Revitalizing the City by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Community Concerns

As with the issues discussed above, community concerns are varied and cover a number of areas. First, a brownfield may pose a public health risk that concerns the community, as could standing contamination on a former industrial site. Second, the community may have a historical attachment to the brownfield, especially if the industrial firm once located there was a major employer of community residents. Third, communities have a stake in the redevelopment of the brownfield property, no matter what outcome occurs.

Federal and state brownfields policies require community involvement. The EPA's brownfields programs require community participation for funding, and they establish models of community-brownfields participation and encourage redevelopment partnerships. The Pennsylvania program also requires a public involvement process for the redevelopment of properties under site-specific standards and for special industrial sites.

Communities surrounding brownfields can represent different, often competing, interests, since a community may have different perceptions of what should be developed and how, based on different preferences and priorities. Community members may rank economic development as one of the major concerns, particularly in economically distressed areas. Individuals active with environmental issues may view brownfields development from a different perspective. Furthermore, requiring community involvement does not necessarily ensure active participation: Some residents may be left out. In one of the sites examined below, an innovative public process revealed "an alternative public that had been without voice in the adversarial space of the official (public) hearings" (Collins and Savage 1998, p. 217).

Within these different community discourses is the understanding of how a community and its residents view their landscape. This mental landscape (Gould and White 1974) shapes how people in a community perceive and relate to their environment, which is further shaped by their current and historical environment. In the case of Pittsburgh, brownfields often resulted from a hundred years or more of industrial activities on a site. How does a community perceive not only the brownfield site itself, but its prospective or potential changed use?

These four concerns, legal, environmental, economic, and community, are not discrete components of a brownfields redevelopment, but are interrelated and form complex relationships. This adds to the complexity of brownfields redevelopment and to the complexity of understanding its context. The research analyzes these components and how they are perceived by different agents in the brownfields redevelopment process. The next section presents a brief description of the five study sites where the research was performed.

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