Flows of justice? Situating environmental justice in urban river restoration

The environmental justice (EJ) movement in the United States has long focused on water quality due to the threats that polluted surface and groundwaters pose to human health in historically marginalized communities. Recently, several advocacy groups, state agencies, and community-based organizations throughout the US have been working to rehabilitate urban rivers towards ecological and hydrological functioning through riparian and instream habitat improvements, channel modification, bank stabilization, dam removal, and other interventions. Many of these projects are attempting to integrate EJ concepts and practices into their river restoration efforts to make the project design, implementation, and outcomes more equitable and participatory. The goal of this paper is to examine how different elements of EJ–procedural, distributive, and recognitional understandings of justice–are (or are not) being integrated into restoration efforts across several urban settings. Employing a combination of textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, we examine cases drawn from cities participating in the Urban Waterways Federal Partnership program, an initiative coordinated through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that highlights justice as a critical component of successful urban stream restoration. This study’s central question is how the discourse and aspirations of EJ are shaping contemporary efforts at urban river restoration. Drawing on three study sites—projects on the Grand River (MI), the Bronx River (NY), and the Los Angeles River (CA)—our findings suggest that EJ is being incorporated into urban river restoration projects in the United States in innovative ways, most visibly through procedural and distributive justice initiatives. We also find evidence of progress towards articulating and achieving recognitional justice, but these achievements are particularly challenging in cities with historical legacies of institutional racism, raising questions about the limits of environmental restoration projects to address structural inequities in an urban context.