From degradation to reproduction: Environmental justice and the racialized politics of environmental quality in Detroit

Abstract

Environmental injustice is frequently understood as the uneven distribution of environmental harms, to which low-income and racialized communities are far more frequently exposed. Alternatively, this paper explores environmental injustice through an uneven politics of environmental reproduction. I argue that environmental injustice can occur via the disproportionate burden low-income racialized communities bear for reproducing environmental quality. To expand on this understanding, I offer both a theoretical framework that centres the socioecological reproduction of racial capitalism, as well as an empirical case study of the fraught history of wastewater management in Detroit. I use Detroit's wastewater system as an example of urban infrastructure that is fundamental to the reproduction of environmental quality, which in turn sustains racial capitalism. Municipal wastewater treatment renews local water quality to support (sub)urban life, as well as industrial and commercial cycles of accumulation—particularly given the need to comply with state water quality regulations. Yet the politically and economically uneven management of Detroit's wastewater system has also contributed to the production of a racialized water affordability crisis. Over several decades, ratepayers in majority-Black Detroit have taken on a disproportionate share of financing wastewater and stormwater infrastructure for the wider metropolitan region, inflating household water bills to the point of compromising residential water security. Here, environmental injustice emerges through an inequitable economic burden for reproducing water quality, ultimately in service of sustaining racialized uneven development across the metropolitan region. Bringing the socioecological reproduction of racial capitalism to bear on understandings of environmental injustice, I argue that scholars and activists alike must consider who pays for and who benefits from maintaining environmental quality.

Keywords

Environmental justice environmental quality racial capitalism urban political ecology wastewater management

Introduction

Environmental justice (EJ) continues to be a pressing concern as communities grapple with ongoing environmental degradation and worsening ecological crises. As an interdisciplinary body of scholarship and an evolving grassroots movement, EJ advocates have spent years documenting the uneven distribution of environmental harms and benefits, the lack of community involvement in decision-making, and demanding change in the form of racially- and class-conscious environmental management. In the US, scholars and activists have succeeded in institutionalizing an EJ framework at multiple scales of governance (Holifield, 2001). Yet many acknowledge that such institutionalization has largely failed to bring about systemic change or to prevent forms of injustice from occurring (Konisky, 2015; Milligan et al., 2021; Mohai et al., 2009; Pellow, 2018; Pellow and Brulle, 2005; Pulido, 2016). As part of their critiques, many EJ scholars have stressed the need to disentangle the complex institutional processes and socioeconomic relations that give rise to forms of environmental injustice. To their call, I add that EJ analyses must also engage more squarely with nature itself, not merely as a contested site of degradation but as the ecological basis that sustains (or not) the political economic configurations that produce environmental harms. In institutional contexts, this includes a focus on state-led environmental regulation and how such regulations are situated within the broader political economy. This paper undertakes such an analysis and in so doing, develops a novel approach to environmental injustice that moves beyond processes of environmental degradation to engage with the less visible and racialized politics of reproducing environmental quality.

Particularly in institutional settings, environmental injustice typically refers to the uneven distribution of environmental harms and benefits that negatively impact low-income and racialized communities. I argue that we must also consider who bears the burden for financing the reproduction of environmental quality. Detroit's wastewater system serves as an example of infrastructure involved in reproducing the urban environment by treating sewage and renewing local water quality to sustain (sub)urban, industrial, and commercial activity. I therefore draw on a historical-geographic case study of wastewater management at the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to situate EJ within a politics of environmental quality. I follow the work of several scholars who have offered historical analyses of the DWSD's operations (D’Anieri, 2007; Johnson, 2010; Kornberg, 2016; Rector, 2022). I concentrate on the state's expanded focus on municipal water quality regulation in the postwar years and how it positioned the wastewater system as critical to the unfolding pattern of racialized uneven development that spread across the metropolitan region. By extension, I show how the regulation and financing of municipal wastewater infrastructure contributed to the production of a racialized water affordability crisis concentrated in Detroit city proper. Over several decades, ratepayers in majority-Black Detroit came to take on a disproportionate share of wastewater and stormwater treatment costs for the wider metropolitan region, inflating household water bills past the threshold of affordability and compromising water security in the city. In this case, environmental injustice emerges not only as environmental harm in the form of water insecurity, but as a racialized cost distribution for reproducing local water quality on which the regional political economy depends.

This paper is organized into five sections. First, I provide a brief review of EJ scholarship and its engagement with the politics of environmental quality. I do so both to situate my intervention and to expand on a main line of critique that argues for a deeper engagement with racial capitalism to investigate the structural relations that give rise to racialized environmental injustice. The paper then moves into a discussion of how an analytic that bridges racial capitalism with political ecology theory on capitalist reproduction, can attune us to an underexplored form of environmental injustice which materializes when the burden for maintaining environmental quality is unevenly distributed along lines of race and class. Next, I contextualize the contemporary water affordability crisis before presenting the case of wastewater management in Detroit. By attending to the specific dynamics of wastewater management and by taking a longer historical view that extends beyond the city's more recent financial crises, I build on a small body of scholarship documenting Detroit's ongoing water affordability crisis (Cramer, 2015; Gaber, 2021; Gaber et al., 2021; Helderop et al., 2023; Mesmer et al., 2020; Moody et al., 2022; Mosley et al., 2015; Quizar, 2020; Recchie et al., 2019; Swain et al., 2023; We the People of Detroit, 2016). Whereas much of this scholarship has examined the significant socioenvironmental harms Detroiters have faced in the contemporary moment—from mass water shutoffs, to the spread of waterborne illnesses, to housing abandonment and foreclosures triggered by water debt—I foreground the evolving institutional processes dedicated to managing local water quality, ultimately unearthing a less visible source of environmental injustice that has contributed to the emergence and exacerbation of the affordability crisis. I close the paper by discussing the local and scholarly implications of analyzing EJ via the racialized politics of environmental quality, and the need to ensure that interventions aimed at improving urban environmental quality do not become sources of injustice in and of themselves.

Environmental justice and the politics of environmental quality

EJ was one of the first critical bodies of scholarship to probe relationships between race and the environment, and to do so empirically. The concept of EJ itself emerged in the 1980s out of grassroots efforts to contest the siting of a hazardous waste facility in a low-income Black neighbourhood in North Carolina. Organizers identified a correlation between facility sites and racialized neighbourhoods across the state. The uneven distribution of environmental harms animated a burgeoning social movement that was rising on the tails of the civil rights movement amidst the mainstreaming of environmentalism. From its earliest conception, the pursuit of EJ was focused on documenting and resisting the uneven exposure of marginalized communities to sources of environmental pollution that compromised their rights “to live, work, play, learn, and worship” healthfully. This working definition of EJ, coined by sociologist Robert Bullard (2000[1990]), became a framework for future environmental organizing, conceptualizing ‘the environment’ beyond ecologies or natural resources to include the spaces of everyday life.

A key premise of the EJ movement was the interdependency between humans and the environment; i.e. that the natural systems and conditions that make up one's living environment directly impact the reproductive capacity of that individual or community. The movement helped to establish environmental quality as a political issue, one that raised questions of social justice over who maintains access to healthy environments. Where, for example, the mainstream environmental movement raised public health concerns over new toxic substances entering the environment in the wake of rapid industrialization, EJ organizers documented how marginalized communities were more vulnerable than their white, middle-class counterparts to such forms of degradation. Bullard’s (1994) research demonstrated how institutionalized racisms “combined with public policies and industry practices to provide benefits for whites while shifting costs to people of color” (452, emphasis in original). As environmental quality entered the public zeitgeist of the 1960s and 70s—and indeed, as more affluent, majority-white communities saw the condition of their surrounding environments improve—EJ advocates began emphasizing the political and socially selective nature of such improvements.

Improving the environments of white and affluent communities by spatially concentrating forms of degradation in racialized and low-income communities was not a materially or politically new phenomenon. Rather, this pattern extended from the segregationist logics that had shaped (sub)urban development and responses to “urban crises” through the postwar era (Wells, 2018). Much EJ scholarship has since documented how institutional decision-making around the management of environmental degradation has been guided by racialized conceptions of space, such that the built environment has come to reflect and further entrench racialized hierarchies based on differential access to environmental quality (Bullard, 1994, 1999, 2000[1990]; Dillon, 2014; Gaber, 2021; Kosek, 2004; Pulido, 2000; Seamster and Purifoy, 2021). Moving beyond degradation, scholars also captured the uneven distribution of environmental benefits, including access to green spaces, healthy and culturally relevant foods, or water affordability programs (Mutz et al., 2002; Schroeder, 2000). This work shows how social unevenness can become entrenched not only through the prevalence of environmental hardships but by the absence of benefits that support community wellbeing.

Proponents of EJ have also raised critical questions around the politics of environmental quality that have become increasingly embedded in the operations of public institutions across multiple scales and regions of the US. Yet despite EJ's institutionalization, there have been modest material gains made to ensure that marginalized communities have access to the environmental quality they require and deserve. Scholars across a range of disciplines have responded by engaging in EJ debates on the contradictory role of the state as both perpetrator and arbiter of environmental harm (Harrison, 2023; Kojola and Pellow, 2021; Kurtz, 2009; Okunade, 2024; Sze and London, 2008). For others, the fault lies in the limits of EJ as a framework to diagnose the ways injustice is produced (Pellow, 2018; Pulido, 2000, 2016). A well-rehearsed critique is that EJ scholarship has been overly focused on uneven outcomes, rather than on investigating the institutional and political economic relations that give rise to environmental inequities. A promising line of inquiry on this front includes the work of critical geographers and political ecologists who make use of racial capitalism to deepen or expand understandings of the ways environmental injustices are (re)produced (Heck, 2021; McClintock, 2018; McCreary and Milligan, 2021; Phinney, 2023; Ponder, 2021; Pulido, 2016, 2017; Purifoy and Seamster, 2021; Silver, 2021). This scholarship moves productively from a focus on the uneven distribution of environmental harms to a focus on how racial capitalism conscripts urban communities and their environments to the pursuit of capital accumulation. Putting this analytic to work in a pair of articles analyzing the infamous water crisis in Flint, Michigan, geographers Laura Pulido (2016) and Malini Ranganathan (2016) show how residential lead poisoning was attributable to the everyday workings of racial capitalism via systemic anti-Black logics, racial liberalism, and austerity-driven, antidemocratic state emergency management—a far more nebulous set of “offenders” than a negligent polluter. EJ scholars using this analytic have shown how capitalist political economies entrench racial norms and hierarchies to legitimize inequitable socioecological relations, including exposure to environmental degradation. As this paper demonstrates, race can also structure processes of environmental remediation, including by positioning racialized communities to subsidize associated costs.

Approaching EJ through racial capitalism—and its socioecological reproduction

In its broadest form, racial capitalist theory explains how capitalist social relations operationalize race in the pursuit of profit and accumulation. Although scholars of racial capitalism do not always take up the socioecological dimensions of their analyses, their work has nevertheless documented how the rise of capitalism as a global mode of production relied upon a racialized social order organized around the ability (or lack thereof) to exclusively possess and profit from nature (Robinson, 2020[1983]; Bhandar, 2018; Gill, 2023; Roediger, 2017). A wider cohort of scholars across critical ethnic and Black studies, Black geographies, cultural geography, political ecology, and environmental history have expanded upon the co-evolution of ideologies of race and nature and their convergence with circuits of capital accumulation (Brahinksy et al., 2014; Dillon, 2014; Kosek, 2004; Heynen, 2016, 2018; McCreary and Milligan, 2021; Mollett, 2021; Nishme and Hester, 2018; Van Sant et al., 2021). Another area of interest examines how racialized hierarchies function within a spatial politics of capitalist reproduction (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Bledsoe et al., 2022; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Goldstein, 2018; Hawthorne, 2019; Issar, 2021; McIntyre and Nast, 2011). I argue that by drawing together these lines of inquiry—on the socioecological dimensions of racial capitalism and its reproduction—EJ scholars stand to gain deeper insight into sites and sources of injustice beyond the racialized exposure to environmental harms. In what follows, I draw out some of these intersections to put under scrutiny the contested reproductive relations that sustain urban environmental quality within racial capitalist political economies.

An obvious point of overlap between EJ and racial capitalist scholarship is an emphasis on the built environment as a site of struggle where the relations that sustain urban life are negotiated. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2007) work on ‘organized abandonment,’ for example, articulates how neoliberal restructuring has undermined the socioeconomic capacities of racialized communities to subject them further to market domination. Put succinctly, she articulates how the state uses racialized extraction to transform community social reproduction into circuits of profit-making (see also Bhandar and Toscano, 2022; Melamed, 2015). Her analysis travels far beyond the urban realm and arguably, the neoliberal moment, where similar attacks on Black social reproduction are evident in the patterns of racialized uneven development that materialized across many industrialized American cities through the first half of the twentieth century. Restricted covenants and redlining, for example, forced rapidly growing Black communities into overcrowded neighbourhoods that then became subject to disinvestment. Yet as Gilmore points out, Black living conditions were not only undermined by the denial of essential public services, but the ways local and federal institutions mobilized abandonment as a strategy for capital accumulation. Across the US, overcrowded Black neighbourhoods were razed in the name of “urban renewal” to make way for more profitable urban developments. For EJ scholars, what matters especially is the insight that institutional processes both oversaw the degradation of Black neighbourhoods, and then subsequently used that degradation to rationalize a process of renewal, rebranding dispossession as a pathway to healthier urban environments.

Scholars of racial capitalism have also made the crucial point that the widespread practice of urban renewal inscribed Black spaces with the quality of expropriation. For institutional actors, Black spaces serve as literal “placeholders” for future rounds of accumulation over and above their function as the sites of Black urban life (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Lipsitz, 2007, 2011; Purifoy and Seamster, 2021). A primary source of environmental injustice since the interwar and postwar years emerged through the ways state institutions underwrote capital accumulation by attempting to reduce the spaces of Black life to a logic of abstraction. Racial capitalist theory pinpoints how institutional responses to the built environment have sanctioned both practices and discourses that degraded the living spaces of racialized communities, often transforming them into environments where profits can be extracted and the circuits of wealth accumulation reproduced.

Relatedly, a subset of urban geographers engage racial capitalism through the “‘raced’ nature of austerity” (Phinney, 2020) and the neoliberal economic policies that have reshaped processes of urbanization (Bigger and Millington, 2020; Phinney, 2023; Ponder, 2021; Ponder and Omstedt, 2022; Silver, 2021). A prominent area of focus amongst scholars of austerity urbanism, including proponents of EJ, involves the financialization of public infrastructure. Majority-Black cities in the US “ha[ve] taken on new relational significance in the contemporary moment of debt-financed urban development” (Ponder, 2021: 2113). Longstanding patterns of infrastructural disinvestment in Black inner cities has not only deepened the need for municipal financing but has led to forms of urban decay that further conflate Black spaces with financial risk. Municipal bonds in majority-Black cities, for example, are frequently subjected to higher interest rates that widen the interest-based profit margins for bondholders at the expense of residents. And the terms attached to financialized debt instruments have historically been more punitive in majority-Black cities, with increased pressure to fulfil bondholder obligations through disciplinary debt collection strategies like water shutoffs (Ponder, 2021). Taxpayers in majority-Black cities have ultimately paid more to construct and maintain key public infrastructures than their counterparts living in majority-white cities and have experienced a greater degree of risk when the cost burden exceeds the financial capacity of the tax base.

Urban infrastructures have long been a focus of study for urban political ecologists, as networks of metabolic flows that constitute life in the city (Graham, 2000; Heynen et al., 2006; Kaika, 2004; Loftus, 2007; Loftus et al., 2019; Swyngedouw, 2006, 2015). Infrastructures are part of the social production of nature, linking together processes of resource consumption, circulation, and regeneration that form the material and semiotic basis for social reproduction—precisely what makes infrastructure political. Wastewater treatment is perhaps the quintessential example of an urban metabolism, purifying wastes through filtration, sedimentation, oxidation, and microbial decontamination to sustain the quality of local waterways. Yet wastewater infrastructure not only facilitates metabolic processes but is itself a metabolic formation which concretizes “the social relations and material and symbolic conditions of capitalist accumulation” (Ekers and Prudham, 2017: 1371). This idea has been captured in the “wastewaterscape,” which foregrounds the dynamic social relations through which treatment systems are designed, constructed, and operated and the wider economic and ecological systems of which they are apart (Karpouzoglou and Zimmer, 2016). Urban political ecologists have a long tradition of examining political economic relations through water, but wastewater treatment remains a comparably understudied topic, including across the environmental social sciences (Damania et al., 2019; McFarlane and Silver, 2017; Pacheco-Vega, 2015). What critical scholarship does exist has primarily focused on the Global South where sanitation crises are prominent; where related infrastructures may be unevenly developed, informal, or non-existent; and where limited access to sanitation resources is often a direct legacy of colonialism (Anand, 2017; Arefin, 2019; Boland, 2016; McCulligh, 2023; McFarlane, 2008; Ranganathan, 2015). Critical wastewater scholarship from the Global North is less common, even as these systems are increasingly falling into disrepair (Silver, 2021). In the US, access to plumbing and sanitation resources also remains spatially and racially uneven (Deitz and Meehan, 2019; Gasteyer et al., 2016; McFarlane, 2022; Seamster and Purifoy, 2021).

Because their function is to maintain local water quality, wastewater systems are a particularly revealing window into the less visible relations that organize the socioecological reproduction of capitalism; that is, how the ecological conditions that are required for, yet nevertheless degraded by, cycles of capital accumulation are indefinitely renewed. While the role that nature plays in capitalist modes of production has inspired considerable debate amongst Marxist political ecologists (Burkett, 2014[1999]; Castree, 2000; Foster, 2002; Harvey, 1974; Smith [1984]2008), James O'Connor (1988) was the first to consider nature within processes of capitalist reproduction. Specifically, O’Connor probed capital's tendency to degrade the conditions of its own reproduction by exhausting or contaminating natural resource supplies, which he coined ‘the second contradiction of capitalism.’ O’Connor argued that by failing to internalize the costs of reproducing the ecological conditions of production, capital would eventually create its own accumulation barriers. O’Connor's crisis theory elucidates a key contradiction at the centre of an undertheorized form of environmental injustice: externalized environmental degradation is both inherent to the way capitalism functions and is often necessary to resolve for future cycles of accumulation. Capital, in other words, does not just externalize the waste and pollution that result from its production cycles; it also externalizes the reproduction of natural resources and infrastructures critical to its production. Offloading wastewater treatment onto the public sphere is one such example. Private capital benefits by externalizing the reproductive costs of maintaining local water quality and by avoiding the potential accumulation barriers a degraded water supply could present.

While EJ scholarship has been celebrated for disrupting binaries between society and nature, and for bringing social justice into the realm of environmentalism, this scholarship has not yet unpacked the uneven relations of environmental reproduction as a potential source of injustice. An analytical approach to environmental justice that centres the socioecological reproduction of racial capitalism reminds us to question who is left to pick up the ‘metabolic tab’ so to speak—the embodied, ecological, or financial processes that absorb and remediate sources of degradation to maintain urban environments and sustain capitalist cycles of accumulation.

Taking stock of the contemporary water affordability crisis in Detroit and beyond

Household water bills are almost universally on the rise across the US, putting many communities at greater risk of water insecurity (Food & Water Watch, 2018; Mack and Wrase, 2017). Of concern is the widening affordability gap between what it costs to maintain water and sewerage systems, and what a local tax base can reasonably afford. The rollback of government funding since the 1980s, the introduction of costly state and federal water quality regulations, and the financialization of public infrastructure investments through the early twenty-first century have had both quantitative and qualitative implications for the affordability of water and sewer service. Individual ratepayers have been saddled with a significantly greater share of operating costs now inflated by heavy debt service loads. Meanwhile, the accumulating financial strain on local tax bases is further exacerbated by the growing capital improvement costs required to repair or replace aging infrastructure, and to retrofit systems to better manage the effects of climate change.

Post-industrial cities have been particularly hard-hit by these affordability gaps given the age and size of their water and sewerage systems. These infrastructures were built in the first half of the twentieth century to sustain large industrial sectors and growing tax bases—both of which were depressed by subsequent waves of deindustrialization (Silver, 2021). Entrenched patterns of racialized uneven development also bear on the geography of water affordability. Higher rates of water insecurity are typically seen in racialized urban cores where both population and employment rates saw their steepest decline, leaving fewer and lower-income residents to shoulder the costs of overbuilt systems (Meehan et al., 2025). A financialized, austerity-driven municipal water sector has only intensified what Meehan and colleagues call the ‘reproductive squeeze,’ as individuals are forced to accept greater costs for essential services with fewer social supports available. Cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore have experienced rising water insecurity, where utility bills have climbed well beyond government-recognized affordability thresholds and where municipal administrators at one point used residential water shutoffs as a revenue collections strategy. There are few other cities, however, where these trends have had a greater impact on water security than in Detroit: a majority-Black city where nearly 40% of residents live at or below the poverty line and where water bills have risen by 400% over the last two decades (Brown, 2020). In Detroit, the mass scale of water shutoffs, the severity of the city's shutoff policy, and the slow progress on meaningful affordability supports set it apart. As does a fundamentally inequitable cost distribution for wastewater treatment.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, before neoliberal austerity and financialization had taken over municipal infrastructure management, Detroit was already facing down an affordability crisis. As growing numbers of residents struggled to pay their water bills, the DWSD disconnected more than 40,000 households from water and sewer service between 2001 and 2002 (Michigan Chronicle, 2004). The crisis prompted a coalition of grassroots organizers, municipal utility experts and progressive city councillors, spearheaded by the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, to design an income-based water affordability plan (Colton, 2005). The plan sought to implement a fixed credit system that would reduce bills to no more than 3% of household income—down from bills that were averaging between 7 and 21% for many Detroit residents.¹ Detroit City Council approved the affordability plan in 2005, and although the DWSD publicly committed to its implementation, it failed to follow through. Instead, the DWSD offered a limited water assistance program that did not meet residents’ long-term needs.

Absent meaningful affordability supports and the added financial hardship of the 2008-09 Great Recession, ratepayer insolvency deepened. By the time the city filed for municipal bankruptcy in 2013, nearly half the DWSD's customer accounts were in arrears (Dolan, 2014). The state forced the city into Emergency Management, led by Kevyn Orr, who subsumed the authority of Detroit's elected officials under a newly expanded and widely contested set of powers. To force payment on overdue water bills, Orr issued a punitive water shutoff mandate for any household that owed $150 or was 60 days overdue. By the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the city had disconnected more than 170,000 households (Schulz and Alhagri, 2022).

Amidst widespread public condemnation, Orr claimed the shutoffs were part of “fiscally responsible” service provision required to ensure the DWSD “[did not] allow people to tap into public water illegally or ignore their water bills” (Dolan, 2014). DWSD's Director, Darryl Latimer, echoed this position, telling The New York Times that “mass shutoffs were the only way to find the shirkers: those who can pay will do so quickly” (Clark, 2014). Suburban officials amplified decades-old charges that Black Detroiters were swindling the suburbs by forcing them to pay for the city's delinquency (Kornberg, 2016; Mesmer et al., 2020; Quizar, 2020)—a misguided claim even Detroit's pro-shutoff mayor, Mike Duggan, felt compelled to counter. “There is no outside funding from the suburbs… These unpaid water bills are Detroit's alone” (Thompson, 2014). Despite high poverty rates and a struggling local and national economy, public officials repeatedly attributed arrearages to residents’ mismanaged household finances or their desire to cheat the system. By promulgating a series of anti-Black and anti-poor tropes premised on incompetence and corruption, officials sought to rationalize a punitive austerity campaign of mass residential shutoffs that not only intensified water insecurity in the city but contributed to housing abandonment and foreclosures as water debt was converted into property liens (We the People, 2016: 20–23).

Like most municipal utilities, the DWSD considers the provision of water and sanitation a commodified service which can be denied for lack of payment. Grassroots organizations like the People's Water Board Coalition, We the People of Detroit, and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, advocate instead that water be considered a public good and a human right, such that compromising access constitutes an injustice. Many scholars would agree (Helderop et al., 2023; Meshel, 2018; Mesmer et al., 2020; Moody et al., 2022). Several EJ scholars have also drawn parallels between Detroit and Flint, documenting how the two water crises both arose out of institutional configurations organized to advance neoliberal austerity, racial capitalism, and white supremacy (Benz, 2019; Mascarenhas, 2024; Rector, 2022). Their work pushes EJ forward by focusing on the structural relations that engendered forms of racialized environmental harm, as well as the multiple ways communities refuse and counter them.

If we examine EJ in Detroit through a politics of water access, it is possible and necessary to draw parallels to Flint. Both cases exemplify avoidable environmental health crises of water deprivation and contamination. Both crises emerged out of a racial capitalist and austerity-driven political economy that transformed the management of essential public infrastructures into key sites for the accumulation of finance capital. Yet in Detroit's case, we miss something important by failing to consider the role that environmental quality plays in sustaining austerity-driven cycles of accumulation, including how the maintenance of environmental quality can itself constitute a process of racialized dispossession. Under an analytic that foregrounds the racialized politics of managing urban environmental quality, the story of EJ in Detroit takes on a distinct quality from that of Flint. As this paper will show, an overlooked contributor to Detroit's water affordability crisis has been the racialized allocation of costs for wastewater treatment to sustain the uneven development of metropolitan Detroit.

Historicizing Detroit's water affordability crisis: from the postwar to the present

There are several reasons why I investigated Detroit's water affordability crisis through the regulation and financing of the regional wastewater system and the political economic relations that structure water quality management more broadly. In Detroit, unlike many other US cities, the water and sewer systems are managed by one authority,² such that households are invoiced for water consumption and sanitation on a single utility bill. Notably, three quarters of an average residential water bill in Detroit consists of sewage and drainage charges, meaning that the costs of wastewater and stormwater treatment have an outsized impact on affordability. Further still, the postwar expansion of Detroit's wastewater system unfolded at the same time Michigan was strengthening its water quality regulations and as a racialized pattern of uneven development was beginning to shape the metropolitan region.

What follows is a high-level summary of empirical research I conducted over 14 months of fieldwork between August 2018—February 2020. My data collection involved archival research, key informant interviews, a survey of relevant media and grey literature, and non-participatory observation. I reviewed collections at five archival sites in Michigan, sourcing most of my material from the Archives of Michigan in Lansing which maintains extensive collections on Michigan's institutional and legislative history. I focused my search on state departments involved in water quality management, primarily the Michigan Water Resources Commission (MWRC), the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR), and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Records included: water quality reports, meeting minutes, legislative and policy briefs, internal correspondence, and public hearing transcripts on the development of water quality standards and wastewater infrastructure across Michigan; public-facing communications, including newsletters and speeches by state officials on the need for pollution abatement; and departmental budgets and financial documents pertaining to the administration of federal and state wastewater infrastructure funding. I supplemented archival records by reviewing recent grey literature produced by local, regional, and state institutions involved with wastewater management, as well as relevant historical and contemporary news articles. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 key informants made up of institutional and community participants who were positioned to explain more recent wastewater management decisions and their impacts on water affordability. This included state water quality regulators, enforcement officers, and financing administrators; state legislators introducing water affordability bills; former and current wastewater facility operators; senior management at DWSD and GLWA; municipal policy analysts, regional planners, and county drain commissioners; and lawyers from the ACLU and the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center representing residents impacted by shutoffs. Community participants were primarily associated with the People's Water Board Coalition, We the People of Detroit, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, and the Detroit chapter of the Sierra Club. Finally, I conducted non-participatory observation of public meetings hosted by the DWSD and GLWA, as well as suburban town halls on local water quality issues.

Cumulatively, this data enabled me to (i) chart the growth of Michigan's water quality management capacities as expressed through infrastructure and regulatory development; (ii) identify the regulatory, legal, and political decisions that informed how wastewater treatment costs were allocated across system users; and (iii) trace the emergence of public contestation over water affordability and public infrastructure management. Broadly, this research examines Detroit's wastewater system as a key point of struggle in negotiating the socioecological reproduction of racial capitalism in southeast Michigan. Below, I focus on the uneven financial burden Detroiters came to bear for wastewater and stormwater treatment, arguing this constitutes its own form of injustice based in the uneven politics of reproducing environmental quality.

i. Introducing Municipal Wastewater Treatment to Southeast Michigan

While the postwar period is commonly characterized by moments of accelerated economic growth and shifting racial geographies, these decades also saw the expansion of state capacities to regulate the environment. As I have documented elsewhere, this period marked a significant shift in how state and federal officials understood the economic function of water and the necessity of maintaining water quality for the future of Detroit's industrial manufacturing sector (Van Lier, 2023). Although the state's authority to intervene in matters of water pollution date back to the 1929 passage of Public Act 245, discharging wastes into local waterways remained a legal and normative practice. The onset of the Great Depression, followed by WWII, stalled out initial state efforts to control water quality. Through the war, Detroit's auto industries transitioned to armament manufacturing and accelerated production schedules took their toll on southeast Michigan's waterways. Portions of the St Clair, Detroit, and Rouge Rivers became slick with oil and industrial debris; raw sewage hugged the water corridor's shoreline; and millions of gallons of industrial wastes entered these waters daily, including acids, pulp mill liquors, chemical plant effluents, and cooling waters contaminated with salts and metal ions (Adams, 1947). At the close of the war, exasperated officials at the MWRC began to lobby state lawmakers to renew Michigan's commitment to water pollution abatement and to strengthen the MWRC's mandate.

Public apathy for environmental quality undermined these efforts, however, and few legislators were swayed to take up a political issue their constituents did not deem pressing. By the mid-1940s, Detroiters had grown accustomed to two major improvements in the management of municipal wastes. The upgrading of rudimentary sewer lines installed in the mid-nineteenth century had stemmed the flow of raw sewage through most city streets and the chlorination of contaminated drinking water worked to curtail cholera, typhoid, and dysentery epidemics in the 1910s. For many local residents (the vast majority of them white and middle class), these interventions had given rise to a “prevailing public attitude of indifference” to worsening water quality (Adams, 1948). Similarly, Detroit's large industrial manufacturing sector, much of which was congregated along the banks of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers, had little appetite for the costs of installing wastewater treatment.

Of course, the benefits of early sewer systems and water chlorination were socially and spatially uneven. The growth of Detroit's auto industry in the 1910s added 100 square miles to the city in less than ten years, quickly outstripping the city's capacity to extend its water and sewer infrastructure. By the early 1920s, only 20% of residents were connected to water infrastructure, with the vast majority relying on well or river water. Working class communities downstream of Detroit, including in Wyandotte, Ecorse, Trenton, and River Rouge, continued to bear the risks of typhoid epidemics as they were subjected to increasing amounts of sewage in the lower Detroit and Rouge Rivers (Adams, 1948). The risks of waterborne illnesses also remained high for the city's steadily growing community of Black auto workers. Between 1920 and 1940, their numbers had nearly tripled from 41,000 to 149,000 thanks to the availability of factory jobs (Sugrue, 1996). While high employment rates and the growth of Black-owned businesses in Paradise Valley had pushed many Black Detroiters into the middle classes, the vast majority were confined to living in overcrowded neighbourhoods, like Black Bottom, that typically did not offer indoor plumbing (Rector, 2022). During this period, local Black civil rights and labour organizers were focused on confronting housing segregation and workplace discrimination. These movements certainly sought to improve the quality of Black living and working environments, but water quality itself was not yet a priority issue.

Despite feeble public support, several years of the MWRC's lobbying convinced Michigan lawmakers to amend Act 245. The MWRC was now authorized to regulate new or increased discharges into state waters by establishing mandates for wastewater treatment. While the MWRC was slow to set real limits on industrial dischargers, it doubled down on efforts to curb municipal sewage.³ The largest burden for wastewater treatment thus landed on the public sector. The MWRC began to issue orders for the construction of municipal wastewater treatment plants, but soon found it was ill equipped to contend with municipalities’ less-than-favourable responses.

ii. Establishing Wastewater Treatment as a Condition of Capitalist Development

The postwar years mark a period when southeast Michigan's political economy was becoming more entangled with the state's expanding environmental regulatory authority while simultaneously undergoing a transformative process of racialized suburbanization. By 1950, the rural fringes of metro Detroit were seeing population growth rates of over 80% (Johnson, 2010: 48). To the west of the city, small urban developments had grown around the sprawling auto plants in Dearborn, where there was space enough to accommodate the single-floor assembly lines characteristic of Fordist production systems. With the introduction of federal housing subsidies following WWII, clusters of housing developments gave birth to villages and townships in Oakland and Macomb counties to the north and northeast. Between 1940 and 1970, the population of Oakland County almost quadrupled in size, from just over 254,068 to 907,871, while Macomb County grew by almost six times, from 107,638 to 625,309 (Kruse and Sugrue, 2006). Because of legalized racial segregation and the anti-Black hostilities that persisted after civil rights organizers struck segregation down, almost the entirety of this suburban population growth was white (Farley et al., 2000).

Yet on the precipice of this growth, minimal wastewater infrastructure existed in the regions outside Detroit. In the immediate postwar years, most American cities lacked the infrastructures required to accommodate rapid rates of urbanization and the MWRC was eager to generate investment in wastewater treatment facilities before suburban communities could pose a serious threat to local water quality. State officials also viewed municipal wastewater treatment as part of a regional economic investment strategy (Interstate Conference on Water Problems, 1960). The benefits of installing municipal wastewater infrastructure would not only support future suburban development but attract and facilitate industrial expansion as industrial water pollution was slowly coming under state scrutiny. Whether or not suburban officials recognized the need to improve water quality, they argued in a series of MWRC hearings over wastewater violations that the state was putting the cart before the horse. While high rates of urban and industrial growth intensified the need to install wastewater treatment infrastructure, financing was dependent on sufficiently growing the tax base. Suburban officials were having a difficult time generating voter consensus on infrastructure plans that were both capacity- and cost-appropriate (MWRC, 1952).

As wastewater financing proposals were repeatedly rejected by suburban voters across the metropolitan region, the state's progress stalled out (Attorney General Files, 1953: 2). With no legal enforcement power, the MWRC had little recourse outside the courts to compel municipalities to accept responsibility for wastewater treatment, a route the state pursued but which was slow and onerous. A more efficient strategy emerged when the Michigan Health Department (MHD) began refusing sewer permits for new suburban and industrial developments until wastewater treatment plans were in place. The MHD asserted that under the amended Act 245, it could not allow the introduction of new sources of pollution into state waters. By placing restrictions on suburban development, the state had found a means to force through compliance with its wastewater mandates.

Sewer permit denials became a significant economic barrier for suburban municipalities where no wastewater treatment plants existed or where existing facilities were already under MWRC violation orders. Permit denials soon became known as “construction bans” because developers could not legally construct or successfully market buildings with no sewer access. A 1958 “ban” in southern Macomb County, for example, frustrated economic development across two thirds of the fastest growing county in Michigan (Detroit News, 1966). In 1959, a “ban” in western Wayne County cut down local development by 60% and spiked unemployment rates in the construction sector, leaving 65,000 jobs hanging in the balance (MHD, 1961). Denied sewer permits also had the effect of slowing residential construction at a time when the demand for suburban housing was intensifying, spurred on by white Detroiters looking to distance themselves from the city's increasingly disaffected and politically organized Black community (Sugrue, 1996: 194–97).

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, Black organizers were priming the ground for major civil rights wins, including successfully pushing for a Detroit City ordinance that outlawed racial discrimination in property sales or rentals. Black families in turn began moving into historically white neighbourhoods, despite facing significant hostility from white neighbourhood associations. The Detroit Congress on Racial Equity organized tenant rights groups in the city while the NAACP took the fight for fair housing to the regional (and national) scale, holding open housing drives in suburban communities like Dearborn and Livonia, whose populations were less than 1% Black (Farley et al., 2000). In 1963, more than 120,000 Detroiters marched down Woodward Avenue in the Walk to Freedom, Martin Luther King among them. Many of these organizing successes were overshadowed, however, by the notoriety of the Detroit Rebellion in 1967, an unplanned uprising against police brutality and anti-Black discrimination that led to five days of armed conflict with federal, state, and local police, and the death of 43 people. Following the Rebellion, the demand for housing in whites-only suburbs quadrupled that of the previous decade. In this heightened climate, coupled with industrial flight and intensifying intraregional competition, the “construction bans” often put enough pressure on suburban officials to force through municipal wastewater treatment proposals. By manufacturing a barrier to development that had both economic and racial repercussions, Michigan transformed wastewater infrastructure into an essential condition for white suburbanization across the metropolitan region.

Nevertheless, suburban tax bases remained fiscally limited. As a result, several communities sought to contract wastewater treatment services with the DWSD. While many suburbs were generally opposed to increased dependence on Detroit, the desire to resolve or avoid MHD “construction bans” often won out. Between 1950 and 1962, 28 suburban communities signed contracts with the DWSD, more than doubling the number of suburban sewer customers it served—the largest burst of growth in the system's history (Daisy, 2000).

Although DWSD personnel raised initial objections to infrastructural regionalization, including the fear that expanding the system would accelerate already high rates of capital flight, federal water quality mandates also made regionalization a necessity for Detroit. In 1966, federal officials concerned by the downstream growth of toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie ordered Detroit to reduce 90% of its phosphorus loadings by 1970. Detroit was mandated to install secondary treatment, a process that metabolizes suspended or dissolved particles using microbes and oxidation. DWSD leadership reasoned that such significant upgrade costs on such an expedited timeline would be more easily absorbed by a larger customer base (DDWS, 1966). Beginning in the late 1960s, the DWSD entered contract negotiations for wastewater treatment with another 20 communities. By 1974, the DWSD served a total of 73 suburbs, quadrupling the size of its service area to a massive 944 square miles (Daisy, 2000).

iii. Administering Wastewater Treatment Across a Segregated Service Area

By the mid-1970s, Detroit became the primary purveyor of wastewater treatment which it now had to administer across an economically competitive, unevenly developing, and racially segregated metropolitan area. The DWSD was facing an estimated cost of $922 million (approximately $26 billion in 2025 dollars) to bring the treatment plant into regulatory compliance (Rector, 2022). Although Detroit received almost $300 million in government funding towards these upgrades, the US was also entering a period where neoliberal restructuring was rolling back wastewater construction grants, even as water quality standards were being strengthened. By the late 1980s, municipal debt-financing had replaced government grants, a policy that transferred the economic burden for maintaining water quality—now inflated by debt service—onto users of the system.

The rescaling of financial responsibility for wastewater improvements also occurred as signs of regional stagnation were materializing and as racial and class segregation deepened across metropolitan Detroit. With a Black population of 75%, Detroit was surrounded by suburbs that were anywhere from 71 to 92% white. And while poverty and unemployment rates in Detroit climbed to 21.9% and 18.5% respectively through the 1980s, they were at all-time lows in the suburbs. By 1990, few other urban regions in the US had become as starkly segregated along lines of race and class (Farley et al., 2000).

This also meant the wastewater system—a public asset critical to regional development—was owned by a majority-Black city with Black administrators at the helm of the DWSD. This shifting balance of power made the DWSD politically vulnerable to suburban politicking, especially when it had to impose contentious (albeit federally mandated) sewer rate increases in the majority-white suburbs. Although the metropolitan area was jurisdictionally fragmented and economically variegated, it often functioned as a sociopolitical and economic block in relation to Detroit. Most suburban officials were aligned in their efforts to capture control of the wastewater system, which held considerable economic appeal. The ability to direct where and how the system was to be expanded provided an advantage in directing economic growth in the region. “Whoever controls where the sewer and water pipes go influences where development—or sprawl—follows” (Detroit Free Press, 1999). With state mandates for systemwide improvements also came multi-million-dollar engineering contracts. The ability to make hiring decisions and to award contracts was particularly appealing as unemployment rates climbed not only in Detroit, but in portions of the metropolitan region. As DWSD Board member, Mary Blackmon, put it in 1988, “it's not just the bottom financial line here. What does the community get for this? It's power” (Bebow, 2002).

To seize control of the system, state representatives across metro Detroit sponsored a series of legislative proposals known as “takeover bills”. These bills proposed alternative management configurations that established either majority suburban representation on DWSD's Board of Water Commissioners or transferred managerial control to an altogether new regional authority. Submitted almost annually from 1976 until the mid 2000s, the Detroit Free Press (1999) dubbed this legislative onslaught “takeover fever”. To rationalize the bills, state representatives disparaged the managerial capacity of DWSD's largely Black administration and staff, routinely attributing historical and structural operating challenges to their “incompetence”. The DWSD was characterized as “chronically mismanaged,” lacking in “transparency” and “credibility,” and was accused of “swindling the suburbs” (Ball, 1975; Bennett, 1976; Detroit Free Press, 1979; English, 1980; Roach, 1976; Warren, 1976a, 1976b; Weingarten, 1978). Detroit's increasingly impoverished majority-Black customer base was also disparaged for ostensibly forcing the suburbs to subsidize their delinquency. In contrast, white stewardship was essentialized as a natural and necessary corrective and a return to “sound management principles” (Thompson, 2014). Suburban officials also whitewashed their proposed takeovers with terms like “fair representation,” “equity,” and “cooperation” to render benign the imposition of white authority over DWSD decision-making. In the eyes of many suburban constituents, these accusations had the added effect of moralizing the white suburban leaders seeking to right the wrongs of “Black mismanagement.”

Detroiters saw things very differently.

The assault on the DWSD is read in Detroit as an attempt by white suburbs to take over an asset owned by a city with a black mayor and a black majority population. It is seen in the context of a decade of proposals to regionalize or transfer control to outsiders of everything from Belle Isle to the bus system (Detroit Free Press, 1984).

Local resistance to the bills was substantial and largely united. DWSD officials lobbied state legislators against the takeover bills. Detroit-based legislators publicly denounced the bills and strategized with city officials on how to defeat them. Detroit City Council passed resolutions against the bills. Grassroots organizers in Detroit drew on their extensive community networks to publicly condemn the proposed takeover of the DWSD, working in coalition with groups defending other municipal assets in Detroit from suburban interference (Jeffries, 2011a, 2011b). Thanks to this resistance, and the emptiness of suburban criticisms whenever subjected to scrutiny, the takeover bills failed.

The state legislature was not the only site of struggle, however. Suburban officials also made use of the court, initiating dozens of rate disputes between 1975 and 1999. Suburban officials litigated the DWSD's rate setting methodology, as well as most sewer and drainage rate increases. Despite their necessity to meet state and federal water quality standards, suburban officials peddled claims that the increases were without cause. They alleged, without empirical evidence, that suburban customers were being overcharged. By mobilizing anti-Black stereotypes, suburban claimants strategically reinforced for their constituents that any rate increase was evidence of the fiscal incompetence and corruption of DWSD leadership.

iv. Racializing the Financial Burden for Wastewater Management

Decades of suburban litigation impacted how DWSD was able to manage the wastewater system. At times, this litigation compromised the DWSD's revenue stream and its ability to bond for capital improvements or to access federal grants. In fact, when Oakland County sued the DWSD over rate increases in 1975, the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) took the litigation as evidence the DWSD could not guarantee revenues for system improvements to reach federal compliance (USEPA, 1978). As a result, the USEPA launched its own lawsuit against Detroit in 1977, placing the DWSD under federal receivership. This arrangement lasted more than 30 years, in part because ongoing suburban litigation slowed the DWSD's progress on resolving its wastewater violations. The DWSD was also under pressure from the city to appease suburban customers in the hopes of maintaining productive business relationships—even when it meant subjecting Detroit ratepayers to inequitable terms (D’Anieri, 2007). Over time, the rate disputes worked to politicize the augmentation and distribution of sewer charges and eventually, to concentrate a greater share of regional wastewater costs in Detroit city proper.

By far, the most significant redistribution of costs came through the 1999 Rate Settlement Agreement that resolved a series of disputes involving charges for stormwater controls. The agreement institutionalized what became known as the “83-17 split”. Moving forward, Detroiters would be consigned to pay 83% of the capital improvement and operating costs for facilities to control stormwater overflows that occurred during heavy precipitation. The remaining 17% would be distributed amongst DWSD's suburban customers in Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland counties. Suburban officials argued they should not bear responsibility since most suburban sewer systems dealt with their stormwater separately. Yet wastewater masterplans showed a sizeable amount of suburban groundwater infiltration and excess stormwater regularly entered the DWSD system. Furthermore, the mandated upgrades involved expanding the capacity of other shared infrastructural components, including interceptor sewers and the treatment plant itself (Mobley interview, 2019). Some DWSD administrators also questioned the notion that suburban customers did not need to contribute to resolving the structural inefficiencies which were endemic to the system as opposed to users in Detroit (Hudson interview, 2022). Despite its inequitable terms, the DWSD consented to the cost distribution, eager to end the litany of rate disputes which had stymied its response to federal wastewater mandates (D’Anieri, 2007). In turn, white suburbanites were empowered to disavow a sizeable share of the costs for requisite stormwater improvements.

To date, the cost of the DWSD's stormwater program has exceeded $1.5 billion. At the time the “83-17 split” was negotiated, it was estimated that over the coming decade, Detroit ratepayers would see a 76.3% increase above 1999 sewer rates, while suburban ratepayers would see a 2.8% decrease (Rate Settlement Agreement, 1999). Yet Detroit's tax base was already strained by the limited economic growth of the 1990s, persistently high unemployment and poverty rates in the city, and the need to manage an overbuilt infrastructural system with a declining customer base. Today, Detroit's per capita share of the system's users sits at approximately 20% (Hudson interview, 2022). Under these conditions, a growing number of Detroit households could not absorb rising water bills under the “83-17 split.”

The disproportionate economic burden Detroit residents have carried for wastewater management has exacerbated an acute water affordability crisis in the city. In response, grassroots organizations like the People's Water Board Coalition, We the People of Detroit, and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, have built a large and growing contingent of frontline community members, city and suburban organizers, community researchers, policy analysts, academics, environmental lawyers, city council members, and state representatives to confront Detroit's water insecurity. A primary objective is the development of a statewide income-based water affordability plan that would cap residential water and sewer bills at 3% of household income for qualifying residents. While the DWSD resisted these efforts for nearly 20 years, persistent pressure from water affordability advocates is now gaining traction. In June 2022, the City of Detroit and the DWSD announced the introduction of a “Lifeline Rate” pilot program, which offers low-income residents a fixed rate for a predetermined quantity of water. Perhaps most significant is the cancellation of outstanding water and sewer debt for participating households, who are also exempt from shutoffs. The program, however, does not yet have a permanent funding source to sustain the lifeline rate beyond 2027. Furthermore, only 20,000 of the DWSD's 60,000 residential accounts in arrears have been deemed eligible for the plan (Rahman, 2022).

This coalition of affordability advocates has also built momentum and bipartisan support for statewide water affordability legislation, with the most recent iteration falling only a few votes short of becoming law in December 2024. At the time of writing, the affordability bill had been reintroduced in the state Senate, albeit with a condition that would allow water utilities to withdraw from the state program if they provide other forms of assistance. The ongoing burden of unaffordable water bills and the risk of shutoffs remain a real concern for tens of thousands of Detroiters who have fallen behind on bill payments but who do not qualify for support. Redistributing cost sharing under the “83-17 split” would go a long way towards aiding these households and would help to shrink the system's wider affordability gap by expanding the customer base responsible for shouldering stormwater costs. Through 2020 and 2021, a joint committee of DWSD and GLWA officials did meet to discuss cost redistribution but concluded the legal agreements and contracts in which the “83-17 split” is set forth make the policy “logistically challenging” to renegotiate (Whitaker, 2021). Such lack of political will means the region's most vulnerable residents will continue to shoulder an inequitable share of wastewater treatment costs that puts their water security at risk.

Who pays for and who benefits from managing urban water quality?

Detroit's racialized water affordability crisis has emerged out of a series of contestations over the multi-scalar management of water quality across metropolitan Detroit. Since the early postwar years, suburban, state, and federal officials came to organize and ultimately racialize the regulation and financing of Detroit's wastewater system—infrastructure that became essential to facilitating racialized uneven development during an era of expanded environmental regulation in Michigan. By the early twenty-first century, the balance of operational control over the wastewater system had accrued in the majority-white suburbs while a disproportionate share of costs for wastewater and stormwater management were foisted onto the city of Detroit proper. The city's contemporary affordability crisis has thus materialized out of a socially and spatially uneven logic for managing urban water quality that has placed the heaviest burden on majority-Black Detroit. I argue this dynamic adds an alternative dimension to longstanding conceptions of environmental injustice that are framed primarily around exposure to environmental harm.

While these empirics are specific to Detroit,⁴ what travels is an approach to EJ centered on the uneven politics of managing environmental quality. An analytic framework that draws together racial capitalist theory on urban dispossession and uneven development with political ecology theory on urban metabolisms and capitalist reproduction, can elucidate both i) the metabolic necessity of renewing natural resources to sustain capital accumulation and ii) the ways processes and responsibilities for maintaining environmental quality become mediated and institutionalized through anti-Black and anti-poor logics. This framework also offers scholars working at the intersections of racial capitalism and urban geography a means to examine the socioecological dimensions of the built environment through the ways racialized communities may be conscripted to maintain the condition of urban natures and infrastructures. Similarly, for scholars of racial capitalism and urban political ecology, this paper demonstrates how the reproduction of urban environmental quality can become a terrain through which the racialized norms and hierarchies that legitimate processes of capitalist exploitation are established and contested.

An expanded analysis of EJ is also a timely undertaking given worsening ecological crises. While additional empirical study is needed to interrogate the social and political dynamics behind processes of managing environmental quality, Detroit's case suggests there may be undiagnosed discrepancies in how different communities have or will be made responsible for maintaining ecologically precarious urban spaces. Another potential area of application is the global balancing of costs between the Global North and South for climate mitigation and adaptation. It has been well established that the countries least responsible for climate change are those who will bear its worst environmental consequences. Political and ecological economists and proponents of the climate justice movement alike have qualified this imbalance as “climate debt,” the legacy of centuries of imperialism, colonialism, and extractive capitalism for which the Global North owes financial compensation (Mohan, 2025; Perry, 2021; Warlenius, 2018). North-South climate financing has typically allocated funds for climate mitigation over adaptation, however, requiring developing countries to prioritize the reduction of emissions before adapting their built environments to better manage climate hazards (Adow, 2020). Climate policy analysts have argued this arrangement has worked to shield the Global North from its share of responsibility for emissions targets by relying on developing countries to make up the difference (Dafermos, 2025). Thus, whether environmental quality interventions take the form of remediating pollution, reducing emissions, or retrofitting infrastructures, it bears consideration how the costs and benefits of these improvements are distributed. This question becomes even more crucial to ask where greenwashing and technocentrism are expanding the reach of capitalist markets and turning environmental management into a realm for profit-making (Cohen et al., 2022; Huff and Brock, 2023).

It is unfortunately the case that in the US, most public infrastructures are managed in ways that prioritize capital accumulation over and above the provision of essential public services (Cramer, 2015). Yet as LaDuke and Cowen (2020) argue, infrastructures, while always political, are not inherently unjust. Rather, they are possible and necessary sites to build social relations that foreground “justice, decolonization, and planetary survival” (245). Communities across the US are already engaged in this work. Among them are Detroit's water justice and affordability advocates who have long been challenging capitalist infrastructure management by advocating for water as a public good. I argue, however, that building a just and lasting politics of water access in Detroit must also contend with the uneven financial burden communities bear for managing environmental quality. In addition to alleviating sources of environmental harm, the pursuit of EJ must work to reconfigure the relations that prioritize the use of nature and public infrastructures for capital accumulation over community wellbeing. A key consideration in this pursuit involves taking stock of who pays for and who benefits from maintaining environmental quality.

Highlights

I offer a novel conceptualization of environmental injustice that is predicated on the uneven burden low-income and racialized communities bear for reproducing environmental quality

This understanding departs from more common framings of environmental injustice as the uneven exposure to environmental harms

I offer a case study in which I historicize Detroit's ongoing residential water affordability crisis by focusing on the uneven management of regional wastewater infrastructure across metro Detroit's geography of racialized uneven development

I document how low-income, majority-Black residents in Detroit city proper have born a greater share of the costs for maintaining regional wastewater and stormwater infrastructure to the benefit of the majority white, middle-class suburban users of the system, including the use of anti-Black logics to rationalize this discrepancy

I make use of a theoretical framework focused on the socioecological reproduction of racial capitalism, which foregrounds: i) how capital externalizes not just the wastes that result from its production cycles, but the costs of repairing and reproducing the environmental resources and infrastructures critical to its production; and ii) how the social relations that guide the reproduction of environmental quality can become mediated and institutionalized through anti-Black racism and anti-poor bias

Ultimately, I argue that a more comprehensive approach to environmental justice includes asking who pays for and who benefits from reproducing environmental quality

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and incisive comments. I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr Rea Zaimi and Dr Bruce Braun for their engagement with an early version of the paper at the Antipode Foundation's 9th Institute for the Geographies of Justice. Any remaining errors are my own.

Data availability

The research data used for this manuscript is not publicly available.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval and informed consent

All interviews that were conducted as part of this research used an informed consent process that underwent ethics review and approval at the University of Toronto.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was completed with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fulbright Foundation.

Notes

ORCID iD

Nicole Van Lier

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