Environmental Justice, Community Benefits and the Right to the City.The case of Detroit

Julie Gobert (1)

1 LAB'URBA - LAB'URBA

In the United States, developers are obliged to take into account Environmental Justice (EJ) issues in order to achieve their facility projects, from a procedural and distributive point of view. The community benefits agreements are among some of the local regulation mechanisms, which contribute to better equity in the allocation of bad and good effects of an impacting facility. Only packages of manifold measures can tackle socio-environmental inequalities: reducing social vulnerability of community groups, increasing their social and political resources and benefiting from opportunities. In Southwest Detroit, on the occasion of two projects (relative to the extension of an intermodal freight terminal and a new bridge between Windsor and Detroit), diverse community groups gathered their strengths to counterbalance the developer’s takeover and obtain compensatory countermeasures. But this negotiation process raises some problems because it does not deal with all of the local civil society concerns, in an area already highly exposed to pollution and economically deprived. This democratic experimentalism is not sufficient to create an actual right to the city and environmental citizenship.

Keywords: Community benefits; environmental inequalities; environmental justice

Domains: Geography; Architecture, space management

Julie Gobert. Environmental Justice, Community Benefits and the Right to the City.The case of Detroit. Justice spatiale - Spatial justice, 2010. ⟨hal-01841418⟩