TITLE:
Measuring and Improving Environmental Justice in the Urban Outdoors
AUTHORS:
Matthew Bingham, Jason Kinnell, Darrick Hamilton
KEYWORDS:
Environmental Justice, Urban, Outdoors, Recreation, Discrete Choice
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.12 No.2,
June
28,
2024
ABSTRACT: This manuscript presents a comprehensive and flexible approach for quantitatively evaluating environmental justice in the provision of spatially distributed public goods. The approach is used to assess baseline spatial aspects of environmental justice in Hudson County, New Jersey and how it changes with the creation of a new park. The analysis quantitatively evaluates changes in environmental justice fusing a statistically estimated recreation preference function to a neighborhood-level, spatially-distributed population and set of parks. The reliance on a preference function estimated from behavioral data, application of preferences to quantify satisfaction, and explicit quantitative connection between the local population and recreation opportunities represent a significant improvement over the ad hoc and rule-of-thumb approaches that are currently common practice for evaluating environmental justice. Given the recognized importance of measuring outcome improvements, it is expected that the widespread application of this approach will ultimately lead to a general improvement in environmental justice.