RACE AND ENVIRONMENTAL EQUITYA GIS BASED SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

Environmental equity has recently emerged as an important issue both in the media and within the Federal government. The issue of environmental equity refers to whether people bear the burden of our technological advances – environmental pollution - evenly across society. In particular, the issue addresses whether or not racial minority and low-income communities bear a disproportionate share of exposure to pollution and environmental risk. This study has two main objectives: 1 ) To determine the extent of environmental inequity in the city of Providence and to provide a measure of the hazardous exposure to various socio-economic strata to study whether inequity, if present, is related to race. 2) To compare the results of analysis, based on (a) the traditional approach using census block groups as the unit of analysis, with (b) the GIS based approach using the domains of influence of each toxic release site as the unit of analysis