Street science : the fusing of local and professional knowledge in environmental policy

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience the greatest environmental health risks, are demanding a greater role in describing, researching and prescribing solutions for the hazards they face. Seeking environmental justice, these communities are demanding to "speak for themselves," often drawing on their first hand experience-here called local knowledge -to challenge expert-lay distinctions and how professionals define and prioritize which problems warrant attention. Community participation in environmental decisions is putting pressure on policy-makers to find new ways of fusing the expertise of professional scientists with insights from the local knowledge of communities. This dissertation asks how the local knowledge of community members can improve environmental decision-making? In answering this question, I explore the ways residents of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, are organizing and using their knowledge of local environmental and health hazards to both improve local conditions and influence the judgments of professionals. In particular, this study analyzes how local knowledge was fused with professional insight in four neighborhood environmental health problems:

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Coburn, Jason

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lawrence E. Susskind.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8522

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8522