| Chapter 1: | Spatial and Environmental Justice in the Metropolis |
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attention has been paid to a growing number of anthropogenic urban hazards across Tampa Bay, including a vast panoply of public health risks, such as exposure to heavy industrial pollutants, increased pollutant loads from sprawl-related automobile use, air pollution from the use of two-stroke, gasoline-powered engines in the massive lawn-care industry, such as mowers, leaf blowers, and chain saws, and from golf carts in the growing number of golf courses and golf estates which dominate Tampa Bay's residential-cum-recreational landscapes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that, annually, lawn rangers spill more than 17 million gallons of gas refueling lawn and garden equipment, more than the amount of crude oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez (Joyce, 2009). No doubt, these landscape management practices have reached ecocidal, and indeed perhaps even urbicidal, levels across the landscaping-obsessed gated communities of Tampa Bay.
The concept of urbicide, which refers to the “deliberate killing of the city (Graham, 2004, p. 25) has a long history, but regained notoriety during the Balkans war in the early 1990s, when the mayor of Belgrade defined what was happening to his city as urbicide, thereby focusing global attention on the violence directed simultaneously against residents and the built environment of the city. In the mayor's words, urbicide is “the intentional attack on the human and inert fabric of the city with the intent of destroying the civic values embodied within it” (cited in Bevan, 2005, p. 121). A case could be made that the land-use decisions behind this manicurist mania are imposing a similar, if less dramatic, fate on both the biophysical and human landscapes of Tampa Bay. These urbicidal practices are a direct result of a series of overlapping and interacting land-consumptive commercial and residential policies, including excessive state and federal expenditures on massive private