Putting Cumulative Impacts on the Map: The Path from Advocacy to Policy in Chicago

This article considers efforts to understand and respond to cumulative impacts of environmental burdens in Chicago, Illinois, to explore the efficacy of mapping as a policy tool to prevent and even reverse the disproportionate distribution of cumulative environmental burdens. It is well established that maps incorporated into formal laws and policies directly contributed to the U.S. environmental burdens landscape, spatially concentrating polluting industries in, and redirecting environmental benefits away from, areas where government action also forced communities of color to live. The question here is: if mapping got us into this mess, can mapping get us out? Spatial data-based mapping tools such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen can produce compelling representations of environmental justice geographies. These representations have advanced the saliency of demands for policy reform from the environmental justice movement because such maps use ostensibly objective public data to dramatic visual effect, especially when drawing comparisons to reveal profound racial and class disparities in pollution burden, ambient environmental quality, and access to environmental amenities. Cumulative impact mapping can therefore be considered a kind of counter-mapping that advances critical cartography’s key claim that maps are not neutral arbiters of truth but instead help create social realities. In recent years, Chicago advocates have harnessed counter-mapping tools to oppose specific industrial siting decisions and demand systemic reform of land use frameworks. This article offers a case study of the campaign against the proposed relocation of General Iron’s scrap metal shredder in Chicago, which deployed a counter-mapping strategy that resulted in novel, ongoing cumulative impacts policy reforms at the city and state level. This article closes with observations to inform efforts in Chicago and elsewhere to incorporate EJ counter-mapping or geographic scoring approaches into public policy decision-making processes.