Rethinking Environmental Justice in Sustainable Cities

Insights from Agent-Based Modeling

Heather E. Campbell, Yushim Kim, Adam M. Eckerd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135128494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política medioambiental y energética

As the study of environmental policy and justice becomes increasingly significant in today's global climate, standard statistical approaches to gathering data have become less helpful at generating new insights and possibilities. None of the conventional frameworks easily allow for the empirical modeling of the interactions of all the actors involved, or for the emergence of outcomes unintended by the actors. The existing frameworks account for the "what, " but not for the "why."

Heather E. Campbell, Yushim Kim, and Adam Eckerd bring an innovative perspective to environmental justice research. Their approach adjusts the narrower questions often asked in the study of environmental justice, expanding to broader investigations of how and why environmental inequities occur. Using agent-based modeling (ABM), they study the interactions and interdependencies among different agents such as firms, residents, and government institutions. Through simulation, the authors test underlying assumptions in environmental justice and discover ways to modify existing theories to better explain why environmental injustice occurs. Furthermore, they use ABM to generate empirically testable hypotheses, which they employ to check if their simulated findings are supported in the real world using real data.

The pioneering research on environmental justice in this text will have effects on the field of environmental policy as a whole. For social science and policy researchers, this book explores how to employ new and experimental methods of inquiry on challenging social problems, and for the field of environmental justice, the authors demonstrate how ABM helps illuminate the complex social and policy interactions that lead to both environmental justice and injustice.

1 Introduction

The possibility of sustainable cities has become of great interest to scholars, governments, and citizens.¹ As the world becomes rapidly urbanized—with more than half the world’s population living in cities as of 2014²—many are concerned about the ability to maintain quality of life.

Over the last couple of decades since the term came into common use, the concept of sustainability has expanded beyond environmental and economic health to include social and political justice for residents. In other words, sustainability has become a three-pillars concept³ that includes the “three interacting, interconnected, and overlapping ‘prime systems’: the biosphere or ecological system; the economy, the market or the economic system; and human society, the human social system.”⁴ The political system, families and communities, and cultures are all important parts of the human social system. Sustainable cities strive to balance all three prime systems and achieve fully sustainable development.

There are numerous initiatives around the globe to build sustainable cities.⁵ As one example, the city of Baltimore is taking action to become a more sustainable city. The 2014 Baltimore Sustainability Plan lays out a broad comprehensive agenda with 29 priority goals grouped under seven themes—cleanliness, pollution prevention, resource conservation, greening, transportation, education and awareness, and the green economy.⁶ The plan encourages city officials to integrate policy and programs addressing the economic, environmental, and social health of the community and requires collaboration among important actors in the city, such as city government, neighborhoods, community organizations, funders, and state and federal agencies.⁷ Balancing environmental, economic, and social systems is essential to a sustainable city, but it poses significant challenges.⁸

Environmental justice (EJ) is a critical element of sustainable cities because social equity, fairness, and progress are core elements of sustainability,⁹ especially under the social pillar of the three-pillars concept. Environmental injustice can undermine a city’s goal of overall sustainability; it can reduce collaboration and create a rift between citizens and their government, or even cause social unrest. Nevertheless, the reality of race- and ethnicity-based environmental injustice is ongoing in many cities.

Existing EJ research has focused on analyzing whether and to what extent environmental injustice exists, and has been weaker in explaining why it exists and in providing useful guidance for addressing the problem. The current concept of sustainability is premised on the interaction and interdependence of natural and social systems, and we argue that thinking about EJ problems systemically—that is, as one part of the entire interlinked system of the city—using tools, particularly agent-based modeling, developed to aid this type of thinking can shed light on the stubbornly difficult, wicked problem of environmental injustice.

Environmental justice

As part of the broader goal of sustainability overall, concerns about the equity of the distribution of environmental quality are arising worldwide. In the United States, consideration of environmental justice began to be examined in the 1980s and was codified into law in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which stipulated that “each Federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations in the United States.”¹⁰ However, the issue is not limited to the United States. The European Union has been working to ensure improvement of the slum-like conditions in which the ethnic minority Romani population often lives.¹¹ The South African government has passed much stricter standards regarding externalities of mining to ensure better environmental conditions for the poor who usually live and work close to mines. Environmental justice is also increasingly considered when designing policy for trade—particularly the trade of waste products—between richer and poorer countries.¹²

In the research literature, a finding of environmental injustice most usually is based on statistical evidence of disproportionate environmental effects based on race or ethnicity while (statistically) controlling for other factors such as cost, income, and the movement of minorities into the ambit of environmental “disamenities” (facilities or sites that cause environmental harm). In some cases, the term is used to indicate that the poor receive disproportionate harmful environmental effects. As with any social injustice, environmental injustice can undermine the health and sustainability of societies and communities. Unfortunately, our current understanding of it is limited. We are fairly sure that environmental injustice exists, but there is heated debate as to why.

The study of race- and ethnicity-based environmental injustice has developed into a research subfield of its own since it was first empirically identified in the United States in the 1980s through the famous United Church of Christ report.¹³ Despite much evidence of the disproportionate spatial collocation of ethnic minorities and poor environmental conditions, there is still significant disagreement as to whether the cause is race/ethnicity-based, or whether statistical findings supporting it are artifacts of various analytic errors and decisions. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that race/ethnicity-disproportionate environmental injustice does exist, even when controlling for time (“which came first,” the residents or the pollution),¹⁴ residential location economics (“move in” versus “move out”),¹⁵ and many other causal factors including income, politics, and other costs.¹⁶ However, as stated above and as we explicate below, significant evidence of the presence of disproportionate exposure does not tell us why it occurs, and racism is not the only possible answer to this question.

To us, then, the EJ literature presents a troubling puzzle. It is not generally America’s self-concept that race and/or ethnicity should still affect living conditions in an involuntary way—this does not seem to be our idea of “justice for all,”¹⁷ as it says in the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States. Even if, as Ringquist argues,¹⁸ the magnitude of race-based environmental injustice effects is small, they have the potential to erode trust between minority residents and their neighbors and governments, and thereby to make cities less governable. This reduces the wellbeing of all.

Some activists and researchers argue that only racism by firm and/or governmental decision makers can explain the oft-observed outcomes in which minority status is an important predictor of disproportionate collocation of residents with environmental disamenities—polluting or polluted land or facilities such as toxics release inventory facilities (TRIFs);¹⁹ Superfund sites;²⁰ brownfields (plots of polluted land); hazardous waste management facilities (transport, storage and disposal facilities—TSDFs); and excessive noise.²¹ However, while in no way denying the continued existence of racism in contemporary America (consider the huge ruckus surrounding the 2013 Cheerios advertisement that showed a multiracial family),²² we wonder whether the current levels of racism in America are sufficient to explain the observed environmental inequities.

Some researchers suspect that the answer to this conundrum is that minorities are, on average, poorer than majorities in the United States, and it is poverty rather than minority status that drives minority-disproportionate collocation with pollution. However, the persuasiveness of this explanation is diminished by the fact that most recent studies control independently for income and many still find a disproportionate race effect.²³ Further, some research finds race-based environmental injustice in the case of Asian Americans,²⁴ but Asians are the Census-measured US minority group that actually has a larger average income than white, non-Hispanic Americans.²⁵ Others wonder if perhaps minorities simply do not care as much about their residential environment as do majority residents, but we also find evidence opposed to this possibility, both through studies of “dread” (the fear of risk),²⁶ and through some empirical work that explicitly examines related issues.²⁷

It is very difficult to tease out the causes of the EJ problem using standard theoretical and methodological wherewithal. Studies informed by conventional economic theories have largely focused on the location choices of firms or residents; related studies based in other disciplines explore EJ from the perspective of psychology and risk. There are some studies that have framed EJ as a social phenomenon that needs to be understood via aggregate-level dynamics, such as neighborhood change over time, rather than individual or firm choices.²⁸ However, none of these frameworks readily allows the empirical modeling of the interactions of the many different actor types involved, the interdependence of social and natural systems, or the emergence of outcomes not necessarily intended by any. In short, none comprehensively treats the city as a system, with environmental injustice as one outcome of systemic interactions.

However, there are novel research methods available to generate new insights into environmental and sustainability issues and policy designs. One of these is agent-based modeling, a computational simulation method well structured to model dynamic interaction within complex urban systems. The usual statistical approach to environmental policy and planning is at a point of diminishing returns, and the agent-based modeling approach gives us a new route with new insights and new types of implications that can then be tested empirically.

This book invites environmental policy scholars, simulation modelers, and practicing professionals and administrators on an exciting journey of social inquiry with this approach: using agent-based modeling to simulate dynamic, systemic interactions and provide new insight into EJ findings and solutions. In addition, though EJ is the specific topic on which we focus, this method has promise for many other issues in urban policy and planning, and for urban sustainability broadly.

EJ as emergence, and agent-based modeling

Specific to agent-based modeling, “emergence”²⁹ is a term that refers to “macroscopic societal regularities arising from the purely local interaction of the agents.”³⁰ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Series foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Environmental justice, urban sustainability, and agent-based modeling
• 3. An agent-based model for environmental justice: The EJ ABM
• 4. Economic rationality, political rationality, or racial targeting: Focusing on firm behavior
• 5. Residential choice constraints
• 6. Race, class, and environmental disparities
• 7. Residential mobility
• 8. Local zoning
• 9. Polluted-site remediation
• 10. All politics is spatial: Integrating an agent-based model with spatially explicit landscape data
• 11. Conclusions
• Appendix: NetLogo code for EJ ABM 1.0
• References
• Index