From Residential Segregation to the Constitution of a Sacrifice Zone in the City of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This work has the aim of analyzing the connection between the phenomenon of residential segregation to issues of environmental injustice in the case of the urban-environmental impacts caused by a mega-steel mill installed in Santa Cruz borough of the western part of the capital of Rio de Janeiro State. Unresolved residential segregation is shown to have been overlain and aggravated by environmental injustice experienced by the residents of Santa Cruz when the current Ternium Brasil steel mill was originally built by the Thyssen-Krupp Group. The correlation between residential segregation and environmental justice is interpreted through the prism of the Political Ecology concept of sacrifice zone. We go further by adding the high consumption of water resources by the steel mill to normal accounts of sacrifice zone.