The published literature on environmental justice has grown significantly over the past three decades. In the pages of this and other journals, as well as in work by major academic and commercial presses, scholars and writers have centered justice and inclusion and shown how they shape the study and practice of environmental politics and movements. As such, it may sometimes seem that “justice” has an unproblematic and uncontroversial relationship with environmentalism. However, three recent books illustrate how contentious and complex it has been, and continues to be, to incorporate justice as a core principle in spatial and environmental politics. By focusing on community organizers and social movements, Evolution of a Movement, A Spark in the Smokestacks, and Just Urban Design offer important case studies showing how differing ideas about justice, equity, and inclusion affect the politics of confrontation, radicalism, and co-optation and shape environmental policymaking. In doing so, each gives additional insight into the challenges and opportunities of the environmental justice movement writ large. To varying degrees, these books also advance our understanding of the role of researchers, academics, and knowledge producers in promoting justice themselves.

One of the important findings from these books is that environmental justice movements are not static. Demands for justice usually come from a place of radical dissatisfaction with or dissent from the existing political system. However, as Tracy E. Perkins shows in Evolution of a Movement, what begin as disruptive and confrontational environmental justice movements may over time become increasingly professionalized and incorporated into political institutions. What opportunities and limitations characterize this evolution? Perkins addresses these questions by tracing the origins of California’s environmental justice movement and its choice of strategies and engagement over the past four decades.

Throughout the 1980s, activists of color involved with the class-focused anti-toxics movement in California increasingly recognized that environmental hazards and risks were disproportionately shouldered by communities marginalized not only by their class status but also by their race. By centering race as an independent factor explaining the distribution of harms, the resultant movement broke from mainstream environmentalism and sought to collectively redress the disproportionate effects of environmental burdens on low-income communities and communities of color. As Perkins illustrates, the earliest years of the movement were characterized by radical politics. Protests were disruptive, intended to highlight the heightened risk of environmental toxins and the stark exclusion of vulnerable populations from institutional decision-making. Activists interrupted permit hearings, organized blockades, and pursued aggressive litigation to oppose proposed incinerators and landfill expansions. Throughout, activists were clear that they were dissatisfied with business-as-usual politics.

For example, in Kettleman City, a predominantly Latinx and Spanish-speaking town, residents who wanted to participate in public decision-making about siting toxic waste incinerators found that hearings on this issue were frequently scheduled in the middle of the workday and located at least thirty miles outside of town. When residents ultimately arrived by bus at one 1988 hearing, they were told that translations would take place in the back of the room and to congregate there—despite having arrived equipped with their own translator. Unsatisfied with this arrangement, activists stormed the front of the room to demand to be heard. These and other instances of blatant disrespect and institutional exclusion further radicalized activists and created the conditions in which disruptive protest was understood as a necessary and appropriate tactic. Moreover, Perkins explains that many activists of this period identified as political outsiders, which reduced their inhibitions and gave them the sense of having “nothing to lose” by upsetting the system.

With time, however, the environmental justice movement became institutionalized at various levels in the decision-making process, including in nonprofit, policy, and legal advocacy. Activists became increasingly reliant on “insider” tactics like voting drives, supporting political campaigns, and “sit-downs” with corporate leaders, eschewing the disruptive and radical practices of their predecessors. As Perkins points out, these changes proved divisive. In one case, an environmental movement in Richmond, California, was split between insiders who wanted to negotiate with Chevron around the siting of a refinery and outsiders who believed that doing so was helping Chevron avoid accusations of environmental racism.

This book represents an authoritative contribution to studies of social movements and environmental justice. One of the book’s many strengths is that Perkins effectively embeds the history of Californian environmental justice activism within the national environmental justice movement, demonstrating how activists drew upon the insight and principles that motivated communities protesting environmental racism in such locales as Love Canal, New York, and Warren County, North Carolina, and adapted them to meet the needs of residents in the deserts, valleys, and cities of California. This means that while her book centers upon the particular constraints and opportunities faced by activists on the West Coast, students who lack familiarity with the broader history of environmental justice activism and its emergence will still find the volume accessible and informative.

Perkins brings a trove of rich qualitative data to this study. In addition to interviews with 125 environmental justice activists, she draws upon eight years of participant observation across the state of California. She further supplements these data with policy and legal research that informs two case studies in the book: one of Kettleman City, the site of the largest hazardous waste landfill west of the Mississippi River, and a second of the struggle to shape the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. In constructing the argument of her book, Perkins acknowledges her indebtedness to her interlocutors, writing that “environmental justice scholarship that does not draw from interview or participant observation data often underestimates activists’ intellectual engagement with the themes about which scholars write” (16). Her assessment underscores that qualitative research methods are uniquely equipped to bring the agency and expertise of underrepresented and marginalized political actors to the forefront of social science.

In light of this, this book may have benefited from more extensive reflection on the methodological choices that guided Perkins’ research. For example, one wonders how Perkins gained access to the legal and policy materials that she draws upon to construct her two case studies, whether some interviews were conducted in Spanish and how Perkins went about translating them for an English-speaking audience, and how the researcher’s own positionality informed her choice of research question and her relationship with the activists whom she interviewed. For students and scholars who wish to pursue socially engaged research of the kind that Perkins has offered us, answers to these questions could have represented a strong starting point for additional reflection on the role of scholarship itself in shaping movement evolution.

An attention to methods and author positionality is one of the strengths of Jean Yen-chun Lin’s A Spark in the Smokestacks, which similarly documents collective organizing against incinerator construction, this time in three middle-class gated communities of Beijing. Lin begins her preface with personal reflections of a childhood spent between Taipei and small-town Illinois, where her attention to issues of public goods and community capacity in different political systems began. These reflections help explain the origin of Lin’s research question: how is it that resistance can emerge in what she calls such an “unlikely” place, that is, authoritarian China?

In the early 2000s, domestic housing reforms led to the abolition of the “work unit” or danwei system, through which one’s housing, medical care, and education were distributed. Simultaneously, economic development facilitated the expansion of the Chinese middle class. The resultant rise of gated communities, Lin argues, as well as the formation of residents’ identities as private homeowners and neighbors, created the conditions for environmental protest to later take place. Residents of these middle-class communities learned to plan meetings, form homeowners’ associations, and cultivate community leadership to address housing-related issues and violations of homeowners’ rights. Residential communities thus functioned as “schools of democracy” within an authoritarian context and paved the way for collective resistance to incinerator construction in later years.

One of this book’s contributions is methodological. The author makes compelling use of various online homeowners’ forums, which functioned as digital community spaces that facilitated collective action, alongside interviews with residents. The resultant combination of traditional and digital ethnographic methods allowed her to observe community building taking place in real time (via the forums) as well as the results of mobilization. Many scholars have noted the important role that online organizing has played in a range of social movements in the last two decades. Yet, as the author recognizes, much of this scholarship has failed to investigate the circumstances under which such organizing is successful. Lin shows that these forums were central to community identity formation, with homeowners even going so far as to refer to each other using their forum usernames rather than their given names (22). However, this book posits that online organizing is no replacement for conventional forms of mobilization. Rather, “the success of an online community space is made possible not only by the platform but also by the social capital and civic infrastructure that are created and reinforced off-line—that is, in the community” (16). Lin advances this argument by comparing the three gated communities that form her primary field site—what she calls Communities Meadow, Rose, and Marigold—with neighboring communities that similarly expressed concerns about incinerator construction but whose discussions were less interactive and who thus failed to mobilize.

Readers of this journal will likely be most interested in Lin’s investigation of the anti-incinerator campaign led by homeowners in these residential communities. However, the anti-incinerator campaign is somewhat orthogonal to the story that Lin tells about community development and middle-class associational life. In constructing her argument, Lin draws from an established tradition in sociology and political science that understands associational and community life as the basis for a strong democracy (e.g., Putnam 2000). As one might expect, research on associational life and civic participation in authoritarian contexts is rather limited, and Lin seeks to fill this lacuna. What she finds is that collective action is indeed possible in such contexts, but finding it requires looking beyond the formal organizations on which political scientists and sociologists have tended to focus. Moreover, while the story Lin tells is indeed one of collective action emerging in an unexpected environment, she concedes that the results of this organizing were ultimately truncated by the government to varying degrees: “while associational life within all three communities’ walls was vibrant, once issues and grievances went beyond the community, the state determined whether homeowners could be deeply engaged in political processes and consequently, influenced their sense and scope of civic responsibility” (18).

Notwithstanding this book’s insights, the point at which environmental activism becomes threatening to the authoritarian state is underexplored in this volume. If, as Lin suggests, environmental grievances are “among the more permissible issues for collective action in the view of the Chinese government” (10), then how should we explain later government interference? One possibility is that environmental activism is just as susceptible to authoritarian control as other forms of collectivization. Mattingly (2019), for example, argues that the Chinese state co-opts community associations as an additional mechanism for social control. As Mattingly might predict, the leader of Community Marigold was first repressed and then co-opted by city-level officials. First, Mr. Lu was detained for his protest activity. According to Lin, following Mr. Lu’s contribution to a citizen science report a few months later, he was invited by the Chinese government on a highly publicized international incinerator tour, in which his relationship with the state was represented as an amicable dialogue (202). Tolerance for environmental activism might thus be explained by community associations’ potential for co-optation by the state, rather than, as Lin suggests, by its seemingly apolitical nature or its resonance for both citizens and government officials alike. Although Lin suggests that the Chinese state is uniquely tolerant of citizens’ environmental demands, she has not yet provided a convincing argument for why we might treat environmental activism as a special case for the study of collectivization in authoritarian contexts. This represents a promising direction for future work.

The third book I consider here, Kian Goh and colleagues’ Just Urban Design, is distinct from the other two both in that it comprises an edited volume rather than a monograph and that its intended audience includes both scholars and practitioners. Whereas urban design is often treated as an aesthetic rather than a political endeavor, the authors seek to center justice in both design research and praxis. How can urban design achieve justice and inclusivity when cities are so often motivated by neoliberal and market-driven objectives? What could just urban design look like? The book addresses these questions in four sections. The first defines and interrogates the concept of just urban design, including by critically evaluating past scholarship on urban design to evaluate the extent to which the field has preoccupied itself with questions of different elements of justice: distributional, procedural, interactional, and recognitional. The second considers the concepts of inclusive urbanism and the public city. The third section investigates how social movements and groups motivated by shared identities seek to gain rights and access to urban spaces, while the fourth imagines how urban design can enhance the right to the city—what Lefebvre (1996, 158) described as “the transformed and renewed right to urban life”—for marginalized groups. Whether intentionally or not, the first two sections of this book tend to draw upon historical, philosophical, and sociological concepts and literatures, while the latter two become increasingly technical and oriented toward questions of praxis.

Perhaps because this book’s intended audience is not limited to academics, the authors tend to be more willing to consider their own roles and responsibilities as knowledge producers in advancing just urbanism. For example, in his essay “Building Community Capacity as Just Urban Design,” Jeffrey Hou reflects on a two-decade-long partnership between the University of Washington, Seattle (UW) and various organizations within Seattle’s Chinatown International District (CID). Community capacity building, he writes, is one channel through which urban design can address persistent social disparities in cities; three areas of focus for the UW–CID partnership have included enhancing the district’s capacity to participate, capacity to organize, and capacity to collaborate. Meanwhile, in their essay on urban rights, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman review their collaborative partnership with policymakers in Medellín, Colombia, in an effort to identify the mechanisms that enabled the city’s rapid and successful transformation into an egalitarian urban environment. The resulting “Medellín Diagram” is a visual tool for enhancing public knowledge about the priorities, processes, and interventions that facilitated Medellín’s transformation, with the goal of enabling similar progress elsewhere.

With its attention to the associations between urban design research and praxis, one might have expected that this volume would additionally interrogate the frequently contested relationship between urban residents and the university campus itself, although this is not the case. As my own evaluations of these texts might have already suggested to the reader, I believe greater attention to the ways that scholarship has itself shaped movement evolution and outcomes can only enhance academic work on environmental social movements. Environmental activists and community organizers often rely upon the knowledge, skills, and resources of scholars and academics to advance their own positions. Because each of these texts is itself concerned with tracing the emergence of justice claims among various environmental movements, historical accounts that fail to contend with the ways that academia has variously helped or hindered these endeavors are necessarily incomplete. Each of these texts exemplifies one possible approach to this charge: Perkins by highlighting the political promise of qualitative research methods, Lin by demonstrating how her personal biography animated her intellectual pursuits, and Goh et al. by building constructive and ongoing relationships between universities and policymakers, design practitioners, and urban residents. Each of these approaches constitutes an important starting point for socially engaged and reflexive research on environmental and spatial justice, and we should continue to follow their lead by remaining conscious to the ways that scholarship has defined the environmental politics agenda.

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Mattingly
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Author notes