Centering Community Perspectives to Advance Recognitional Justice for Sustainable Cities: Lessons from Urban Forest Practice

Amber Grant (), Sara Edge, Andrew A. Millward, Lara A. Roman and Cheryl Teelucksingh
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Amber Grant: Urban Forest Research & Ecological Disturbance (UFRED) Group, Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto ON M5B 2K3, Canada
Sara Edge: Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto ON M5B 2K3, Canada
Andrew A. Millward: Urban Forest Research & Ecological Disturbance (UFRED) Group, Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto ON M5B 2K3, Canada
Lara A. Roman: USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Riverside CA 92507, USA
Cheryl Teelucksingh: Department of Sociology, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto ON M5B 2K3, Canada

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 12, 1-28

Abstract: Cities worldwide are grappling with complex urban environmental injustices. While environmental justice as a concept has gained prominence in both academia and policy, operationalizing and implementing environmental justice principles and norms remains underexplored. Notably, less attention has been given to centering the perspectives and experiences of community-based actors operating at the grassroots level, who can inform and strengthen urban environmental justice practice. Through ethnographic, participant-as-observer methods, interviews, and geovisualizations, this study explores the perspectives, experiences, knowledge, and practices of community-based urban forest stewards in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (United States) who are invested in addressing environmental injustices through urban tree-planting and stewardship. Interviewees were asked how they were addressing issues of distribution, procedure, and recognition in urban forest planning and practice, as well as the socio-political and institutional factors that have influenced their perspectives and practices. Particular attention is given to how urban forest stewards implement recognitional justice principles. Findings from this study exposed several complex socio-political challenges affecting steward engagement in community-led tree initiatives and the broader pursuit of environmental justice, including discriminatory urban planning practices, gentrification concerns, underrepresentation of Black and Latinx voices in decision-making, volunteer-based tree-planting models, and tree life cycle costs. Nevertheless, urban forest stewards remain dedicated to collective community-building to address environmental injustices and stress the importance of recognizing, listening to, dialoguing with, and validating the perspectives and experiences of their neighbors as essential to their process.

Keywords: environmental justice; urban forest; community-led stewardship; recognitional justice; Philadelphia; redlining; structural racism; gentrification; sustainability; representation; engagement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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