| Chapter 1: | Spatial and Environmental Justice in the Metropolis |
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or institutional tabula rasa, nor are they randomly distributed in and through space and time. Instead, environmental burdens and benefits are deeply spatialized and marked by combined and uneven distributions in urban space according to identifiable social structures and institutional logics. In other words, an environmental injustice is always already a spatial injustice. These two concepts constantly interact and constitute each other. Not only are environmental injustices produced and governed in and across space, they are also affected and embodied by space. Accordingly, the goal of advancing the ends of environmental justice requires both intensive and extensive investigations (Sayer, 1984) of the mutual and synergistic interplay between space and society, as well as the phenomenon of geographical scale (Purcell, 2007)—ranging from the microscale of everyday neighborhood life and the more intermediate scale of city and metropolitan work to the more distanciated scales of national governance and global flows. Consequently, in order to comprehensively and coherently address environmental justice, it is necessary to identify and examine both the spatial and scalar dynamics and structures of the problem (Purcell & Brown, 2005). This means that seeking meaningful and sustainable environmental justice involves attending to the overlapping and interacting spaces and scales of injustice. Among other things, such an effort would at a very minimum entail a detailed examination of how the spaces and scales of economic governance interact with the spaces and scales of environmental governance to unevenly produce and distribute certain risks and burdens which are then disproportionately suffered by specific racial/ethnic minority or low-income residents and neighborhoods.
Consistent with a progressive politics of scale, advocating for spatial justice implies that it is primarily the responsibility of state and municipal officials and public institutions to develop