Mapped Out of Local Democracy:
Exclusion and Environmental Justice at the Urban Fringe

Michelle Anderson
School of Law
University of California, Berkeley

Wednesday, January 21, 2009  |  Noon - 2:00 pm

De Carli Room, Memorial Union Building - 2nd Floor (Where?)
University of California, Davis

People living outside city suburbs on the affordable urban fringes may find themselves "mapped out of local democracy." In unincorporated, high-poverty neighborhoods of color, residents may have no access to sewage systems, drainage, flood control, streetlights or sidewalks. But when the adjoining city expands their landfill or sewage treatment facility, these communities will bear a greater share of the impacts than the city residents who benefit from these services. The failure of cities to annex residents who are subjected to more than their fair share of regional waste and air pollution is termed "municipal underbounding." Legal remedies to these issues will be presented by Assistant Professor Michelle Wilde Anderson, UC Berkeley School of Law. She will argue that for municipal underbounding, as for other contemporary issues of spatial inequality, local government law provides a promising corridor of reform. The seminar is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the UC Davis Environmental Justice Project, Center for Regional Change and School of Law.