Unequal Protection Revisited: Planning for Environmental Justice, Hazard Vulnerability, and Critical Infrastructure in Communities of Color

Abstract

Existing environmental justice (EJ) and hazard vulnerability literatures inadequately address key texts and topics related to critical physical infrastructure, including stormwater, green space, sewerage, energy, and roads, among other systems. This scoping review demonstrates how fundamental principles of EJ can bolster and compliment those of social vulnerability (SV) with a focus on stormwater systems and flood risks. The discussion and conceptual framework provide in-depth insight to how neighborhoods are not inherently vulnerable, but occupy built environments that are systematically sequestered, neglected, and underserved. Social processes and larger planning and development patterns shaped by power and privilege create areas of both prosperity and disadvantage. These outcomes are brought about specifically by early racial zoning, segregation, legalized redlining, and ultimately the isolation of racial minorities that have led to diminished tax bases and built environments in disrepair. Thus, infrastructural robustness and resilience at the neighborhood level result directly from human decisions and social ideologies of environmental racism and classism. The associated human-built environment manifests social and physical circumstances of damage and disease mentioned in both the SV and EJ literatures. The built environment must be explored with a progressive lens that views physical infrastructure as an extension of social circumstances to gain a comprehensive and robust understanding of how low-income communities and communities of color are unequally managed and protected in both daily environmental conditions and extreme events.