Urban planning is usually associated with the notion of model cities, turning what we've learned about existing cities into blueprints for better places, in what graduate student Lisa Schweitzer calls "the undeveloped universe."

Lisa wants to fix up what's already there. "It's the legacy of industrial production in our cities that needs to be examined," she says. "We need to look at what past practices have done to create the riskscape that people have to deal with every day, and then find a way to improve it."

Rather than focusing on the undeveloped universe, Lisa's dissertation research looks at the Southern California communities of Commerce, the City of Industry, and Boyle Heights. Residential neighborhoods there exist side by side with factories, and trucks come and go with production materials, some of them hazardous.

How does it come to pass that some people become next-door neighbors to factories and the risks those factories present? In the case of Boyle Heights, the residents came first, then the freeways and factories in close succession, leaving people little opportunity to get out of the way. The reverse was true for the City of Industry and Commerce, where the residential neighborhoods were built around existing industrial complexes.

Either way, the present situation results from racial and economic politics, Lisa says. "Nobody gets up in the morning and says I'm going to build my landfill in Pacific Palisades or Malibu," she says. Rather, industries and governments look for "the neighborhoods that are going to resist the least," inhabited by people with few resources and less power, often people of color, as in the case of Boyle Heights. "It's not fair and it's not nice," Lisa says, "but it's the reality of planning."

As for the City of Industry and Commerce, people with few resources-and people of color-ended up living there because they have few choices in a tight and sometimes discriminatory housing market like the one in Southern California. Living next to a factory might be their best housing option.

Over the years, many people have tried to determine whether there is malicious intent behind the fact that poor people of color so often find themselves living in hazardous areas. "That's not a productive line of inquiry because it's too difficult to establish and in many cases, intent isn't relevant," Lisa says. "What's relevant is that we have people living in proximity to things that are bothersome, dangerous, or both, and we need to be thinking about ways of changing that."

Lisa's dissertation focuses on freight traffic. Researchers looking for safe ways to transport hazardous materials tend to focus on finding the shortest possible routes with the fewest people living alongside of them. Lisa looks instead at the transfer points, often factories, where hazardous materials are picked up and delivered. People in these neighborhoods believe they are in danger, and Lisa proved empirically that their sense of risk is warranted.

Her adviser, Randall Crane, says her ground-breaking work makes a significant contribution. "The project is computationally intensive, which is one set of her skills," he says. "She is, however, an unusually broadly trained person, with strengths in both theory and practice. Her perspective on these issues is thus both unusually nuanced and integrated."

Lisa's broad training began as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, where she earned a major in social work and a minor in economics. She came to college "with a strong desire to do work that was emancipatory in nature," she says. "I wanted my work to be centered on social justice." Nevertheless, as she studied social work, she found herself spending less time doing people-oriented work and more time handling administrative or budgetary tasks. "I wasn't particularly good at getting people talking," she says. "I was good with numbers, and I recognized where my talents were." After obtaining master's degrees in economics and urban planning from Iowa, she worked for a few years doing program evaluations and consulting in Iowa, then decided to continue her education.

UCLA was her choice: Los Angeles "seemed like a good place to study urban inequality and transportation because it had both problems in spades." Lisa says. In addition, the Department of Urban Planning "has a long tradition of emancipatory research," she says, making it "a marvelous place to study environmental justice."

While it's been a great place to study, however, Lisa says "living here drives me crazy." Unlike graduate students who say their life improves once they learn to drive, Lisa found the opposite: "My quality of life increased substantially when I stopped driving-and not driving also enriched my research a great deal."

Lisa's studies have been supported financially by a string of fellowships: the UCLA Chancellor's Fellowship, the Federal Highway Administration's Eisenhower Fellowship, and a Toxic Substances Research Program Graduate Fellowship. Last fall, she was selected the 2003 Transportation Student of the Year by the University of California Transportation Center, which links programs at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and UCLA.

Social support has been provided by the urban planning faculty and other doctoral students. "We discuss our research and help each other out," Lisa says. "I can't really imagine how I would have finished my dissertation research without them."

This spring, Lisa will leave UCLA for an academic position at Virginia Tech. "I always thought my major contribution would be through research," she says, but she realized how attached she'd become to teaching when she saw a few of her public finance students graduate. "I hadn't cried that much since I was five."

Published in Spring 2004, Graduate Quarterly