Estimated time: 25–40 minutes. Includes the activity and its built-in responses. Extra assignments may take longer.
Do Geography Lab · Environmental Justice
Every metropolitan region needs infrastructure. Every facility occupies somebody’s geography. Choose a site, reveal the people already living nearby, and decide whether “efficient” and “fair” are describing the same place.
The regional truth
A warehouse can shorten deliveries for millions while concentrating truck exhaust beside a few hundred homes. A data center can support a digital economy while drawing heavily on one utility system.
The political trap
Low land prices may record an old history of disinvestment. Weak opposition may reveal unequal political power rather than public consent.
Choose a facility. The same site will not perform equally well for every use, and “need” does not erase consequences.
Planning brief
This is an imaginary metropolitan area. At first, the planning packet gives you logistics and cost—not neighborhood demographics. Select any lettered site to inspect it.
Teaching geography: values and parcels are constructed, but the map now behaves like a planning map—showing street grain, land use, water, transport corridors, and orientation.
Environmental justice begins where a conventional site-selection spreadsheet often ends: cumulative exposure, vulnerability, meaningful participation, and the distribution of benefits.
Spend four protection points. Mitigation can reduce harm, share benefits, or improve legitimacy, but it cannot erase an inherited geography of cumulative burdens.
Each thematic map preserves the metro’s recognizable physical setting and transport structure, then emphasizes the corridors and neighborhoods most relevant to cumulative burden. They are regional teaching maps, not parcel-level permit maps.
Select three pieces of evidence. The lab will assemble a defensible conclusion from your facility, parcel, protections, and metropolitan cases.
Draft finding
Select evidence cards to construct the finding.
The fictional metro uses instructor-built values. Scores are comparative teaching devices, not exposure models, permits, or health-risk assessments. Real projects require site-specific environmental review, legal analysis, and community participation.
Real-case framing draws on the City of Houston’s Magnolia Park Healthy Community Design Ideas Book; the Illinois EPA’s Environmental Justice Policy; the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s Regional Strategic Freight Direction; and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency materials on the Burnsville Sanitary Landfill expansion and Freeway Landfill and Dump contamination.