The data can very quickly show you how many facilities a geographical area may have. This can allow users to see how burdened a neighborhood for example may be with specific facilities.
This figure shows a smaller window open within the California State Water Resources Control Board page on Cal Open Data Portal, providing straightforward access to an Excel document displaying a dataset within the state 2019 water quality status report that sampled 1,2,3-trichloropropane, a drinking water contaminant.
[Source: EM-DAT Public] This graphic shows the prevalence of technological disasters [includes toxic spills, industrial explosions, etc.] by country. This can be used to characterize, on a transnational level, where potential industrial harms are centralized or concentrated. While it does not characterize more insidious harms, such as air pollution, it can be a direct and easy to understand measure of environmental harm distribution across the globe.
Additionally, data is available as excel sheets, which allows users to produce their own graphics on the prevalence of disasters within a particular nation over a desired time interval.
In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.
