Environmental Justice and the Sustainable City

Abstract

This chapter discusses the small number of interlinked principles for sustainable development which derive from these concerns, and then moves on to assess how four different sets of approaches to creating a sustainable city measure up against them. In particular, relative to the other models of sustainable urban development, what the self-reliant city approach adds is a clear emphasis on interspecies equity, procedural equity and also social equity, bringing these to the forefront of both problem diagnosis and the processes of devising policies for the sustainable city. Environmental justice and social justice are seen as intrinsically connected in such analyses, with both treated in this article in this larger conception of addressing both the underlying systemic causes of injustice and the more traditional distributive justice concerns of seeking to redress inequalities of outcome. The concern with procedural equity here also covers what is sometimes referred to as the principle of participation.