The Wood for the Trees: Ordinary Environmental Injustice and the Everyday Right to Urban Nature

Mark Whitehead

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009, vol. 33, issue 3, pages 662-681

Abstract: This article explores the potential for a more ordinary sense of urban environmental justice. While great progress has been made over the last 30 years in connecting environmental politics to the everyday concerns of urban residents, this article claims that the urbanization of environmentalism has produced a very narrow sense of what everyday forms of justice may be. Drawing on a Lefebvrian-inspired interpretation of everyday life, this article exposes a residual set of ordinary socio-ecological injustices that persist in urban space. While rarely addressed in either environmental politics or urban policy, this article claims that these expressions of ordinary injustice have a significant impact on the capabilities of disadvantaged urban communities to live out a full life. Drawing on the case of the Black Country Urban Forest in the English West Midlands - the largest urban woodland project in the UK - analysis considers how the spatial location and scalar constitution of the project appear to draw attention to the spaces of ordinary environmental neglect in cities. Further analysis shows, however, that the desire to address simultaneously questions of social and ecological injustice, which is typical in such large-scale urban greening initiatives, can actually compromise the ability of such schemes to resolve ordinary forms of urban injustice. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00862.x link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:33:y:2009:i:3:p:662-681

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0309-1317

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research is edited by Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings

More articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from Blackwell Publishing
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().