Pub. 2 2021-2022 Issue 1

12 REFLEXION | 2021-22 | AIA Utah Tackling Environmental Discrimination with Dr. Robert Bullard BY PHIL HADERLIE, AIA I n the U.S., all communities are not created equal. The legacies of redlining and other racist policies are still powerful forces in cities across the country. Dr. Robert Bullard, the Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas State University, has spent his career researching and chronicling environmental injustice, penning 18 books along the way. On day two of AIA’s 2021 Conference on Architecture, he shared his perspective on how architects can address some of the most urgent environmental equity issues of our time. “ZIP code is still the most potent predictor of an individual’s health and well-being,” Bullard told a virtual audience during a day filled with sessions focused on sustainable practice. Bullard’s session, which put him in conversation with Kimberly Dowdell, AIA, the 2019-2020 president of the National Organization of Minority Architects, aimed to help architects meaningfully contribute to the reduction of environmental, health, economic and racial disparities. One striking example of these disparities are the rates of asthma in nonwhite communities in the U.S. Black Americans are nearly 1.5 times more likely to have asthma compared to white Americans, and in 2019, non-Hispanic Black children had a death rate due to asthma that was eight times that of non-Hispanic white children. Factors like poor air quality, as well as exposure to pollution, more generally contribute to worse health outcomes for nonwhite Americans. “My job is to connect the dots,” Bullard said, citing his work on books such as “The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities.” Additionally, African Americans and Latinx people breathe in far more deadly air pollution than they are responsible for making 56% for African Americans and 63% for Latinx people.