Hard Asphalt and Heavy Metals: An Environmental History of the Urban Crisis

Carson Fellow Robert Gioelli highlights how central city residents in the United States dealt with increasing environmental problems in the 1960s and 1970s. He focuses on three case studies—St. Louis, Chicago, and Baltimore—in order to determine how urban renewal plans and highway development shaped the lives and environmental understanding of the residents, who were often minorities. Robert Gioelli is a historian of the modern United States with a specific interest in how the perception and experience of the urban environment has shaped social movements, politics, and policy.