Territorial Justice and Neighbourhood Environmental Services: A Comparison of Provision to Deprived and Better-off Neighbourhoods in the UK

Abstract

Do the poorest neighbourhoods receive the poorest environmental services? This paper explores whether local environmental service provision in the UK achieves ‘territorial justice’ with respect to deprived and nondeprived neighbourhoods within cities. Territorial justice is argued to pertain when the distribution of service provision to neighbourhoods reflects levels of need for the service. Focusing on the provision of street-level environmental services in four British local authorities, the paper shows that poor and better-off neighbourhoods have different levels of need for environmental services. It then examines whether the services provided are commensurate with variations in need, using observed cleanliness levels within the neighbourhoods to assess this. The author argues that—despite an increasing policy and practice focus on targeting public services towards deprived neighbourhoods in the UK—environmental service provision does not yet take full account of the complex needs of poor places, meaning that they tend to be dirtier than their more affluent counterparts.