White Flight
Essential Questions: What natural and social factors caused “White Flight” from the cities to suburbs? What are the environmental implications of White Flight?
Standards:
ESS3: Human Impacts on Earth’s Systems
LS2 Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
Mathematical and Computational Thinking (SEP)
Photos: NASA
Growth of Beijing (left) and Las Vegas (right) over 30 years.
Most people are familiar with the idea of urbanization — a mass migration to cities, often for job opportunities. Because cities are far removed from nature, students may be surprised to know that living in a city is usually more environmentally-friendly than living somewhere rural. City dwellers occupy less land, take public transportation, travel shorter distances, and power smaller homes. Students can consider what other variables influence a person’s carbon footprint -- an interesting one to discuss in a justice-oriented classroom is the strong predictive power of socioeconomic status on GHG emissions. There are an endless number of carbon footprint calculators (online and on paper) that can break the variables down for students. Many provide quantitative estimations and help conceptualize what these numbers mean.
Urbanization was the prevailing trend throughout most of the twentieth century, a second phenomenon, urban sprawl, emerged in the 1950s, the same time period which saw white Americans leaving the cities for suburbs in what is now known as “White Flight.” As (white) Americans moved away from the cities, the sprawling suburbs effectively canceled any environmental gains of urbanization. Homes in the suburbs tend to be larger and consume more energy; most residents must commute (by car) to jobs in the city. Urban sprawl is an interesting anthropocentric case density-dependent limiting factors that govern living populations of many species. As populations grow too dense, individuals must compete for resources (eg. soaring home prices, poverty-induced violence) and diseases spread more easily (eg. sanitation issues in large cities).
Image: Cool Climate Maps, UC Berkeley
Check out the full, interactive map!
However, unlike our animal and plant counterparts, complex social change accelerated urban sprawl. In 1954, Brown v. the Board of Education mandated integration of public schools. A decade later, the Civil Rights Act granted Black Americans access to restaurants, parks, theaters, and other “public accommodations” from which they had previously been barred. As Black activists were slowly dismantling Jim Crow Laws that had effectively maintained segregation, white Americans were interacting with people of other races in ways they had not before. Unhappy with this new reality, many fled to more homogenous suburbs.
Image: Bogumil Kaminski
Because the standard emphasizes mathematical and computational thinking, it may be relevant to bring in the Schelling model, a simple mathematical theory that can be replicated with simple manipulatives. The Schelling model predicts how individual preferences and choices can affect levels of segregation. For example, if each individual would like at least 50% of their neighbor to be “like them”, then the only feasible arrangement of residents that meets the needs of individuals is into fully-segregated neighborhoods. The model is run with varying degrees of individual tolerance for difference . While much segregation is caused by other forces such as economic factors and redlining, the Schelling model can predict at least some instances of white flight. Students in higher grade levels should be expected to not just use, but critically evaluate the Schelling model.
