Who Is Planning for Environmental Justice—and How

Bibliographic Data

ID21476512
AuthorsCatherine Brinkley (0000-0002-3642-8207, University of California, Davis), Jenny Wagner (0000-0001-7507-9620)
Year2024
Volume90
Issue1
Pages63-76
Publication date2024-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Planning Association (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0194-4363 • E-ISSN: 1939-0130
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01944363.2022.2118155
PMID39228964
OpenAlexW4309527251
LanguageEN
Citations received29
References cited54

Problem research strategy and findings: Environmental justice (EJ) seeks to correct legacies of disproportionately burdening low-income and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities with environmental hazards that contribute to health inequalities. Federal and state policies increasingly require plans to assess and incorporate EJ principles. The current lack of accessible data and plan evaluation on EJ has been a barrier to policy setting and benchmarking. We created a framework for analyzing content across a large corpus of plans by using quantitative text analysis on 461 California city general plans, also known as comprehensive plans. To verify results and identify specific policies, we conducted content analysis on a subset of seven plans. Demonstrating the broad applicability of EJ principles in planning, policies spanned all required elements of general plans: housing, circulation, land use, health, safety, open space, air quality, and noise. We found that the most headway in EJ planning has been made in cities with a majority population of color and well before the 2018 California state mandate to address EJ. Policies were primarily focused on preventing adverse exposures as opposed to correcting for legacies of inequality. Further, although all policies address vulnerable populations and places, very few specifically addressed race or racism. Thus, EJ has been largely operationalized as health equity. Takeaway for practice: We identified 628 EJ policies focused on vulnerable populations across the seven city plans included in content analysis. The smorgasbord of policy approaches provided fodder for cities across the United States to incorporate an EJ approach to planning. Gaps in focus areas reveal room for policy innovation (e.g., emphasis on language justice, formerly incarcerated individuals, and noise ordinance policing). We invite planners and community advocates to search across California's plans for EJ policy inspiration, and to use the appendix of EJ policies cataloged in this research as a benchmark of city-level innovation

Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Environmental planning · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Law · Philosophy · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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