Book Review: Lindsey Dillon, Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco

This is a review of geographer Lindsey Dillon's 2024 book Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco. A majority of the book describes remediation following the designation of a former Naval shipyard for Superfund. But Dillon provincializes the US Navy as one in a series of polluters who produced southeastern San Francisco as a wasteland (Voyles, 2015) and, consequently, as one of several political bodies invested in its quick conversion into developable land. Against the displacing forces of redevelopment, Dillon charts a continuous history of Black-led activism. Since the 1960s, Black activists in southeastern SF understood housing, health care, and jobs as fundamentally environmental issues. Dillon argues that we understand their efforts at “counterplanning” as environmental justice work that precedes and exceeds the field’s codification in the 1980s and 90s. The book’s third chapter, “The Politics of Environmental Repair” could stand alone as an introduction to contemporary environmental justice, anchored by a concise survey of the federal Superfund trust and a nuanced discussion of the politics of risk that form the foundation for modern cleanup programs. But Toxic City is best approached as a whole: Dillon returns consistently to the question of what it means for activists to appeal to the state for repair when it’s largely the state who has done the harm. This is her most interesting provocation, and a tall order she doesn’t entirely fill. It’s an ethical question that allows Toxic City to contribute to several bodies of literature, including environmental justice, theories of waste and its remediation, and an emerging literature on the afterlives of domestic sites of US militarism (see Krupar 2013; Reno 202; Cram 2023; Taylor 2024).