Environmental justice and transitions to a sustainable urban future

Environmental justice as an academic field and activist movement evolved to address the uneven and unjust distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. This chapter examines how environmental justice can infuse sustainability thought and practice in ways that lead to a just transition to an urban planet. Transitions can bring opportunity, but may also result in painful consequences. Sustainability is about intervening in systems to accelerate transitions to a plausible, but normative future. The future we want includes the principle of achieving intra-and inter-generational equity, but sustainability should be more than about outcomes. The central argument is that lessons from environmental justice about the need for fairness of processes-not only outcomes-are useful for ensuring that sustainability transitions do not undermine or threaten justice principles on the pathway to a better future.