Sustainable Development and Social Justice: Conflicting Urgencies and the Search for Common Ground in Urban and Regional Planning

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This essay examines urban planning’s recent engagement with two social movements sustainability and social justice ‐ and the field’s efforts to simultaneously pursue both impulses. What arises from the juxtaposition of these two lofty goals? I develop three arguments. First, rather than prematurely speaking of a convergence between environmental sustainability and social justice, planners might better approach this encounter as a productive tension of two still incongruent movements. Second, before planners can negotiate a merger of sustainability and social justice, they first ought to directly confront the political imbalance between the two: middle-class environmental interests typically trump the interests of the poor and marginalized, too often leading to an exclusionary sustainability of privilege rather than a sustainability of inclusion. Third, despite the perhaps inevitable criticisms of immeasurability and vagueness, sustainability has endured as a central principle in urban planning because its oppositional engagement with social justice and economic development continually reinvigorates sustainability planning, keeps the term relevant and inclusive, and grants the task of urban planning greater urgency.