Toxic City

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Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, is the city’s last remaining predominantly Black neighborhood and the ongoing site of struggle against displacement and environmental injustice. The neighborhood houses the highly hazardous Hunters Point Shipyard. Abandoned by the US Navy in 1974, the shipyard bears the palimpsest of a century's worth of toxic waste, a by-product of the shipbuilding and repair industry.

The first part of this project constructs an analytic of waste, race, and space drawing on theories from critical geography, science and technology studies, and planning studies. The second part queries the possibility for spatial practice and design to challenge the production of differential urban experience. Through mapping, poetry, and illustration, this project intervenes in the traditional narrative of progress in Brownfield Redevelopment, conceiving of an ongoing process of social and economic remediation alongside ecological cleanup.

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December 2019
Brown University Honors Thesis 


garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation
to trashlessness, that is too far off and,
anyway, unimaginable, unrealistic . . .
(Ammons 1993; as quoted in Moore 2012)

Developer’s proposed land use, including: green space (green), housing (orange), office & retail (grey)





Radioactive & ‘impacted’ sites







Topography & Buildings; created with python script






Projected sea level rise: 1.2m (dark blue), 1.7, (medium blue), 2.7m (light blue)