Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUS)

The acronym LULU stands for locally unwanted land use—a facility whose siting is resisted by local residents. Typically consisting of hazardous waste repositories, landfills, power plants, highways, and other projects that may pose an environmental or health risk, LULUs may also be prisons, low-income housing, shelters, treatment centers, and other facilities perceived as lowering property values and posing a security risk. A LULU may also be a facility that is resisted due to racial prejudice. LULUs are closely linked to the more common acronym NIMBY (not in my backyard), a term referring to the common position taken by local residents when faced with a LULU.

Geographers and planners take a particular interest in LULUs, because resistance to them illustrates the dynamics of political conflict in urban space. While geographers are more inclined to address the structural conditions giving rise to the LULUs and the NIMBY response, it generally falls to planners to suggest ways to overcome this resistance through measures such as public participation in decision making, risk communication, “fair-share” allocation, mediation, compensation, negotiated settlement, and, when all else fails, outright preemption by higher levels of government. Justification for public intervention comes through portrayal of local resistance to a public good as parochial and self-serving, typically under the assumption that there is a geographic dichotomy between parochial economic self-interest and regional public goals.

However, beginning in the late 1970s, a critique of this common understanding emerged from environmental and local activists addressing the subset of LULUs involving health threats. They suggested that the term NIMBY presupposed acceptance of the need for the LULU, implying that the facility should be located somewhere, just not in “my” backyard, when the facility should be viewed as unacceptable anywhere. Such resistance has been particularly noticeable in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color where waste repositories have been proposed. Thus, a more appropriate term for resistance to the LULU in this instance would be NIABY, or not in anybody's backyard. The latter suggests elimination of the facility up front rather than accommodation of the offending practice and/or its waste byproducts.

Recognition of environmental LULUs and the organized resistance to them has increased since the 1950s due to the post–World War II introduction of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the production process, which are linked to health problems (e.g., at Love Canal and other Superfund waste disposal sites). Another issue concerns the spatial separation of the site of production from residential areas, an idea dating from the late 19th century, in which homes are often portrayed as a refuge from the consequences of factories and other sites of work. Such separation is now under attack as the continued expansion of the forces of production, and the ensuing negative externalities of production (e.g., noise, waste, and pollution), has invaded these residential sanctuaries.