ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how one community has mobilized local knowledge to make expert assessments more responsive to their lived experience. It traces the work of residents in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighbourhood in Brooklyn, NY, USA, and their efforts to mobilize local knowledge to diagnose and describe the environmental and public health hazards they face. Through interviews, primary texts and ethnographic fieldwork, the chapter highlights how community knowledge combined with expert assessments to analyze the community's risk from toxic air emissions, subsistence fishing and asthma. It also highlights how residents of the poor community of colour organized their experiences, contextual information and situated knowledge to describe, analyzes and prescribes solutions for their risks from toxic air pollution, subsistence fish diets and asthma. The chapter argues that through a rich understanding and appreciation of the knowledge offered by local people, environmental planners can find ways to combine the contextual knowledge of citizens with insights gained from professional ways of knowing.
