UC Berkeley

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.