Search Results (173)

While newly built urban green spaces aim to address environmental concerns, the resulting green gentrification and social inequality caused by escalating property values have become critical topics of urban socio-spatial research. To prevent green initiatives from becoming unaffordable for their intended beneficiaries in rapidly urbanizing cities, it is essential to examine the spatial and temporal relationships between the construction of new green spaces and rising housing prices. This study employs a difference-in-differences methodology to analyze regional disparities, impact periodicity, and the influence of park size on housing prices, using Nanjing, China as a case study. This result reveals that the introduction of new-built parks in Nanjing significantly impacts housing prices within an 800 m radius. The premium effect of these parks is substantially higher in urban core areas compared to suburban locales, demonstrating spatial differentials. Suburban parks temporally exhibit a prolonged lag and a shorter premium impact duration. Moreover, among various park areas, medium-sized parks demonstrate the most pronounced leverage effect, approximately double that of large parks, while small parks do not significantly affect housing prices. To mitigate the exacerbation of premium effects and enhance social justice in green strategies, we advocate prioritizing the development of small parks, particularly in urban core areas, and leveraging the temporal delay in new-built park impacts for urban policy interventions. Full article

This study investigates the spatial disparities in flood risk and social vulnerability across 66,543 census tracts in the Conterminous United States (CONUS), emphasizing urban–rural differences. Utilizing the American Community Survey (ACS) 2016–2020 data, we focused on 16 social factors representing socioeconomic status, household composition, racial and ethnic minority status, and housing and transportation access. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reduced these variables into five principal components: Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Elderly and Disability, Housing Density and Vehicle Access, Youth and Mobile Housing, and Group Quarters and Unemployment. An additive model created a comprehensive Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). Statistical analysis, including the Mann–Whitney U test, indicated significant differences in flood risk and social vulnerability between urban and rural areas. Spatial cluster analysis using Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) revealed significant high flood risk and social vulnerability clusters, particularly in urban regions along the Gulf Coast, Atlantic Seaboard, and Mississippi River. Global and local regression models, including Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), highlighted social vulnerability’s spatial variability and localized impacts on flood risk. The results showed substantial regional disparities, with urban areas exhibiting higher flood risks and social vulnerability, especially in southeastern urban centers. The analysis also revealed that Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Group Quarters and Unemployment, and Housing Density and Vehicle Access are closely related to flood risk in urban areas, while in rural areas, the relationship between flood risk and factors such as Elderly and Disability and Youth and Mobile Housing is more pronounced. This study underscores the necessity for targeted, region-specific strategies to mitigate flood risks and enhance resilience, particularly in areas where high flood risk and social vulnerability converge. These findings provide critical insights for policymakers and planners aiming to address environmental justice and promote equitable flood risk management across diverse geographic settings. Full article

Water is crucial for enduring horticultural productivity, but high water-use requirements and declining water supplies with the changing climate challenge economic viability, environmental sustainability, and social justice. While the scholarly literature pertaining to water management in horticulture abounds, knowledge of practices and technologies that optimize water use is scarce. Here, we review the scientific literature relating to water requirements for horticulture crops, impacts on water resources, and opportunities for improving water- and transpiration-use efficiency. We find that water requirements of horticultural crops vary widely, depending on crop type, development stage, and agroecological region, but investigations hitherto have primarily been superficial. Expansion of the horticulture sector has depleted and polluted water resources via overextraction and agrochemical contamination, but the extent and significance of such issues are not well quantified. We contend that innovative management practices and irrigation technologies can improve tactical water management and mitigate environmental impacts. Nature-based solutions in horticulture—mulching, organic amendments, hydrogels, and the like—alleviate irrigation needs, but information relating to their effectiveness across production systems and agroecological regions is limited. Novel and recycled water sources (e.g., treated wastewater, desalination) would seem promising avenues for reducing dependence on natural water resources, but such sources have detrimental environmental and human health trade-offs if not well managed. Irrigation practices including partial root-zone drying and regulated deficit irrigation evoke remarkable improvements in water use efficiency, but require significant experience for efficient implementation. More advanced applications, including IoT and AI (e.g., sensors, big data, data analytics, digital twins), have demonstrable potential in supporting smart irrigation (focused on scheduling) and precision irrigation (improving spatial distribution). While adoption of technologies and practices that improve sustainability is increasing, their application within the horticultural industry as a whole remains in its infancy. Further research, development, and extension is called for to enable successful adaptation to climate change, sustainably intensify food security, and align with other Sustainable Development Goals. Full article

Urban green space (UGS) is a fundamental infrastructure in modern urban settings, crucial for regulating the urban climate and improving public health. Accessibility to UGS represents a significant environmental justice issue, influencing the sustainable development of local communities. In this work, we comprehensively evaluated the temporal dynamics of UGS accessibility and the disparity in exposure for all 31 metropolitan divisions in the United States from 2013 to 2022. Our findings indicate that there have been no significant changes in both population-weighted UGS exposure and within-city inequality of UGS exposure for all racial/ethnic groups across the study period. Furthermore, a consistent racial/ethnic disparity in UGS exposure was noted throughout the study period, with the White group tending to have higher-than-average UGS accessibility, and all other racial/ethnic groups, including Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander, experiencing lower-than-average UGS accessibility. These findings underscore the urgency for urban planning and policy-making strategies to address these inequities, promoting healthy and sustainable urban development. Full article

Mainstream empirical studies on the spatial justice of medical facilities focus on equal accessibility or resource availability based on population scale, overlooking critiques that emphasize the importance of assessing inequality and the multidimensionality of human needs. However, access to medical care, particularly for vulnerable groups in social housing, often demands a higher level of consideration. Evaluating whether people can access the facilities they demand and expect is crucial for improving living standards. This study categorizes medical facilities into primary healthcare and hospital facilities based on their service grade, and integrates survey-based satisfaction into a spatial analysis of cost–distance-based accessibility and gravity-2SFCA-based availability. Analysis reveals that satisfaction primarily correlates with two factors: the distance to primary healthcare and the ease of reaching hospital facilities. While low accessibility to primary healthcare contributes to the evident distribution injustice of medical resources, satisfaction with service quality and scope is more strongly associated with the ease of reaching hospitals. To reduce injustice in social housing, specific remedies are needed to improve the difficult conditions for accessing primary healthcare faced by communities such as Guangdan, Likang, and Jinshazhou. Moreover, improving the easiness of reaching hospital facilities may significantly enhance the resident satisfaction with the level of medical service provided. Findings obtained in this research may not only enlighten Guangzhou’s urban planning, but may also be noteworthy for developing livable cities, which people anticipated. Full article

This study explores the complex interplay between air pollution, the socioeconomic conditions, and the tourism density within Texas’s urban landscapes, focusing on Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Despite extensive research on environmental justice and urban tourism separately, few studies have integrated these fields to examine how tourism development intersects with environmental and socioeconomic disparities at a neighborhood level. This research addresses this gap by employing advanced geospatial analyses and multi-criteria decision analysis to reveal the pronounced clustering of stressed communities on urban peripheries, often removed from tourism’s economic benefits. The study uniquely quantifies the spatial mismatches between tourist hotspots and areas of environmental stress, a dimension often overlooked in the environmental justice literature. Local spatial statistics and cumulative impact analysis uncover statistically significant correlations between high poverty levels and elevated air pollution in specific locales. The results show varying patterns across cities, with Austin presenting the lowest inequality levels and San Antonio exhibiting significant disparities. This granular, neighborhood-centric approach provides novel insights into the tourism–environment–equity nexus, addressing the lack of comprehensive studies linking these factors in rapidly growing Texan metropolitan areas. The findings underscore the critical need for targeted policy interventions and neighborhood-specific approaches in diagnosing urban environmental disparities and crafting equitable urban development policies that consider tourism’s impact on local communities. Full article

The climate crisis, migration and urbanization may appear as three separate crises, but under Sheller’s paradigm of Mobility Justice, they become part of a coherent whole that should be tackled as a single, complex and interconnected predicament. This paper observes rhetorical strategies employed in texts about the climate crisis, about cycling advocacy and about the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, which developed in Oxford, UK, in 2023. The metaphors, deictic pronouns and identity categories used are the main discourse features analysed through a qualitative approach, showing how mobility-related issues are often discussed through spatial metaphors, while deictic pronouns play a central role in the creation of identities. The findings are employed to contribute to the beneficial reframing of mobility-related discourses, whether global or local, and to react to climate inaction. The overall aim of this approach is to reveal the links between discourses about the climate crisis on a global scale and those on a local, urban scale concerning urban mobility policies. The prism through which both global and local discourses are observed is that of space and access to mobility. The aim of this investigation is to identify new patterns of language that can help us finding “new stories to live by”. Full article

As a typical city with a population of 5 to 10 million in China, Jinan has undergone significant increases in land supply during the past decade, resulting in substantial volatility in apartment sale/resale market prices. In this study, we investigated all second-hand apartment transactions from 826 communities of Jinan city and explored the multiscale impacts of land environmental features and planning on apartment resale prices throughout the city. Specifically, central and eastern regions had significantly positive impacts on apartment resale prices, while western regions had significantly negative impacts; education resources had consistently positive impacts throughout the city while shopping, business buildings, and medical resources had insignificant impacts; subway stations had insignificant impacts and bus stations had significant effects only in congestion points and northeastern edges. Our results revealed the formation mechanisms and spatial heterogeneity of apartment resale prices in Jinan. Our work will not only help in the decision making of potential apartment purchasers, but will also be conducive to enhancing the spatial justice of local governments in land supply and planning policies. Full article

Urban air pollution has been long understood as a critical threat to human health worldwide. Worsening urban air quality can cause increased rates of asthma, respiratory illnesses, and mortality. Air pollution is also an important environmental justice issue as it disproportionately burdens populations made vulnerable by their socioeconomic and health status. Using spatially continuous fine-scale air quality data for the city of Philadelphia, this study analyzed the relationship between two air pollutants: particulate matter (PM_2.5, black carbon (BC), and three dimensions of vulnerability: social (non-White population), economic (poverty), and health outcomes (asthma prevalence). Spatial autoregressive models outperformed Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, indicating the importance of considering spatial autocorrelation in air pollution-related environmental-justice modeling efforts. Positive relationships were observed between PM_2.5 concentrations and the socioeconomic variables and asthma prevalence. Percent non-White population was a significant predictor of BC for all models, while percent poverty was shown to not be a significant predictor of BC in the best fitting model. Our findings underscore the presence of distributive environmental injustices, where marginalized communities may bear a disproportionate burden of air pollution within Philadelphia. Full article

Energy justice remains relatively under-researched outside of the Western context, especially in Asia. This paper addresses that gap by investigating the process of energy transition in Taiwan through the socio-spatial lens and institutional points of view. The paper underscores the urgency of recognizing and addressing the overlooked social injustices across different territories, advocating an integrated planning approach that incorporates a just energy transition perspective to reduce the uneven negative impacts of deploying renewable energies across communities and regional territories. Drawing on a case study of the Changhua region, the paper identifies conflicts arising from the rapid deployment of renewable energy, such as land use changes that displace farming activities and negatively affect rural stakeholders. The findings suggest the need to urgently address the gap between top–down goals in energy transition and bottom–up considerations to raise awareness and prevent injustices that risk deepening the existing socio-economic inequities. This paper also proposes a new framework for both new research and policy for (just) energy transition, incorporating distributional, procedural, and recognitional concerns together with a critical view on the cross-scale and cross-sectoral integration as part of the spatial planning process. Full article

Understanding the determinants of the availability and spatial fairness of street greenery is crucial for improving urban green spaces and addressing green justice concerns. While previous studies have mainly examined factors influencing street greenery from an aerial perspective, there has been limited investigation into determinants at eye level, which more closely aligns with people’s actual encounters with green spaces. To address this, the Green View Index (GVI) and Gini coefficient were used to assess the availability and spatial fairness of street greenery from a pedestrian’s perspective, using Baidu Street View (BSV) images across 49 subdistricts in Changchun City, China. A dataset of 33,786 BSV images from 1877 sites was compiled. Additionally, 21 explanatory factors were collected and divided into three groups: socioeconomic, biogeographic, and landscape patterns. The Boosted Regression Tree (BRT) method was employed to assess the relative influence and marginal effects of these factors on street greenery’s availability and spatial fairness. The results showed that street greenery’s availability and spatial fairness are predominantly influenced by landscape patterns. Specifically, the percentage of landscape and edge density emerged as the most significant factors, exhibiting a threshold effect on the availability and fairness of street greenery. Increasing the proportion and complexity of urban green spaces can efficiently enhance the availability and spatial fairness of street greenery. These findings lay a new foundation for urban green infrastructure management. Full article

With rapid urbanization, many cities have experienced significant changes in land use and land cover (LULC), triggered urban heat islands (UHI), and increased the health risks of citizens’ exposure to UHI. Some studies have recognized residents’ inequitable exposure to UHI intensity. However, few have discussed the spatiotemporal heterogeneity in environmental justice and countermeasures for mitigating the inequalities. This study proposed a novel framework that integrates the population-weighted exposure model for assessing adjusted thermal comfort exposure (TCEa) and the spatiotemporal weighted regression (STWR) model for analyzing countermeasures. This framework can facilitate capturing the spatiotemporal heterogeneities in the response of TCEa to three specified land-surface and built-environment parameters (i.e., enhanced vegetation index (EVI), normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), and modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI)). Using this framework, we conducted an empirical study in the urban area of Fuzhou, China. Results showed that high TCEa was mainly concentrated in locations with dense populations and industrial regions. Although the TCEa’s responses to various land-surface and built-environment parameters differed at locations over time, the TCEa illustrated overall negative correlations with EVI and MNDWI while positive correlations with NDBI. Many exciting spatial details can be detected from the generated coefficient surfaces: (1) The influences of NDBI on TCEa may be magnified, especially in rapidly urbanizing areas. Still, they diminish to some extent, which may be related to the reduction in building construction activities caused by the COVID-19 epidemic and the gradual improvement of urbanization. (2) The influences of EVI on TCEa decline, which may be correlated with the population increase. (3) Compared with NDBI, the MNDWI had more continuous and stable significant cooling effects on TCEa. Several mitigation strategies based on the spatiotemporal heterogeneous relationships also emanated. The effectiveness of the presented framework was verified. It can help analysts effectively evaluate local thermal comfort exposure inequality and prompt timely mitigation efforts. Full article

Access and exposure to urban green space—the combination of parks and vegetative cover in cities—are associated with various health benefits. As urban green space is often unequally distributed throughout cities, understanding how it is allocated across socio-demographic populations can help city planners and policy makers identify and address urban environmental justice and health equity issues. To our knowledge, no studies have yet combined assessments of park quality, park availability, and green cover to inform equitable urban green space planning. To this end, we developed a comprehensive methodology to identify urban green space inequities at the city scale and applied it in Portland, OR, USA. After auditing all public parks in Portland and gathering green cover data from publicly accessible repositories, we used a suite of statistical tests to evaluate distribution of parks and green cover across Census block groups, comprising race, ethnicity, income, and educational attainment characteristics. Right-of-way tree canopy cover was the most significant urban green space inequity identified in bivariate analysis (r_s = −0.73). Spatial autoregressive models identified that right-of-way, private, and overall tree canopy cover (Nagelkerke pseudo-R² = 0.66, 0.77, and 0.67, respectively) significantly decreased with the proportion of minoritized racial population and increased with median income. The results were then used to identify priority locations for specific urban green space investments. This research establishes a process to assess intra-urban green space inequities, as well as identify data-informed and spatially explicit planning priorities to promote health equity and environmental justice. Full article

Urban parks, integral to city life, have long contributed to the well-being of residents through various ecosystem services. Previous studies consistently highlighted unequal park distribution and access, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these disparities. From a spatial justice perspective, this review examines urban parks’ roles during the pandemic, the impact on equity and access, and how evolving park usage characteristics inform future management challenges. Analysing 53 peer-reviewed studies and 11 online materials from January 2020 to April 2023, this review reveals a significant increase in park visitors during the pandemic, causing challenges in accommodating the surge due to lockdown measures. The findings underscore physical and social justice dimensions, revealing disparities in park access during COVID-19. These challenges prompt reevaluating urban parks’ potential for well-being and ecosystem benefits, advocating for inclusive decision-making to enhance community resilience and socialisation. The COVID-19 crisis highlighted planning and management challenges, emphasising the need for a more sustainable, liveable, and responsive approach to urban park planning. Full article

This article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre’s potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of ‘active citizenship’ for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research. Full article