| This dissertation illustrates that the concept of "brownfield" in defining and organizing the discourse on contaminated land is a social construction of Western origin, e.g., in the rapidly-industrialized economies of North America and Western Europe, that serves to focus the understanding of the problem on instrumental (legalistic, technical) meanings at the cost of the expressive (cultural), which systematically removes decision-making authority from local communities. Ultimately, this scenario robs communities of the opportunity to engage in important aspects of social expression in the form of what Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1996/2002) calls "ritual purification" and the creation of "taboo" in ordering societal responses to pollution.; Using an international comparative case study analysis, the dissertation demonstrates that brownfields, like all pollution ideas, are culturally-bound and therefore socially-constructed, and rests upon an inquiry regarding how pollution ideas, like brownfields, become "socially established as 'reality'." (italics in original, The Social Construction of Reality, Berger & Luckmann 1966, 3) This perspective suggests that understanding the social processes that underlie the formation of the concept "brownfield" provides insight into how best to address the problem and prevent its future occurrence. A qualitative cross-cultural analysis is employed, which reveals that brownfields in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. have arisen in response to a legacy of wide-scale contamination from deindustrialization and have been shaped by a highly-bureaucratic, regulatory response to notorious cases, such as Love Canal in upstate New York, which spurred the creation of Superfund legislation. Conversely, an evaluation of how an approach to brownfields is emerging in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, Malaysia, demonstrates that an indiscriminate replication of the U.S. brownfields model is inadvisable because it is instrumentally-based and would not reflect local-level expression or knowledge, since the understanding of brownfields is not socially-constructed in the same way. A key conclusion is that by making the cultural, expressive, aspects of the brownfield problem endogenous to remediation in both contexts, community stakeholders may be more fully-engaged in brownfield prevention than in the avoidance and antagonism that has prevailed under the existing, more fully-developed and highly-regulated policy and planning contexts. |
