Industrial agglomeration and the regional scientific explanation of perceived environmental injustice

摘要

This article evaluates the impact on an environmental justice analysis of explicitly controlling for forces of agglomeration. Many environmental justice studies have examined whether polluting facilities are disproportionately concentrated near certain types of people, such as minorities. No studies so far have explicitly included a proxy for agglomeration, and relatively few use appropriate spatial analytic techniques. Our analysis does both, and in doing so demonstrates that agglomeration is an important factor explaining locations of certain environmentally regulated facilities. Not using fundamental regional science concepts and appropriate spatial analytic techniques can lead to flawed analyses and conclusions.