SUSTAINABLE FUTURES, WATER INFRASTRUCTURE LEGACIES AND RACIAL CAPITALISM: A CASE STUDY OF THE MID-MISSISSIPPI RIVER REGION

Abstract

Over the past several decades, flooding events in the United States have become the most frequent and costliest natural disaster. In the US, city and regional leaders are planning new water and flood mitigation infrastructure in response to the challenges of flooding, uneven urbanization, and racialized exclusion. Historically, projects to keep water out have never been universal or evenly applied. Yet, ‘learning to live’ with water, a key tagline in current sustainable development paradigms, masks how histories of racialized land development are entangled with contemporary water infrastructure projects and are productive of regional planning power. This dissertation centers racial capitalism in analysis of how contemporary water infrastructure projects are entangled with, and informed by, histories of racialized land development in the mid-Mississippi River Region. Through two case studies on flood mitigation infrastructure in eastern Missouri, I trace the historic development of infrastructures that shape the ongoing racialization of space, infrastructure (re)development and community vulnerability to flooding today. The case studies draw from a range of data, including archival research on histories of land and infrastructure development, participant observation of planning meetings, professional conferences, and local neighborhood initiatives, and field observations of the built environment. I argue that 1) scholarship concerned with social-environmental inequities should engage racial capitalism as a framework to “provincialize” urban theory and environmental racism as a means to theorize uneven infrastructural provisioning as a mode of urbanization that (re)produces social difference and value creation under racial capitalism, 2) the historical development of flood control in the Mississippi region was fundamental to the development of racial capitalism because it consolidated regional planning power through methods of social and environmental domination, and 3) contemporary infrastructural redevelopment and flood mitigation projects must contend with the path dependencies of structural racism to disrupt existing cycles of marginalization across social differences to deliver meaningfully on equity goals. Ultimately, this study finds that flood-mitigation infrastructures, including levees, floodways, and dams, on the Missouri River and gray and green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) in the City of St. Louis are embedded in broader social-environmental networks and regional power blocs, whose regional history and dynamics have created distinct patterns of uneven urbanization and vulnerability to flooding disasters. Because infrastructure projects are embedded in the built environment for decades, the social relations comprising their implementation, or lack thereof, reach into present and future development considerations. Thus, when planning projects fail to grapple with path dependencies of past infrastructure projects, they may reproduce structural racism and re-create patterns of uneven urbanization and vulnerability to flooding disasters.