven commercial and residential growth that the question of environmental justice in the Tampa Bay metropolitan region of Southwest Florida (figure 1.1) should be situated. This city-region has received remarkably little attention in the research literature on environmental justice. This lack of research attention is especially surprising given that this vast metropolitan region has steadily grown throughout the 1990s, with local officials building grandiose plans to transform Tampa Bay into a formidable “global city-region” (Amen & Bosman, 2006). With an estimated total population of almost 4 million inhabitants in 2007, a figure which is expected to increase to almost 4.5 million by 2012 (Tampa Bay Partnership, 2008), the Tampa Bay metropolitan statistical area has morphed into the second largest urban area in Florida and is currently the 19th largest in the