RESTORING A RIVER, RE‐STORYING HISTORY

This essay zooms in on an unloved stretch of Philadelphia's tidal Schuylkill River, long home to the largest petroleum refinery on the United States’ East Coast, the cradle of petromodernity. In the aftermath of the refinery's spectacular explosion in 2019, city officials were confronted b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of urban and regional research Vol. 46; no. 4; pp. 660 - 673
Main Author Wiggin, Bethany
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 01.07.2022
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects
Community involvement
Community participation
Community research
community‐based research
data poverty
Governance
Marshes
Marshlands
Participatory research
Petroleum
Petroleum refineries
Petroleum refining
petromodernity
Poverty
Refineries
refinery
Research methodology
Research methods
Research projects
Residents
restoration
river
Rivers
sacrifice zones
Sacrifices
Storytelling
Texture
university partnerships
Urban poverty
Wetlands
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Summary:This essay zooms in on an unloved stretch of Philadelphia's tidal Schuylkill River, long home to the largest petroleum refinery on the United States’ East Coast, the cradle of petromodernity. In the aftermath of the refinery's spectacular explosion in 2019, city officials were confronted by the data poverty in this sacrifice zone where many residents live in analog poverty. The essay contributes to our understanding of urban waters in two ways. First, it uncovers the shape and texture of the sacrifices made to dry out and urbanize wetlands, exploring how and by whom this former marshland has been made into what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls a ‘forgotten place’. Second, it presents a set of interrelated community‐based participatory research projects designed to document the inhabitants’ lived experiences—glaringly absent from existing environmental data collected across different levels of governance and largely missing from the historical record. The essay explores embodied research methods and storytelling as tools to build and sustain academic–community alliances.
Bibliography:I want to thank Nikhil Anand, Lalitha Kamath, Pranjal Deekshit, Tathagat Bhatia, Anushri Tiwari, Simran Sumbre, Luna Sarti, Martin Premoli and all the student fellows, who together helped to realize the comparative and deeply collaborative research project
Rising Waters
Our discussions and your wise words rang in my ears while writing this essay. I would also like to thank students at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, and especially Maggie McNulty and Alex Imbot, for their contributions to
Futures Beyond Refining
a project co‐ideated by the graduate students in my environmental humanities seminar in Fall 2019. I'd like to thank Professor Peter DeCarlo (Johns Hopkins University), Dr Marilyn Howarth (Penn Medicine), and Mr and Mrs Charles and Tammy Reeves (Tasker Morris Neighbors) for their various and vital contributions to the work discussed here, and especially acknowledge the eighth‐grade teachers and students at Alcorn Middle School and Germantown Friends School who welcomed university‐based researchers into their classrooms and walked and toured the former refinery's fenceline with us. The project was made possible by the Making a Difference in Diverse Communities Research Grant awarded by the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Additional field research was supported by the National Geographic Foundation.
ISSN:0309-1317
1468-2427
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.13091