Greening the color line: historicizing water infrastructure redevelopment and environmental justice in the St. Louis metropolitan region

In 2011 the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District developed a geographically bifurcated gray and green approach addressing aging sanitary and stormwater infrastructure in the region. This approach maps tightly to the region’s persistent patterns of racial segregation allocating green infrastructure to areas of North St. Louis which is majority Black and where significant disinvestment has taken place. While green infrastructure often is hailed as a more equitable way to address urban flooding, a crucial question remains as to how urban greening strategies grapple with persistent urban inequities. This article examines the relationship between geographically uneven infrastructural investments and persistent urban inequities. Drawing on six months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork on St. Louis’s wastewater redevelopment project, I argue that racial capitalism must be incorporated as a framework through which to analyze the equity dimensions of infrastructure redevelopment projects. I found that rather than contend with path dependencies of structural racism, St. Louis’s approach to wastewater redevelopment relies on geographies of racial capitalism to save costs, subjecting marginalized communities to cost-saving approaches with no measures or plans to measure benefits beyond stormwater retention.