A Language of (In)Justice: Expanding the Sustainability Planning Lexicon

Introduction

Since at least the early 1990s with the creation of Local Agenda 21 at the Rio Earth Summit, there have been calls for urban governments to engage in environmental sustainability planning as an integral part of broader sustainable development strategies. Earth Summit was seminal in addressing the necessity for local authorities to engage in sustainability objectives and by considering the multitude of problems (and solutions) that “have their roots in local activities … (a)s the level of governance closest to the people, they play a vital role in educating, mobilizing and responding to the public to promote sustainable development.” ¹ Since Earth Summit, innumerable cities globally have engaged in sustainability planning by establishing municipal departments and offices, drafting sustainability documents, and incorporating ideals of sustainability within their comprehensive development strategies.

Within the context of the above, this article begins by looking at the unique vulnerabilities that environmental justice (EJ) communities face within cities and under the purview of environmental sustainability planning. While considering the potential for marginalized peoples to be excluded from sustainability planning and policies, using content analysis, the research evaluates the language of municipal sustainability plans by assessing their respective attentions to justice, economic, and environmental concerns. The work concludes that considering the dearth of attention that sustainability plans give to EJ concerns and language barriers, more democratic processes are needed in the plan design phase.

Urban Vulnerability and Incorporating Environmental Justice

Notwithstanding Local Agenda 21's vital infusion of the local into the broader sustainable development discourse, Agyeman and Evans stress the discrepancy between Agenda 21's aspirations regarding the sustainability and social equity nexus and ultimately concluded that “sustainability is not a panacea for dealing with long term and deeply entrenched inequalities,” and that “a community plan for sustainability, informed only by the ideas of the articulate middle classes” ultimately proves inadequate in achieving sustainability. ²

Vulnerability has been broadly described as “an aggregate measure of human welfare that integrates environmental, social, economic and political exposure to a range of potential harmful perturbations.” ³ While adhering to the above description, this work is conscious of the unique exposures and threats that marginalized communities face in cities, including: challenges to food sovereignty, ⁴ transportation issues, ⁵ and access to (safe) public space. ⁶ Thus, one goal of urban sustainability planning should be to mitigate the challenges that these parties face. There exists significant tension between urban sustainability planning and environmental justice conscious policies. For starters, urban sustainability is an amorphous concept, with iterations that vary significantly between locales. Similarly, conceptions and considerations of EJ will vary, from those places that are mute on justice concerns, to those where equity is embedded in broader policymaking. Furthermore, with a bedrock premise of sustainability being that humans manage finite resources in a responsible, intergenerational manner, tensions and conflicts can arise when reconciling the immediate control of resources with a foundational premise of EJ being that decision-making apparatuses are often removed from marginalized communities. ⁷ In shepherding resources for posterity, those without access in the contemporary face both intergenerational and intragenerational dilemmas. Numerous studies have weighed in on why EJ hasn't generated significant traction in planning, ranging from a general ambiguity regarding how equity and justice is advocated, ⁸ to the predominance of middle class environmental interests over the poor, ⁹ to the apolitical nature of sustainability language, which couples environmental benefits with gentrification and makes equity issues subsidiary to development concerns. ¹⁰

Notwithstanding the tensions noted above, local sustainably policy hasn't been entirely absent of justice and equity concerns. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in providing protections based on race, color, and national origin, has had local justice implications. In concert with Executive Order 12898, recipients of federal funding are mandated to fortify EJ groups against discrimination in the siting and execution of publically funded projects, such as highway expansion and transit provision, and are subject to significant public oversight to ensure community input in projects. These protections, in part, seek to make neighborhoods secure against the decimation that marginalized areas were subject to via urban renewal and the accompanying proliferation of expressways and megaprojects that partitioned inner cities and created de facto racial buffer zones. ¹¹ On the local government scale, EJ has legally been initiated in at least one area, via Fulton County, Georgia's pioneering Environmental Justice Zoning amendment, which enacts an EJ review process for rezoning and creates distance stipulations for environmentally adverse uses. However, the progressiveness of the legislation, from Georgia's most populous county, is tempered by its confinement to only unincorpated parts of the county. ¹²

The Inadequacies of Urban Sustainability Planning

Operating within a “planner's triangle” Campbell notes the constraints that urban planning is bounded by, with tensions generating from economic growth, environmental protection, and equity concerns. ¹³ Here clashes emerge via i) property conflict (involving economic growth and equity concerns); ii) resource conflict (between society and nature); and iii) development conflict (between equity and environmental concerns). Campbell ¹⁴ additionally recognizes urban planning's recent attention to sustainability and justice concerns, but notes the difficulty in reconciling the two within the corpus of planning; as they have been incongruent movements whose respective interests lie within disparate parties, the former appealing to middle-class environmental concerns while the latter involves the concerns of marginalized populations. Thus a milieu of “conflicting urgencies” exists, and involves competing interests related to resources, physical space, and political capital.

Pearsall and Pierce ¹⁵ note that environmental justice has a diminutive presence in both the environmental policy arena and urban sustainability indicators, due to the growing prominence of macro-scale problems (largely climate change) and also with regionally competitive amenities (e.g., public parks). Portney ¹⁶ notes an overall underrepresentation of EJ in sustainability plans, as these documents tend to be more economic centric, with indicators trending toward biophysical and ecological components, more so than those centered on social dynamics.

Methodology

This research used content analysis, “the systematic, objective, quantitative analysis of message characteristics” that involved the thorough examination of word use in order to distill the focal points of municipal sustainability planning. ¹⁷ It employed a standard discourse analysis, which monitors “consistency and connection of words to theme analysis of content and the establishment of central terms” with the aim of typifying customary word use from analyzed texts. ¹⁸

In order to capture whether sustainability planning speaks the language of justice in cities' programmatic material, the text analysis analyzed sustainability plans from several sustainability regimes. The analysis used a priori coding, that is, it predetermined which categories that were looked for within the text.

The use of text analysis here, and subsequent development of the Just Sustainabilities Planning Index, is similar to Agyeman ¹⁹ in which it was employed as a tool to assess the frequency of EJ and equity language used in the missions and programmatic materials of the Big 10 environmental organizations; here, its use is expanded to not only look at the use of environmental justice/equity language, but also sustainability and economic terminology. The content analysis initially used KH Coder software to perform the quantitative analysis due to its ability to identify co-occurrences and key words in context. While the software was valuable in framing word counts for each term, it ultimately served only as a baseline for minimum and maximum word uses, due to the inclusion of some terms that were used repeatedly as page footers for section identification purposes, and thus inflated a given term's word count. ²⁰

Because singular terms cannot act as the sole determinate regarding whether justice related issues are (or are not) being considered and served in American cities, it is necessary to also examine proxy language that cities use that will identify justice orientations in public policy documents. A battery of terms that, when contextually appropriate acted either as synonyms with EJ, or indicate at least some appreciation of the pervasive existence of environmental inequality. The proxy terms that this work uses and allows for are: equity (when used in the context of intragenerational equity, and accounting for socioeconomic imbalances) and environmental racism. Similarly, the analysis for economics included searches for terms related to jobs and employment and the environmental analysis considered the terms ecology and nature. It is readily acknowledged that terms not covered by the content analysis have the potential to convey sentiments synonymous to the selected terms, but each phrase used was selected for its lack of ambiguity when read in context and capacity to succinctly represent trends within a document. With the exception of environmental racism, each term was featured in a majority of the documents. Ultimately, while terms may not be entirely synonymous, there is profound correlation amongst the groupings.

An exegesis of each plan was performed to ensure that key terms were used within the context of this analysis. For example, the inclusion of the term equity in a sustainability plan could not be counted if its use did not address fairness, equality or a related meaning. Thus, its use in the phrase “debt-to-equity” ratios in the context of personal wealth doesn't involve social equity concerns and thus was not considered. An example of the analysis can be drawn from the Sustainable DC plan. In its section on Waste, the plan offers that “exporting waste from one community to another raises serious questions of environmental justice,” ²¹ and then provides commentary on the necessity of more comprehensive waste and resource management. Another example is Atlanta's Power to Change plan's bold, yet ambiguous proclamation: “If Georgia recycled 10% of its recyclables, it would potentially create roughly 1200 jobs.” ²²

Indexing

The results of the content analysis (see Table A.1) are coupled with the Just Sustainabilities Planning Index (see Table 1). The score for each plan is generated by examining sustainability development plans and assigning a value consistent with the respective plan's use of justice terms. The index's scoring thresholds assess the prominence that environmental justice issues are given in respective plans. The score range includes: zero (no acknowledgment of EJ), one (casual mentions of EJ), two (thematic mentions of EJ), and three (EJ mentioned thematically and programmatically).

Plan Criteria

The criteria for plan selection allowed for the inclusion of the most recent sustainability plans, as of May 2015, from the U.S.'s six most populous metropolitan regions' core cities (Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, ²³ and Washington DC). While each of these entities has its own unique geographies, resource bases, and populations that call for a deep analysis to appreciate the nuanced environmental and social characteristics to fully appreciate their respective ecologies and milieus, the purpose here is to illuminate how cities are talking about sustainability. In addition to the populations of the cities and their respective metropolitan regions, the decision to use the above cities was influenced by both Warner ²⁴ and Pearsall and Pearce, ²⁵ whom performed analysis that investigated a wider swath of city sustainability plans for their inclusion of EJ conceptualizations and implementations. This work distinguishes itself from those by engaging in an exegesis of each plan to analyze the linguistic framing of sustainability planning. The exhaustive reading of each plan that the content analysis called for made a survey of dozens of plans impractical. Additionally, this study further differentiates itself from earlier works by making contrasts between economic, justice, and environmental concerns.

The author acknowledges that the scale involved in looking at cities and regions with immense population may not be transferable to cities with smaller populations, varying geographies, or potentially even amongst other large cities. It is recognized that the unique political economies and political ecologies that influence urban planning make the conditions that this analysis examines not entirely reflective of those in other locales; however, considering their overall financial prominence, ²⁶ their budgets and resources that have been designated to sustainability planning, their nonattainment of National Ambient Air Quality Standards reconciled with the larger populations that are subjected to these conditions, all contributed to the significance of focusing on this scale.

Discussion

Upon reviewing the sustainability plans of the aforementioned cities, in regards to environmental justice concerns, efforts leave significant space for improvement. Many of these documents scarcely mention EJ and equity concerns; which becomes even more pronounced in contrast to the attention given to economic development interests. Although the two ideally should not compete, and can be complimentary (e.g., DC's sustainability-related workforce goals give attention to single parents and workforce development that is targeted towards unemployed and underemployed Washingtonians), when environmental justice issues are subordinate to economic ones, marginalized communities are exploited and made expendable. ^{27 , 28}

In addition to the broad critique of municipal sustainability being a de facto economic development mechanism (confirmed in part by the inordinate use of language related to jobs and economic development; see Table 2), plans can take on the tone of public relations documents more so than ones that seriously target environmental and ecological concerns. An example is Atlanta's Power to Change; its goal of achieving 1,000,000 “sustainable acts of change” ²⁹ isn't anchored in a coherent strategy to go about this nor offers a definition of what this encompasses. Lofty and ambiguous language can't be a tour de force in reversing environmental stresses associated with urbanization including poor air quality, energy obesity, and waste disposal. The use of environmental justice and equity language was conspicuously absent, even when it was broadly being acknowledged within plans. An example is Philadelphia's Greenworks plan, which has a chapter dedicated to equity; though the term is mentioned more in the section's footer—here used to identify the name of the section—than in the actual chapter itself. This contrasts significantly with the same plan's treatment of economy-related terms, which sees the chapter designated to that topic, flooded with the language related to the local economy. It should be recognized that Philadelphia has concentrated EJ concerns regarding its energy goals with the expansion of low-income weatherization efforts and workforce development along with energy efficiency strategies for public and low-income housing. ³⁰

The city of Chicago, with no mentions of EJ or equity terms, embodies what Agyeman terms the equity deficit. ³¹ In light of previous groundbreaking attention given to the Windy City's waste and recycling regime and the increased positioning of threats that waste management burdens communities of color with ³² (as well as employees that are from these communities), it is problematic that its sustainability agenda features this blind spot. Overall, all plans were significantly more focused on economic issues over justice. Perhaps even more perplexing, economic terms in all but one plan were mentioned more than environmental terms.

Conclusion

The attention that urban development and municipal sustainability planning has given to environmental justice concerns has been mixed. While planning may comply with federal mandates (e.g., Title VI directives covering local projects that receive federal monies) regarding the needs and conditions of environmental justice communities, cities need to do more to incorporate basic justice language into plans. So long as development strategies inordinately concentrate on economic growth, while giving scant attention to inequality, equity concerns, environmental maladies, and socioeconomic disparities that disproportionately burden distressed communities and residents, will continue to be a characteristic of development outcomes. While economic development should not be stricken from planning agendas, quality of life, human and ecosystem health, and justice dimensions of sustainability need greater standing. When justice isn't prominently featured, or is outright omitted, as an integral component of urban planning, the prospects for equitable outcomes are grim. Furthermore, if the accompanying policies and work of sustainability and planning regimes don't meaningfully embody just principles, notwithstanding prominence in planning materials, results that don't fortify the vulnerable against harm, nor give them greater entrée into environmental amenities, will persist. Notwithstanding its inclusion within planning materials, for just outcomes to materialize, planning must also engage in outreach towards populations that have been historically marginalized. This includes steps ranging from Sustainable DC using Spanish language media to promote its sustainability agenda, New York City and the Bay Area translating planning materials into a bevy of languages, and the simple step taken by DC and NYC of embedding language translation tools on their sustainability websites. An essential feature in rearranging the status quo is through robust involvement in the planning and development sphere by the public—especially those that are most vulnerable to environmental threats: this includes people of color, women, disabled persons, young people and the elderly—in the formative stages of policy. Communities must define the course of urban development, so that they will not have to subsequently defend against, nor be ignored by it.