COS 141-4 - Centering justice in conceptualizing and restoring access to urban nature

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

8:45 AM – 9:00 AM EDT

Location: 518C

Presenting Author(s)

Kelley E. Langhans

PhD Candidate
Department of Biology, Stanford University
Palo Alto, California, United States

Slides (PDF)

Coauthor(s)

AE

Alejandra Echeverri

Postdoctoral Scholar
Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, United States
SD

S. Caroline Daws

Stanford University, United States
SM

Sydney Moss

University of California, Berkeley, United States
CA

Christopher Anderson

Salo Sciences, United States
RC

Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer

Principal Research Scientist
Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota
OAKLAND, California, United States
NH

Nicholas Hendershot

Stanford University, United States
Ll

Lingling liu

Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, United States
LM

Lisa Mandle

Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, United States
ON

Oliver Nguyen

Department of Biology, Stanford University, United States
SO

Suzanne Ou

Department of Biology, Stanford University, California, United States
RR

Roy Remme

Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, Netherlands
RS

Rafael Schmitt

Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, United States
AV

Adrian Vogl

Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, United States
GD

Gretchen C. Daily

Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, CA, United States

Background/Question/Methods

Urban nature provides enormous benefits to people’s physical and mental health. However, as cities expand, many people are suffering from extinction of experience and are losing access to nature and the benefits it provides. This is especially true for marginalized groups, who often live in neighborhoods with more-degraded nature, along with fewer greenspaces overall. Ensuring that all people have access to nature in cities is a justice issue. Here, we critically analyze concepts of human-nature relationships, urban sustainability, and justice to present a definition of “access to nature” in urban contexts. We evaluate how recognitional, procedural, and distributional injustices have disrupted urban access to nature, and identify cases where justice has been centered in maintaining access to nature. We present a flexible design-thinking framework that centers justice in creating interventions aimed at increasing and restoring access to nature, along with questions that can guide the process of designing and implementing new interventions. Lastly, we apply our framework by showcasing three case studies that restore access to nature to marginalized communities in the United States. This framework can be implemented to incorporate justice into projects from urban wildland restoration to environmental education.

Results/Conclusions

We evaluate three types of justice: (1) recognitional (i.e., recognition of unique values and needs of groups), (2) procedural (i.e., equal distribution of decision-making power among groups), and (3) distributional (i.e., equal distribution of resources between groups), and found that injustices of all three types have blocked access to nature. Our design thinking framework for incorporating justice into creating interventions that restore access to urban nature has four phases: (1) defining the problem and recognizing stakeholder rights, which involves recognitional justice, (2) including all stakeholders in decision making, which involves procedural justice, (3) prototyping the intervention and (4) evaluating the intervention, both of which involve distributional justice making sure that the costs and benefits of the intervention are equitably distributed across groups. Finally, we highlight case studies from Latino Outdoors, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Nature Imagery in Prisons Project to show how our framework can be operationalized in real-world urban settings. Our work re-affirms the importance of centering justice in restoring access to nature, so that all people can enjoy the benefits that nature provides and lead healthy, fulfilling lives.