Environmental Justice in the Urban Landscape

Abstract

Environmental justice is a crucial subfield within environmental politics. Environmental justice studies have often been focussed on sites of natural disasters; however, more recently the scope of environmental justice study has been expanded to include environmental justice in urban locations. First, this paper contains a literature review of prominent scholarly articles within the field of environmental justice, including historical examples of environmentally unjust policies, and the factors influencing environmental injustice. Next, this paper examines case studies of environmental hazards within North America. Finally, this paper makes policy recommendations to mitigate environmental injustice through a Canadian federal context such as mandating the creation of environmental justice assessments, in the Canadian provincial context, by encouraging the creation of an environmental justice framework, as well as through a municipal context, by encouraging the creation of an environmental justice assessment to create equity within city planning.