Growing wealth and air pollution. Distribution of environmental costs in the context of spatial expansion of cities

Air pollution is one of the most acutely felt environmental costs of development, concentrated in urban areas. There are two distinct research streams in the literature explaining the relationship between wealth and pollution, i.e. the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and the concept of environmental justice (EJ). However, their empirical verification remains inconclusive due to, among other things, the omission of spatial variation at the local level, the limited geographic scope of the research, and the failure to take into account spatial sorting within the territorial units studied. The latter aspect becomes particularly important in light of the on-going suburbanization, which can be seen precisely as a geographical sorting process driven by differences in environmental quality.

The project aims to examine the relationship between wealth and air quality in cities and metropolitan regions in Poland, in the context of spontaneous and chaotic suburbanization. Specifically, the project applies EKC at the local level, focusing on intra- rather than inter-regional variations; for the first time, it introduces an EJ perspective to the study of the smog problem in Poland; and finally, it places the air pollution-development study in the context of spatial transformations of modern cities. Using new data sources and spatial econometrics tools, the study will (1) reveal the socio-spatial distribution of smog in Polish cities, (2) enrich the body of work of EKC and EJ with results from a hitherto unexplored region, and (3) determine the impact of suburbanization on the shape of the relationship between wealth and environmental costs.