Locational Conflict (NIMBY)
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C. Gorter and P. Nijkamp
Locational Conflict (NIMBY)
Locational conflict arises when individuals or groups
believing themselves to be negatively affected express
opposition to a locational or siting decision made by
others. As an expression of protest or opposition
within the public sphere, locational conflict represents
a political manifestation of a geographical conflict
over locational decision-making. Conflict may be
initiated by the siting or locational designation of a
facility, activity or land use believed by an affected
party to be noxious, hazardous, undesirable, stigma-
tizing, or unwanted for any of myriad other reasons.
Such targets of conflict have been dubbed locally
unwanted land uses, or LULUs, by Popper (1985).
NIMBY, an acronym for Not In My Backyard, is a
colloquial expression of locational conflict, articulat-
ing the sentiment that certain activities, facilities or
land uses should be located elsewhere (not in my
backyard) because of real or perceived negative effects
of the sited activity on the surrounding area.
NIMBYism, often referred to as the NIMBY syn-
drome, refers to the common or widespread opposi-
tion to change in one’s surroundings associated with
the introduction of an activity or land use thought to
bring negative consequences. The term NIMBY is
often used, by extension, to refer both to individuals or
groups that habitually or expectedly oppose change in
the local environment and to the unwanted land use or
facility to be sited. In common usage, NIMBYism
pejoratively connotes a reactionary parochialism
based on self-interested, and thus possibly biased,
perceptions. Locational conflict, in contrast, embraces
a broader range of perspectives encompassing struc-
tural and systemic as well as perceptual causes and
allowing for conflict to be liberating rather than simply
reactionary in certain circumstances. This range of
approaches, their conceptual origins, and means of
conflict resolution are examined in this article, after
describing the spatial and temporal dimensions of
locational conflict.
1. Spatial and Temporal Dimensions
The relatively site-specific character of locational
conflict differentiates it from relatively a-spatial forms
of political expression such as social movements,
protest movements, and even geopolitical territorial or
jurisdictional conflicts. Individual sites of locational
conflict, however, may seek coalitions with conflict
participants in other locations to form aggregate social
or protest movements covering wide geographic
regions. Local advocacy groups in the USA and
elsewhere, opposed to the siting of environmentally
hazardous waste treatment facilities, for example, have
become adept at forming broad-based coalitions
seeking to alter regulatory provisions governing waste
production, treatment, and disposal at regional and
national scales.
Inherently geographic, locational conflict and
NIMBYism are frequently manifested at the local
scale of the immediate neighborhood or district in
which deleterious effects of a proposed facility or
activity are concentrated and experienced. If one
conceptualizes the negative effects as an externality
generated by the proposed facility (e.g., the smoke and
particulates expelled through a factory’s smokestack
and falling on the surrounding neighborhood), then
those effects can be mapped onto a spatial externality
field defining the area of impact (Cox and Johnston
1982). Locational conflict is often relatively local in
scale since such externality effects usually attenuate
sharply with distance. Conflict also becomes manifest
at larger spatial scales, often depending on geographi-
cal circumstances of adjacency or propinquity. A
proposal to site a noxious facility near a municipal or
regional border, for example, may generate locational
conflict between the abutting jurisdictions. Proposals
to site solid waste disposal facilities that will accept
waste from multiple jurisdictions often generate oppo-
sition to the importation of waste from distant
locations, expanding the conflict over a sizable area.
Locational conflict has similarly emerged at the
national scale over proposals to export hazardous
waste from western industrialized nations to less-
developed countries and over the migration of noxious
effects, such as air or water pollution, across in-
ternational boundaries. Concerns over the worldwide
effects of climate change attributed to material prac-
tices in high-consumption nations can be understood
as locational conflict at the global scale.
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Locational Conflict (NIMBY)
Locational conflict is not a uniquely recent phenom-
enon nor one exclusively associated with highly indus-
trialized societies. Analysis of newspaper accounts of
locational conflicts in nineteenth-century Worcester,
Massachusetts (Meyer and Brown 1989) found that
the frequency of reported conflicts on a per capita
basis was essentially the same in Worcester in the
1870s as occurred in the 1970s in Vancouver, British
Columbia (Ley and Mercer 1980), London, Ontario
(Janelle 1977), and Columbus, Ohio (Cox and
McCarthy 1980). The location of rendering plants,
slaughter houses, and saloons generated protest in the
nineteenth century, while waste incinerators, homeless
shelters, and low-cost housing frequently motivated
opposition in the late twentieth century. A vexing new
problem for local officials is the location of cellular
telephone towers, which are sometimes disguised
inside church steeples or building cupolas to avoid
protests over visual blight. In general, however, while
the targets of conflict have changed to reflect changes
in technology, economic activity, and society at large,
the intensity of conflict was no less virulent a hundred
years ago than it is today.
The perceptual basis of locational conflict exhibits
both change and continuity over time. Newly industri-
alizing cities of the nineteenth century provided a
context in which proximity to the coal smoke and
pollution emitted by mills and factories was perceived
as beneficial, no doubt due to an association with
steady employment and economic prosperity (Meyer
and Brown 1989). In contrast, public awareness of the
health hazards of industrial activity is one of the most
frequent sources of locational conflict today. A com-
mon focus of protest in 1870s Worcester were the
millponds which, despite their obvious economic
importance, were thought to generate ‘miasma,’ be-
lieved to be a disease-bearing atmospheric poison
produced by decaying organic matter (Meyer and
Brown 1989). The parallel to today’s conflicts over
siting waste incinerators is striking. Both the millponds
then and the incinerators now are considered necessary
adjuncts to essential economic activity but both were
and are also perceived to present risks to health and
the environment. Both, consequently, are said to
produce the NIMBY syndrome: yes, society needs the
facility – but Not In My Backyard.
2. Antecedents and Conceptual Approaches
Formal analysis of locational conflict by American
geographers began in the early 1970s as an extension
of classical economic location theory. Classical
theories of industrial and residential location presen-
ted a model of locational choice by autonomous units
(firms or households) seeking to maximize individual
utility functions within budget constraints. Political
geographers such as Kevin Cox and his students at
Ohio State University challenged the assumption of
9020
autonomous locational decision-making by recogniz-
ing that individual utilities are not independent of the
externality effects produced by the locational decisions
of others (Cox and McCarthy 1980). Conflict ensues
when the utility of a locational choice is diminished by
the negative externalities generated by the locational
choices of others. This extension of traditional lo-
cation theory shifted analysis away from individual
locational choice towards a focus on the manipulation
of the spatial distribution of externalities, that is, on
attempts to exclude negative externalities and attract
positive ones. While classical location theory addres-
sed individual locational decision-making within a
framework of economic rationality, locational conflict
theory examines collective strategies for the protection
and enhancement of neighborhood quality within a
framework of collective political action. As a result,
the focus of analysis moved from the economic to the
political arena, from individual choice to collective
action, and from locational decision-making to loca-
tional conflict as a politics of turf.
The view of locational conflict as turf politics,
however, retains an axiomatic assumption of tra-
ditional location theory. The central assumption in
this behavioral approach is that conflict arises when a
locational decision perceived as beneficial by some is
perceived negatively by others. While focus has shifted
to collective action, the impetus for political engage-
ment still resides in the individual’s perception of
positive or negative consequences associated with a
proposed locational decision. The active agent is the
autonomous individual whose behavior is guided by a
unique calculus of perception, whether locational
conflict is situated within an individual choice frame-
work of conflicting utilities or in the pluralist politics
of neighborhood change.
Situated at the level of conflicting perceptions, the
behavioral approach to locational conflict rarely
considers why changes occur in local areas such that
conflict arises over their perceived positive or negative
consequences. A structuralist approach views loca-
tional conflicts as symptomatic of fundamental con-
tradictions situated within the basic structure of
society. Locational conflicts, in this view, are merely
surface manifestations of deep-seated conflicts in-
herent in the extant system of social organization (Cox
and McCarthy 1980). Within a structural mode of
explanation, negative externalities are not viewed
simply as evidence of market imperfections subject to
correction but rather are understood as necessary and
inevitable consequences of class relations within the
process of capital accumulation.
Identifying the particular structural contradictions
that become manifest as locational conflict, however,
is itself a subject of conflict and disagreement. In one
view, the inherent contradiction between labor and
capital generates contradictory orientations to neigh-
borhoods, such that labor’s attachment to place based
on the neighborhood’s use value conflicts with capi-

tal’s investment interest based on the neighborhood’s
exchange value. Locational conflict, in this frame-
work, arises from the fundamental antagonism be-
tween labor and capital with respect to neighborhood
change. In another view, locational conflict is situated
within the incessant competition between factions of
capital, and results when the expansionary interests of
mobile capital conflict with the exclusionary interests
of capital already fixed in place (Plotkin 1987). For
example, existing investors seeking to exclude po-
tential new competitors may resist a shopping center
developer’s search for new investment sites. Bridging
these two approaches is a third view in which labor’s
attachment to neighborhood erects a barrier to con-
tinued accumulation of capital. In response, capital
encourages long-running societal processes—the
homogenization of space, pervasive ideologies of
materialism and consumerism, media manipulation
and mass education, and increasing residential mo-
bility, among other contributing factors—which
succeed in transforming neighborhoods from com-
munities into commodities and, consequently, trans-
forming labor’s attachment to community into an
orientation based on protecting neighborhood ex-
change value (Cox 1981). Now locational conflict
occurs when the exchange value interests of capital
and labor fail to coincide as, for example, when a land
developer’s proposal for a shopping center generates
traffic and pollution that threaten to reduce the resale
value of surrounding homes.
More recently, a post-structuralist approach has
emerged that situates locational conflict within the
antagonistic discursive or representational strategies
of contending groups vying for control over the use of
space, where such control is an expression of political
power. Rejecting the view of space as simply a
container for action, this approach, influenced by the
work of Lefebvre (1991) and others, considers the
social and political process through which the meaning
and use of space are constructed in particular in-
stances. Now locational conflict is not primarily about
the spatial distribution of activities or land uses nor is
it simply about contrasting preferences for various
activities in particular locations. Rather, locational
conflict is symbolic conflict over the social distribution
of power to assign meaning and uses to space (Mitchell
1992). Locational conflict symbolizes contention over
whose values have standing within the political process
and whose values, therefore, become expressed in the
landscape. Recursively, control over the use of space
symbolically constitutes the controlling group as a
legitimate actor within the broader political process.
Establishment of a squatter settlement within an
affluent residential neighborhood despite the opposi-
tion of existing residents, for example, provides a site
for housing impoverished families. Also, and perhaps
more importantly, it discursively represents squatter
families as legitimate occupants of space and, there-
fore, legitimate participants in the political process.
Locational Conflict (NIMBY)
The evolution of locational conflict theory from
classical to behavioral, to structural, and post-struc-
tural formulations parallels theoretical developments
in the field of geography as a whole. Underlying each
of these theoretical positions is a set of often in-
commensurate assumptions regarding the relative
autonomy of individual actors, the primacy of market
processes, the nature of the public interest, and the
respective roles of structure and agency in creating
geographic landscapes. In addition, the various theor-
etical understandings of locational conflict point to
substantially different routes for its amelioration or
resolution. A behavioral model of conflict based on
contrasting perceptions suggests that resolution is
attainable through public information and education
designed to bring perceptions into agreement. A model
of conflict based on the unequal spatial distribution of
negative externalities suggests the use of compensation
to equalize outcomes. Understanding conflict as symp-
tomatic of deep underlying structural relations re-
quires the elimination of structural contradictions. A
focus on locational conflict as the symbolic expression
of rights to create the meaning of space requires the
deconstruction of opposing claims and their recon-
struction in more equitable forms. Far from being
merely an academic exercise, one’s theoretical ap-
proach to locational conflict implicates significantly
different avenues for its resolution, as discussed in the
following section.
3. Resol
ing Locational Conflict
The contentious character of locational conflict has
generated considerable debate over the intervention
strategies conducive to its resolution. Approaches to
intervention differ according to their proponents’
understanding of the sources and dynamics of conflict,
as described above, and according to their focus on the
varying perspectives of conflict participants. Methods
of resolving conflict distinguish between community-
centered, user-centered, and state-centered ap-
proaches (Takahashi 1998 and DeVerteuil 2000).
3.1 Community-centered Approaches
Community-centered approaches focus on community
opposition to a proposed facility siting. Depending on
the characteristics of the community and, in part, on
the perspective of the analyst, local opposition can be
interpreted as exclusionary parochialism or as con-
stitutionally protected freedom of speech and dissent
(Takahashi 1998). Those taking the latter perspective
point to instances in which poor or politically margin-
alized communities succeed in preventing the siting of
an environmentally hazardous or otherwise noxious
facility and consider that conflict has been resolved
through defeat of the siting proposal (Heiman 1990).
9021
Locational Conflict (NIMBY)
More frequently, and especially when phrased in the
NIMBY characterization, locational conflict is viewed
as a shortsighted and parochial expression of self-
interest that prevents achievement of the greater public
good. Their proponents present the facilities whose
siting generates locational conflict as both necessary
and beneficial for society. A mobile society needs
highways and airports. Consumers expect convenient
access to shopping. Production of wastes is an in-
evitable by-product of a consumer society and requires
safe and reliable disposal capacity. New prison con-
struction keeps dangerous criminals off the streets and
prevents prison overcrowding.
From this vantage point, conflict over siting pro-
posals poses a barrier to attainment of the public good
and requires a strategy to overcome, elude, or defuse
opposition in order to allow the siting to go forward.
Some professional associations of land and real estate
developers offer guidelines and training to assist their
members to negotiate the hazards of community
opposition to proposed developments. Such strategies
counsel facility proponents to anticipate opposition,
solicit statements of support from potential allies,
marshal expert testimony for public presentation,
demonstrate the anticipated benefits of the proposed
scheme, utilize formal appeals procedures, and the
like.
Compensation of affected parties is a central prem-
ise within the community-centered approach. If
locational conflict arises from the unequal spatial
distribution of negative externalities created by the sited
facility, then conflict can be resolved through com-
pensation of those bearing a disproportionate share of
costs. The theory of compensation assumes that costs
are susceptible to translation into a single monetary
metric and that a fair system can be devised for
identifying affected parties and distributing payment.
Such a system is difficult to devise in practice, however.
It is difficult to distinguish between payment as
compensation of costs and as inducement to accept
costs, and communities often reject compensation as
synonymous with a bribe. It is relatively easy to
compensate for direct costs associated with a newly
sited facility, such as additional emergency response
equipment, but it is more difficult to assess a value for
indirect costs such as stigmatization or economic
growth foregone when potential investors avoid prox-
imity to a noxious facility. There is disagreement as to
whether costs should be compensated at an equal level
in an impoverished and an affluent community. On
purely economic grounds, the impoverished com-
munity can receive less compensation because poor
people are satisfied at a relatively lower cost but this
conclusion can easily be challenged on ethical grounds.
Compensation as a means of resolving locational
conflict is problematic for these and other reasons.
Some practitioners adopting the community-cen-
tered approach choose siting strategies based on equity
considerations. Such strategies typically distinguish
9022
between the goals of procedural equity in decision-
making and distributional equity in outcomes. Ap-
proaches based on distributive justice assume the
necessity of the facilities in question and seek to
achieve a fair distribution, where the primary criterion
of fairness is to avoid neighborhood concentrations of
unwanted facilities. One such method is to devise a
point system for desirable and undesirable facilities
(parks and libraries in the former category, for
example, and waste incinerators and sewage treatment
plants in the latter) and to equalize points across
neighborhoods or political jurisdictions. Localities
might be encouraged to opt for an undesirable facility
so as to qualify for a desirable one under this system or
might be disqualified from obtaining a beneficial
facility due to insufficient points for hosting undesir-
able ones. The obvious difficulty in assigning points
to facility types, however, has prevented this system
from being implemented in practice. New York city’s
legislatively mandated fair share process for distribut-
ing unwanted city facilities across neighborhoods
similarly has been abandoned in practice due to
difficulties of implementation.
Community-centered approaches based on proce-
dural justice argue that public opposition is mobilized
not only by unwanted siting outcomes but also by
perceived unfairness in the decision-making process.
At a minimum, the procedural solution takes the form
of a mandated hearing within a public review or
permitting process. The public hearing has been
criticized as a means of facilitating public partici-
pation, however, on the grounds that it is rarely more
than advisory and that important decisions, such as
the need for the facility, have usually been taken prior
to the hearing. More detailed procedural approaches
stress the importance of community consultation early
in the siting process, inclusion of all stakeholders in
negotiations, and the opportunity for sites to withdraw
from consideration at any time. The most fully
developed approach within this framework allows
localities to volunteer themselves as sites for con-
troversial facilities, subject to specified siting criteria
and in return for generous compensation. This ap-
proach elides difficult ethical questions, however, if
localities volunteer for controversial facilities not
through choice but due to a lack of alternative means
of economic survival.
3.2 User-centered Approaches
The user-centered approach usually applies to conflict
over social service facility location. This approach
moves beyond the perspectives of siting proponents
and opponents and considers the perspective of facility
users who often experience extreme poverty and\or
physical, social, or mental disability as a barrier to
access to needed services (Takahashi 1998). Omission
of the users’ perspective in community-centered

approaches both reflects and contributes to their
stigmatization. While equity in community-centered
approaches focuses on community participation in
facility siting decisions, equity in the user-centered
approach is concerned with facilitating access to
needed facilities on the part of service-dependent
clients. Residents and users of homeless shelters, drug
or alcohol rehabilitation centers, domestic violence
shelters, group homes, and similar facilities are often
dependent on multiple services and benefit from
service clustering that other community residents view
as an undue concentration of unwanted facilities.
Social service providers choose from two divergent
strategies in countering local opposition (Dear 1992).
The collaborative approach seeks to establish a part-
nership between the service provider and the host
community through public outreach and education
aimed at improving awareness, tolerance, and ac-
ceptance. The autonomous approach considers access
to needed services to be a civil right of facility users
and relies on legislative and judicial protections to
override community opposition.
3.3 State-centered Approaches
The state-centered approach to locational conflict
reformulates the traditional question of locational
conflict—‘Why is the community opposed to this
facility?’—and asks instead: ‘Why is the state seeking
to site this facility in this community?’ (Lake and
Disch 1992). This rephrased question problematizes
the assumption, shared by community- and user-
centered approaches, that facilities are needed by
society. In the state-centered approach, controversial
facilities are understood as needed by capital seeking
to externalize costs as a competitive strategy and as an
expedient solution for the state seeking to facilitate
capital accumulation while maintaining legitimation
of the capital-labor relationship (Lake 1993).
Facility siting in this context constitutes a particular
problem-solving strategy that is instrumental for the
state. By providing a locational solution to a problem
of industrial production (waste production or home-
lessness, for example), facility siting allows production
and capital accumulation to continue relatively unim-
peded while concentrating costs on host communities.
The decision to concentrate costs on communities
rather than on capital reflects a political calculation
that it is preferable for the state to confront localized
political conflict than to risk a challenge to the capital-
state relation. The siting strategy deflects political
conflict away from a potentially daunting challenge to
the capital-state relation and into a relatively benign
debate over the merits of alternative facility locations
(Lake and Disch 1992).
According to the state-centered approach, the root
of locational conflict is situated not in the conse-
Locational Conflict (NIMBY)
quences of hosting a controversial facility but rather in
a regulatory approach that inexorably leads to facility
siting as a policy solution that concentrates costs on
host communities. To the extent that this is the case,
the resolution of conflict requires a restructuring of
policy assumptions and policy solutions through
political debate, redirecting costs from host com-
munities back on to capital, and avoiding the emerg-
ence of conflict at its source rather than seeking to
ameliorate its occurrence after the fact.
4. Future Directions: Ethical and Social Justice
Issues
Recent locational conflict scholarship has increasingly
intersected with the literature of environmental racism
and environmental justice. This coalescence emerges
from a common conceptual focus on equity and on the
distinction between distributive and procedural
equity, in particular. Influenced in part by devel-
opment of the state-centered approach, locational
conflict scholarship is increasingly shifting attention
from siting outcomes to examine political and struc-
tural influences on the siting process. This shift closely
parallels a redirection within environmental justice
scholarship from a focus on distributional equity,
concerned with the concentration of environmental
burdens in disempowered communities, to a focus on
procedural equity, concerned with democratic par-
ticipation in the gamut of prior decisions affecting the
production of burdens and benefits to be distributed
(Lake 1996). Recent environmental justice literature
explicitly seeks to relinquish its narrow focus on
inequity in facility siting, emphasizing instead the
pervasive inequity in the broad socio-spatial processes
creating geographic landscapes (Pulido 2000). The
challenge for these increasingly combined spheres of
scholarship is to expand understanding of these
processes and to inform the design of institutional
structures that expand community participation in
their operation.
See also: Behavioral Geography; Citizen Participa-
tion; Environmental Justice; Global Environmental
Change: Human Dimensions; Location Theory
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All rights reserved.
Locke, John (1632–1704)
1. Life and Writings
Hegel perhaps excepted, John Locke is the most
eminent philosopher of the Western world to have
addressed himself to political and social issues. Indeed
his standing as the great thinker amongst English
speakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
gave to his writings on such issues, the theories of
politics, toleration, economics and education, a stand-
ing which they would not have commanded even when
taken together. And yet the famous Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1975) scarcely provided a
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
general intellectual framework for his theories on
individual topics. The action of his mind was like that
of the beam of a searchlight shining through the
darkness on individual objects but with no linkage
made between them or any reflection back from object
to source.
John Locke the man can be taken as the archetype
of the English country gentleman turned intellectual.
He was the first born of the two sons of a lawyer who
fought for the Parliament against King Charles I when
John was a teenager. The family had a small landed
estate in the county of Somerset and Locke was born
on August 29 1632 in the village of Wrington, though
the family seat was at Belluton some ten miles away.
He inherited the family properties and his father’s
modest position within the community of gentry of the
county. He was an absentee landlord, except for brief
intervals, for most of his life. This was because his
father designed him for a scholarly career, not all that
unusual for the gentry but exceptional for an heir
(Laslett 1948).
Locke’s father set his sights high for his son, whose
outstanding intelligence must have been evident from
the beginning. In 1647 he sent him to Westminster
School, the best in the country, and thereafter, in 1652,
to the college of Christ Church in Oxford, where he
went on to take office as a teacher between 1658 and
1684. Locke never married, and insisted that he would
have liked to have lived his whole life there as a
bachelor don. However, it proved otherwise, and
within a decade he found himself for much of his time
in London at the center of national politics, in the
entourage of one of the great political magnates of the
time, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury,
who was then in high office but subsequently became
leader of the movement of opposition to the succession
to the throne of the Catholic James, brother of the
childless Charles II, the Exclusion campaign, as it is
called. The explanation for this transmogrification,
which left his position at Christ Church unaffected,
was that Locke had taken up medicine so that he could
continue his academic career without becoming a
priest. In 1666, on a visit to Oxford, the invalided
Shaftesbury met Locke who performed upon his body
one of the medical miracles of that age which saved his
life. It was as a medical adviser of Shaftesbury, not as
an academic, that Locke took up and pursued his
career as a writer on the theory of knowledge, and on
what we now recognize as social scientific subjects.
Two Treatises of Go
ernment, also published in 1690,
was composed while Locke acted as what a close
friend called ‘assistant pen’ to Shaftesbury in the early
1680s during the Exclusion campaign. The Catholic
James nevertheless became James II in 1685.
A now outmoded interpretation of Two Treatises
perceives it as the subsequent rationalization of the so-
called Glorious Revolution of 1688\9; it is now
accepted that the author’s intention was to justify a
revolution yet to be brought about by Shaftesbury and
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7