Public works across the country are reaching the end of their life-cycle. Water infrastructure systems, particularly those in older cities, are not equipped to deal with population growth nor the potential consequences of climate change. Wastewater planning methods of the past will not sufficiently address environmental degradation or keep up with user demands. As officials look to improve their water infrastructure, scholars are advocating for “soft path” or “Water 4.0” approaches to decentralize infrastructure and management. Calls for greater equity, however, are often absent in uses of these frameworks. Furthermore, scholarship’s focus on the impacts of old and new infrastructure neglects repair as a necessary site for critical engagement. Repair can perpetuate social and spatial inequalities; it is also an opportunity to reimagine and create infrastructure that is environmentally just.

This dissertation enters this timely junction by asking how responding to environmental justice claims benefits wastewater infrastructure rebuilding in older cities. I investigate this question through an examination of San Francisco’s Sewer System Improvement Program (SSIP), a 20-year, $6.98 billion capital improvement project. Using interviews, original document review, and participant observation, I focus on the years from 2009 to 2017 of five rebuilding phases: project objectives, environmental review, project selection, project implementation/construction, and monitoring and evaluation. I build on environmental justice scholarship that identifies the equity implications of capital improvement plans. I also apply a structural racism lens to highlight the inter-institutional relationships and processes that create racialized outcomes.

I find that the pursuit of racial justice in rebuilding projects reveals cumulative impacts, enhances organizational capacity, involves activating more substantive forms of sustainability, unlocks the anchor potential of public works agencies, and is implicated in gentrification trends. Findings are used to develop a heuristic framework to engineer justice through the consideration of procedural and distributive justice in each phase of planning. This approach to confronting structural racism elucidates the political relationships within which infrastructure is embedded. It also enhances conventional planning and engineering practice.

This dissertation analyzes the emerging epistemologies of climate change in California as articulated by social movements, experts, and subnational governments. As the world’s eighth-largest economy and the only state in the U.S. to implement a comprehensive program of regulatory and market-based mechanisms to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, California represents an important site of inquiry. The passage of Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 has made the state a global leader on climate change science and policy innovation. While no subnational government can halt climate change alone, California’s environmental policies have a long history of success and replication. Through an extensive analysis of the state’s climate policies and interviews with key stakeholders, this dissertation highlights the challenges California faces in influencing global climate policy while addressing the needs of local communities that are already adversely impacted by air pollution.

As cities and public agencies appropriate leadership roles in climate governance, policy formulation is increasingly emerging as an expert-driven process that emphasizes global GHG reductions as the goal and geographically-neutral economic and technological fixes as the solution. In this process, community-based strategies that integrate climate change interventions with population health outcomes are often excluded. This dissertation asks how environmental justice advocates are engaging strategically in the policymaking process in order to legitimize or contest regulatory policies regarding climate change in the face of ongoing pollution, illness, and injustice. In answering this question, the dissertation centers on three areas of inquiry: (1) the public health and environmental justice aspects of municipal climate action plans; (2) the conflict over statewide carbon pricing and use of its revenue for investment in communities most impacted by air pollution; and, (3) the social implications of international forest carbon-offset projects allowable under California’s market-based climate change law. These cases provide critical insights into environmental inequities and the emerging epistemologies of climate change on multiple scales. The dissertation findings demonstrate that the implementation of climate policies can either serve to exacerbate or redress underlying environmental health inequities in urban communities. In particular, these cases highlight the environmental justice strategies that are challenging a priori policy expertise to produce new local, place-based conceptualizations of climate change that underscore population health and community well-being.

Utilizing qualitative research in Nairobi’s informal settlement of Mukuru, this dissertation will explore the multiple roles of informal service providers, unravel their ties to formal actors, and develop new tools for analyzing informal service delivery. ‘Informal’ typically denotes activities that fail to comply with government regulations, and urban informality is always changing, contextually-determined and cross-cutting across multiple domains. I seek to fill multiple gaps in the literature on informality and service provision for low-income urban residents. Past studies rarely examine informal electricity providers or narrowly analyze ‘electricity theft,’ while my analysis of electricity providers will reveal the groups’ multiple facets and changes over time. In my sanitation case study, I analyze seasonal and spatial variations as well as proposing a new approach for studying slums’ waste flows. Although there is ample research of formal/informal linkages between firms or in a single sector like water, there is only limited comparative research of formal/informal ties in urban service provision. I develop a new typology of how informal water, electricity, and sanitation providers in Nairobi’s slums relate to formal actors; my analysis of a ‘formal/informal interface’ can also encourage further research into these ties. Taken together, my chapters can foster rigorous comparative analyses and promote more appropriate initiatives in African informal settlements where informal providers play a central (though sometimes problematic) role in serving the poor.

Mukuru’s heterogeneous informal providers and their diverse ties to formal actors make this slum a fitting site for uncovering new facets of informality in urban service provision. Located on private lands in Nairobi’s industrial area, Mukuru has rarely featured in past studies or benefited from upgrading projects. Although Mukuru is undergoing electrification, the project has yet to displace well-established informal electricity providers and the slum’s sanitation has been largely neglected by state or donor projects. Given its diversity of sanitation solutions, Mukuru is unusually well-placed to reveal how excreta are disposed in informal settlements and in turn to develop new methods for addressing these hazardous practices. Along with informal electricity and sanitation providers, Mukuru has active water vendors with their own modes of relating to government officials. With few donor- or government-led infrastructure interventions to date, Mukuru offers an appropriate study setting for analyzing a profusion of non-state service providers and for comparing formal/informal ties in urban service delivery. Based upon over a year of fieldwork in Mukuru, my dissertation draws upon semi-structured interviews, observations, and focus groups with residents and service providers as well as interviews with experienced practitioners in Nairobi.

In Chapter 2, I argue that electricity cartels simultaneously resemble gangs, electricity thieves, and informal workers, and these multiple facets create a corrupt, entrenched system that still provides an accessible service. Power cartels are comprised of youths who usually live in Mukuru, and they offer a range of benefits to customers like payment extensions and low-cost connections, even if the services undoubtedly remain hazardous. Although they initially clashed over customers and were ethnically divided, providers are now mixed and not primarily violent actors. I explain how cartels regularly collude with Kenya Power and the police; cooperate and compete amongst themselves; and provide flexible services that are quite socially-embedded. While not downplaying the unsafe or collusive aspects, I aim to provide a nuanced understanding of these shadowy figures’ multiple roles and to inform future electricity interventions. I also seek to enrich the literature on non-state providers (NSPs) by showing the mutability and complex motives of cartels while challenging a static classification of providers’ profit orientation or sectarian ties.

Chapter 3 analyzes how excreta are disposed in Mukuru and develops a mixed-methods approach that can be replicated by local organizations. While analyses of the ‘sanitation chain’ (from user to ultimate disposal) helpfully recognize the need for comprehensive approaches, I suggest that this discrete sequence is misleading for informal settlements. Instead, Mukuru’s wastes are disposed via non-linear, often improvised strategies that can vary by season, residents’ age, gender, and other factors. I also critique past studies of excreta flows that typically utilize epidemiological methods that are too technical for local organizations, or miss fine-grained practices and variations in informal settlements. I develop a feasible mixed-methods approach for understanding slums’ waste flows that could be subsequently utilized by sanitation advocates, urban poor federations or other local practitioners. Furthermore, I underscore the importance of ongoing maintenance by male latrine-emptiers and (largely female) caretakers who clean shared latrines. I argue for gender- and age-sensitive strategies as well as multi-sectoral initiatives combining fecal sludge management (FSM) with adequate drainage, menstrual hygiene facilities, and solid waste management. Finally, I argue the ‘sanitation chain’ in Mukuru is best understood as an emergent co-creation of households, caretakers, and service providers who regularly shift in their interactions with (at times filthy) shared latrines and tenuous networks like open drains or brittle water pipes.

Chapter 4 analyzes how Mukuru’s informal providers interact with formal actors, and my typology can encourage further comparative research. Although there are related literatures on hybrid security governance and informal institutions, past studies rarely offer a comparative framework on urban informal service providers or focus on broader scales than informal settlements. In my exploration of a ‘formal/informal interface,’ I argue that these interactions represent a continuum ranging from latrine-emptiers (usually ignored by police and relevant officials) to electricity cartels that regularly bribe and periodically clash with state actors. Additionally, I offer a new typology of informal providers as invisibly parallel (latrine-emptiers), invisibly parasitic and collusive (sewer hook-ups), visibly parasitic (water), and visibly parasitic and collusive (electricity). I also offer a detailed comparison of water and electricity cartels, who differ in their levels of conflict, salience of ethnicity, and competitive vs. cooperative pressures. Lastly, I discuss how water and electricity providers can deploy ‘trappings of formality,’ including a strategic display of official meters to avoid paying fines. Understanding the interface not only helps to uncover the deep-seated, complex roots of informal provision but may also develop more appropriate interventions, such as tackling the collusive ties that contributed to the rise of cartels.

I conclude with policy lessons and methodological reflections, as well as analyzing ways to emulate informal providers’ accessible, flexible services. Based on past slum electrification projects, I identify key challenges and mechanisms that may facilitate the transition to formal power; I also briefly discuss experiences with Nairobi’s ongoing electrification project. I propose a research agenda into (sometimes unsavory) informal providers and suggest that future slum upgrading initiatives may benefit from a nuanced analysis of informal providers and their ties to official actors. After acknowledging the challenges of studying informal providers, I discuss the implications for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argue for holistic slum upgrading projects rooted in a thoroughgoing analysis of dynamic, multifaceted informal providers.

People of Asian origin, including Asian Americans, immigrants, and refugees, constitute the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in the United States. Despite the fact that there are known chronic health disparities among Asian people, comparatively few studies examine the relationships between structural racism and chronic health conditions in Asian communities. The prioritization of successful and healthy narratives of Asian people may cause health researchers to overlook their inclusion in medical research. As a result, studies rarely include Asian people as a distinct racial/ethnic group, and furthermore, peer-reviewed literature rarely reports health outcomes for this group. This underrepresentation and subsequent lack of robust research on health disparities for Asian people means that there are few, or precariously funded, health and social programs for those who are at risk for health inequities.

Asthma is a chronic respiratory illness that has become a severe problem in the United States. Health statistics from the state of California suggest that some Asian people experience asthma inequities. Disaggregated health data shows that Filipino and Japanese people have a lifetime asthma prevalence of more than double their Korean and South Asian counterparts; however, there has been little to no research conducted to understand the drivers of this disparity. Public health research suggests that structural racism is a fundamental cause of racial/ethnic disparities in health. Studies have found that asthma has associations with two forms of structural racism, racial residential segregation and environmental racism, but Asian people have little to no inclusion in this type of research. While evidence suggests that Asian people experience disproportionate exposures to air pollution when they live in Asian segregated areas, there are no studies to my knowledge that explore health outcomes associated with this phenomenon.

To address these gaps in knowledge, this dissertation uses mixed methods to expand understanding of how structural racism impacts the health of Asian people. The first paper is a case study that examines how an Asian community in Richmond, California has responded to decades of experiencing disproportionate exposure to air pollution and poor health outcomes. I use the Asian Pacific Environmental Network’s regional campaign for “Regulation 12, Rule 16” and local campaign for “No Coal in Richmond'' to describe how an Asian organization employed critical environmental justice strategies as tools to achieve its clean air goals. The second paper is a quantitative analysis that examines the ecologic associations between racial residential segregation for Asian people in California and the age-adjusted rates of emergency department (ED) visits for asthma per 10,000 in the neighborhoods where they live. I also examine community-level contextual factors as modifiers of this relationship. Finally, I use spatial statistics to identify areas in California that warrant future study on individual and community-level contextual factors that may contribute to asthma morbidity in Asian communities. The third paper is a narrative review that assesses the conceptualization, measurement, and examination of how racial residential segregation has been utilized in asthma research. I investigate the extent to which Asian people have been included in such studies and summarize best practices for future research that includes Asian populations.

A tale of two cities. The Mason-Dixon line. The Berlin Wall. Fresnans have evoked a variety of metaphors to describe the spatial divide between the rich, clean and white neighborhoods in the north and the southern areas housing the poor, polluting industries and communities of color that has characterized urban development in the city since its inception. The narrative explaining this spatial inequality has been remarkably consistent over time - sprawl fueled by aggressive developers, corrupt city councilmen and the market pushed the city limits ever farther northeast, abandoning the older neighborhoods to the south where the poor and immigrant communities settled and were too disorganized to counter the government's neglect.

The spatial concentration of the poor, people of color and unwanted land uses can be seen in cities around the country and is identified by public health scholars to be a key driver of the disparities in health between racial and socio-economic groups. City governments are increasingly returning to their core and investing in New Urbanist and Smart Growth strategies to transform these older, more densely developed neighborhoods as the drive for environmental sustainability, walkable neighborhoods, and the attraction of creative urban residents grows. The potential effects of such efforts on the health and wellbeing of the existing residents, however, remains under explored. This dissertation asks if and how the new planning paradigms that use public health as a goal and organizing principle significantly change planning practice and lead to the re-distribution of environmental risks and resources to reduce health disparities? I investigate this question through three case studies of in Fresno a) a downtown revitalization plan, b) the general plan update, and c) a foundation based community development effort to increase the power of South Fresno residents to engage in planning.

Following a year of fieldwork I find that everyone is talking about healthy neighborhoods, however for whom and how to achieve them appear to be quite different. While community groups seek to improve the living conditions of the poor residents of South Fresno and ensure their ability to stay in a revitalized downtown, planners are focusing on attracting wealthier residents and actively avoiding any talk about equity, affordable housing and public investment. Thus, although health seems to be providing a unifying framework in terms of a vision for the physical environment, it does not ultimately resolve the inherent tensions between community and economic development.