Computer based design & economic evaluation for air pollution control

Abstract

Locational conflict arises when individuals or groups express opposition to a locational or siting decision made by others. NIMBY, an acronym for Not In My Backyard, is a colloquial expression of locational conflict. Frequent targets of conflict include environmentally noxious facilities such as waste treatment and power generating plants as well as social service delivery facilities including homeless shelters, group homes, and drug treatment centers. In common usage, NIMBYism pejoratively connotes a reactionary parochialism blocking the siting of needed facilities, while locational conflict embraces a broader range of perspectives that may be liberating or regressive depending on circumstances. Inherently geographic, locational conflict is often relatively local in scale although conflict participants at distant locations may aggregate to form protest movements covering wide geographic regions. The evolution of locational conflict theory from classical to behavioral to structural and post-structural formulations parallels theoretical developments in the field of geography. Methods of resolving locational conflict distinguish between community-centered, user-centered, and state-centered approaches. Locational conflict scholarship is increasingly shifting attention from an initial focus on siting outcomes to examination of political and structural influences on the facility siting process, and to investigation of pervasive inequity in the broad socio-spatial processes creating geographic landscapes.