Explores how sea level rise and flooding are amplified by the design of cities, presents built environment strategies to manage flood risk, and considers issues of climate justice.

This chapter explains how racial residential segregation affects the health of Black Americans. Housing is highly racially segregated in most American cities. While this occurs to some extent because people want to live with other people similar to them, it is primarily due to governmental policies and private business practices that created widespread residential segregation by severely restricting where Black people could live. The neighborhoods to which Black Americans were relegated were typically in undesirable areas, physically separated from the larger community, and containing few resources. Once these neighborhoods were created, the practices of banks (e.g., refusing loans) and real estate firms (e.g., restrictive covenants) made it difficult for Black Americans to improve these areas or to leave them. Living in these neighborhoods makes poverty more likely, which, by itself, is associated with poorer health. These neighborhoods are also more likely to have high levels of environmental toxins (e.g., polluted air and water), limited availability of healthy food, unhealthy built environments (e.g., dangerous housing, absence of green spaces), and limited access to healthcare. In sum, residential segregation, which is the product of anti-Black racism, creates living conditions that threaten Black Americans’ health.

Climate change and other global processes shape and are shaped by local process such as land use change. Does the idea of sustainability help us take account of both human well-being and the environment at the local and global level? To answer, we have to unpack what is involved in decision-making and what sustainability means. Decisions are made in multiple roles: consumer, citizen, role model for others, organizational participant, investor, and resource manager. In all of these roles, context, including inequalities, shapes opportunities and constraints and thus decisions. Context often reflects a long history of previous decisions, including discrimination. Thus context and choice are two views of the same process.

Legacies of past institutionalized political discrimination reverberate in present-day patterns of commercial drinking water consumption. We investigate several case studies – redlining, the Voting Rights Act implementation in North Carolina, institutionalized neglect in Appalachia, and political marginalization of Hispanics in the Southwest – to illustrate the relationship between moral distrust of government and citizen-consumer behavior. We find that areas redlined in the 1930s are more likely to host present-day water kiosks. Parts of North Carolina protected by the Voting Rights Act in 1965 have lower present-day bottled water sales than unprotected areas. Counties located within Appalachia have higher bottled water sales than counties outside of Appalachia. Water kiosks in the Southwest today are most likely to be located in predominantly Hispanic communities. Commercial water companies capitalize upon these legacies of moral distrust to market commercial water products to politically marginalized populations. “Cultural” preferences for commercial water stem from citizen-consumers’ beliefs about the competence and morality of government.

Chapter 5 extends our framework to credit markets, which are not usually analyzed by scholars of the welfare state, yet fulfill many of the same income-smoothing functions. Much like in private insurance markets, more and better information allows for better risk classification, which enables lenders to tie interest rates more directly to default risk. This results in inequality because individuals with a higher risk of default are almost always lower income, and more information either raise their interest rates or cut them off from credit markets altogether. The welfare state matters, too, because generous social protection lowers default risk – something lenders take into account. Based on a data set containing the 39 million single-family loans that Freddie Mac purchased or guaranteed in the past two decades, we show that the interest rate spread markedly increased over time and we test, using a regression discontinuity design, whether information could have plausibly caused this increase. We also test whether social protection influences access to credit for different income groups and find that it does.

Argued February 27, 1974.Decided July 25, 1974.

Chief Justice ADAMS delivered the opinion of the Court.1

The question in this case is simple: may a federal court impose a multidistrict, area-wide school desegregation remedy when doing so is necessary to cure a constitutional violation in a single school district? The answer is yes because Brown v. Board of Education requires it.

Chapter 3, “Architecture,” offers a historical explanation of aesthetic change. Commentators agree that architectural modernism had crested by 1980. But how could far-flung actors more-or-less simultaneously come to prefer, say, pitched roofs over flat ones? Rather than assuming that modernism’s end was natural or inevitable, this chapter recovers the process by which one set of forms displaced another. The analysis toggles between a macro account introducing the concept of welfare state modernism, and a micro account examining its fate in Milton Keynes. From the early 1970s, a new generation of architects arrived eager to renew their modernist inheritance. At the same time, building societies conveyed reluctance about offering mortgages to non-traditional houses. Since this policy threatened the corporation’s ability to sell its housing, a faction engineered a survey to undermine modernist features. By altering the criteria against which housing was judged, this survey resulted in instructions to future architects to design in neo-traditional styles. In this way, a public sector body born of the welfare state became enlisted in the project of eliminating welfare state modernism.