Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity

作者：Shiloh Deitz, Katie Meehan · 发表于：Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 年份：2019 · DOI：10.1080/24694452.2018.1530587 · 研究领域：Water Governance and Infrastructure、Child Nutrition and Water Access、Water Systems and Optimization

Household water insecurity is a global threat to human health and development, yet existing metrics lack a systematic consideration of geographic inequality and spatial variation. In this article, we introduce the notion of plumbing poverty as a conceptual and methodological heuristic to examine the intersectional nature of infrastructure, space, and social inequality. Plumbing poverty is understood in a dual sense: first, as a material and infrastructural condition produced by social relations that fundamentally vary through space and, second, as a methodology that operationalizes the spatial exploration of social inequality. Drawing on millions of census records, we strip household water security down to a single vital measure—the presence of complete household plumbing—to assess its spatial and sociodemographic trends. We identify distinct hot spots (geographic clusters of higher than average values) of plumbing poverty, track its social and spatial variance, and expose its fundamentally racialized nature. Our study finds that plumbing poverty is neither spatially nor socially random in the United States. Rather, plumbing incompleteness is spatially clustered in certain regions of the country and is clearly racialized: Living in an American Indian or Alaskan Native, black, or Hispanic household increases the odds of being plumbing poor, and these predictors warp and woof through space. In considering who experiences the slow violence of infrastructural dysfunction, a geogr...