Environmental justice implications of siting criteria in urban green infrastructure planning

ABSTRACT

Green infrastructure (GI) has become a panacea for cities working to enhance sustainability and resilience. While the rationale for GI primarily focuses on its multifunctionality (e.g. delivering multiple ecosystem services to local communities), uncertainties remain around how, for whom, and to what extent GI delivers these services. Additionally, many scholars increasingly recognize potential disservices of GI, including gentrification associated with new GI developments. Building on a novel dataset of 119 planning documents from 19 U.S. cities, we utilize insights from literature on justice in urban planning to examine the justice implications of criteria used in the siting of GI projects. We analyze the GI siting criteria described in city plans and how they explicitly or implicitly engage environmental justice. We find that justice is rarely explicitly discussed, yet the dominant technical siting criteria that focus on stormwater and economic considerations have justice implications. We conclude with recommendations for centering justice in GI spatial planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Green infrastructure
• environmental justice
• urban planning
• content analysis

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of The JPB Foundation for this work, through a project entitled “Environment, Health, and Poverty: Is Green Infrastructure a Universal Good?”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JPB Foundation; National Science Foundation [Grant Number #1934933, #1444755, #1927167, DBI-1639145], National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) and National Science Foundation [grant number DEB–1832016], Central Arizona–Phoenix Long–Term Ecological Research Program (CAP LTER).

Notes on contributors

Fushcia-Ann Hoover

Dr. Fushcia-Ann Hoover is a transdisciplinary researcher specializing in social-environmental urban systems, environmental justice, green infrastructure and planning. Her research centers equity and justice in urban planning and engages the racial histories and relationships between people, place and the environment. She is an Assistant Professor in Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Caroline-Charlotte, and a faculty affiliate with the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP-LTER) program.

Sara Meerow

Dr. Sara Meerow is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of urban geography and planning on how to make cities more resilient to climate change and other social and environmental hazards in ways that are sustainable and just. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University.

Zbigniew J. Grabowski

Dr. Zbigniew J. Grabowski is a transdisciplinary researcher focused on enabling just transitions of socio-eco-technical systems. He has expertise in human and physical geography, biocultural conservation, hydrology, ecosystem and environmental science, and infrastructure studies. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a Visiting Scholar at the Urban Systems Lab, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Portland State University.

Timon McPhearson

Dr. Timon McPhearson is an urban ecologist with expertise in urban data science, climate change risk, and nature-based solutions for urban resilience and sustainability. He is Director of the Urban Systems Lab, Associate Professor of Urban Ecology at The New School, and a Research Fellow at The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.