Cooked: Survival by Zip Code. Directed by Judith Helfand. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2018. 82 minutes.

Decade of Fire. Directed by Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran. Los Angeles: GOOD DOCS, 2018. 75 minutes.

When Environmental Problems Are Social Problems

In episode 94 of the podcast Another Round (2017), famed hosts Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu play a game with sociologist Eve Ewing (faculty at the University of Chicago) called Six Degrees of Education Policy. To play, the hosts share a headline from the week’s most important style and pop culture news and ask Professor Ewing to demonstrate the headline’s deep connection to education policy in under six steps. Like this rousing and informative game, Decade of Fire and Cooked: Survival by Zip Code both illustrate the power and lasting legacy of racial segregation policies, specifically how government decisions at local scales can result in infrastructure disinvestment creating social and environmental hazards. Importantly, these two films simultaneously highlight a social problem, namely neglected infrastructure, and a social asset: community organizing.

Cooked weaves together Chicago’s week-long heat wave in 1995—a “natural” disaster—the natural outcome of neglecting important investments and updates to infrastructure, and makes critical connections across environmental crises to neglected infrastructure and environmental injustices (e.g., the film begins with coverage of Hurricane Sandy in New York City).1 The film compliments the story of Decade of Fire, where viewers witness how institutional disinvestment and discrimination produced massive fires and residential displacement. The latter half of Decade highlights the People’s Development Corporation, a resident organization formed in response to the persistent negligence and neglect, that focused on rehabilitating and constructing abandoned and damaged buildings. Through this, Decade adds to the important environmental justice canon whose stories do not linger on the racism but shift to highlight the efforts and outcomes of residents who build life in spite of environmental racism.  

Another environmental injustice theme both films expose is the practice of misplacing the responsibility for institutional failures and discrimination onto individuals, an all-too-commonplace tool to escape institutional accountability for environmental racism, and thus the responsibility to repair the problems. These failures are reframed as an individual problem and compounded by positing the individual or group of individuals as apathetic to social and environmental concerns (Finney 2014; Isoke 2013). In Cooked, Chicago Mayor Daley shames residents for not checking on their neighbors, laying the deaths of elders from the heatwave on South and West Side residents, instead of focusing on the inadequate or absent air conditioning systems, broader safety concerns, lack of city preparedness like cooling stations, or the limited green space and tree canopy that might have acted as a natural cooling system. Meanwhile, Decade depicts New York City mayors and officials producing a narrative a narrative that residents in the South Bronx are responsible for the fires, ignoring the sorely outdated wiring systems, effects of redlining on property owner’s insurance, and a lack of fire stations (a result of the city deprioritizing the South Bronx and similar low-income and/or communities of color).

“What we recognize as infrastructure… reflects our priorities as a society, as well as our motivations to invest capital to address collective problems” (Lim 2023, 2). Years have passed since the 1995 Chicago heatwave, but despite a task force and report on the event, planning for urban heat resiliency is still a relatively new and not a widely adopted practice for US cities (Keith and Meerow 2022). Thus, the framing of infrastructure as a social system that reflects priorities tied to monetary investments is useful in understanding why this is the case and in exploring connections between environmental injustice, infrastructure, and environmental risks.

These films can be integrated into urban planning, ecology, human and natural interactions, and other environmental courses that can be found in fields in engineering, public health, geography, and policy. They encompass multiple disciplines due to the holistic coverage, demonstrating how racism and classism shape policies that lead to dangerous and long-lasting public health and environmental crises. Critically, the films also show the power of community coalition building and what can be accomplished in spite of institutional barriers. As both a warning and a call to action they can inform and empower students at all levels of higher education.

1 For other examples of films exploring similar issues, see Freedom Hill (dir. Resita Cox, 2022) and The Smell of Money (dir. Shawn Bannon, 2022).

Fushcia-Ann Hoover is an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in social-ecological urban systems. She employs a range of approaches and perspectives that include environmental justice, green infrastructure performance and urban planning, evaluating the impacts of green infrastructure planning when framed by race, justice and place-making. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and the founder of EcoGreenQueen LLC, a company dedicated to teaching and expanding the knowledge and use of environmental justice frameworks and methods across research and practice. Dr. Hoover served as a chapter author on the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment and is a 2023-2024 Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard University.