ancient cities

244 Environmental Justice
such as the satellite city, outer city, technopole, and
suburban fringe). While the edge city may have a
more direct application to geography—it is after all
the result of the concentration of business, commercial,
office, and retail space—in current usage,
edge city has lost the original meaning, and use of
the concept challenges conventional understandings
in political science and sociological analysis.
Although urban scholars seek new models as well
as new labels to better describe the continued
expansion of metropolitan regions, there is recognition
that models developed in the United States
may not transfer to other countries because of differences
in political governance. Contemporary
research in the United States, United Kingdom, and
beyond will allow scholars to better evaluate
whether models, such as the edge city and growth
machine, are applicable across cultures and
regions.
See also Exopolis; Suburbanization; Technopoles
Further Readings
Ray Hutchison
Bontje, Marco and Joachim Burdack. 2005. “Edge Cities,
European-style: Examples from Paris and the
Randstad.” Cities 22(4):317-30.
Edge City Collective (http://www.edgecitymusic.com).
Flanagan, William. 2001. Urban Sociology: Images and
Structures. 4th ed. New York: Allyn & Bacon.
Freestone, R. and P. Murphy. 1993. “Edge City: Review
of a Debate.” Urban Policy Research 11:184-90.
Garreau, Joel. 1991. Edge City: Life on the New
Frontier. New York: Doubleday.
En v i r o n m E n t a l Ju s t i C E
Environmental justice is both a normative principle
describing the equitable distribution of environmental
benefits and burdens and a political
and legal movement that seeks to realize that goal.
A closely related term, environmental equity, represents
the state, achievement, or outcome of environmental
justice, and environmental racism is the
practice of contravening environmental justice
along racial or ethnic lines.
Beginning in the United States in the early
1980s, advocates advanced environmental justice
claims within the logic of racial equality of the civil
rights movement and did so by following a legal
strategy seeking change through litigation in the
courts. Movement organizers also saw environmental
justice as a means to move mainstream
environmental organizations from their traditional
focus on conserving and protecting nature to an
anthropocentric concern with protecting people,
especially those burdened by low income and
racial and ethnic segregation or discrimination,
from inequitable exposure to the harmful effects of
environmental pollution.
More recently, the scope of environmental justice
has expanded beyond the original focus on the
inequitable spatial distribution of environmental
burdens. This expansion has entailed the reconceptualization
of justice beyond distributional considerations
to consider procedural, systemic, and
structural dimensions, and the reconceptualization
of environment beyond the siting of noxious activities
to include the economic and political construction
of the geographic landscape within a
broad political ecology framework. The conceptual
evolution of environmental justice has
prompted, in turn, a redirection of method and
practice beyond the original, narrowly construed
legal strategy to encompass a broader and potentially
more far-reaching challenge to underlying
sociospatial processes.
Historical Roots
The pivotal moments in the introduction, diffusion,
and popularization of environmental justice
have been memorialized in frequently rehearsed
histories of the movement. Although local protests
in the United States over noxious environmental
conditions date back to colonial-era objections to
rendering plants and mill ponds, the rubric of environmental
justice emerged with the conjunction of
the civil rights and environmental movements in
the late 1960s and 1970s. The first organized protest
to explicitly invoke themes of environmental
racism and environmental justice is widely acknowledged
to be the opposition mounted in 1982 by
residents of rural Warren County, North Carolina,
to the proposed construction of a landfill for disposal
of contaminated soil containing highly toxic