Environmental justice (EJ) seeks to correct legacies of disproportionately burdening low-income and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities with environmental hazards that contribute to health inequalities. Federal and state policies increasingly require plans to assess and incorporate EJ principles. The current lack of accessible data and plan evaluation on EJ has been a barrier to policy setting and benchmarking. We created a framework for analyzing content across a large corpus of plans by using quantitative text analysis on 461 California city general plans, also known as comprehensive plans. To verify results and identify specific policies, we conducted content analysis on a subset of seven plans. Demonstrating the broad applicability of EJ principles in planning, policies spanned all required elements of general plans: housing, circulation, land use, health, safety, open space, air quality, and noise. We found that the most headway in EJ planning has been made in cities with a majority population of color and well before the 2018 California state mandate to address EJ. Policies were primarily focused on preventing adverse exposures as opposed to correcting for legacies of inequality. Further, although all policies address vulnerable populations and places, very few specifically addressed race or racism. Thus, EJ has been largely operationalized as health equity.

While citizen participation has become a commonplace element in many planning efforts, both planners and citizens often assess the participatory elements as being unsatisfactory. The contention in this article is that not enough attention is being given to the design of participatory programs and that there is a particular failing in matching objectives to techniques. Five objectives of citizen participation are identified: information exchange, education, support building, supplemental decision making, and representational input. Then through the development of a typology of participatory mechanisms, techniques are matched with their most appropriate objectives. This relationship is further illustrated by examining four techniques in detail. The conclusions suggest that if the relationship between objectives and techniques is ignored in the design of a participatory program, the possibility of a successful program decreases.

Income segregation has risen in each of the last four decades in U.S. metropolitan areas, which can have lifelong impacts on the health, economic productivity, and behaviors of residents. Although it is widely assumed that local land use regulations-such as minimum lot sizes and growth controls-exclude low-income households from wealthier neighborhoods, the empirical research is surprisingly limited. We examine the relationship between land use regulation and segregation by income using new measures for the 95 biggest cities in the United States. We find that density restrictions are associated with the segregation of the wealthy and middle income, but not the poor. We also find that more local pressure to regulate land use is linked to higher rates of income segregation, but that more state control is connected to lower-income segregation.

Supportive built environments for walking are linked to higher rates of walking and physical activity, but little is known about this relationship for socioeconomically disadvantaged (e.g., low-income and racial/ethnic minority) populations. We review 17 articles and find that most show that the built environment has weaker effects on walking and physical activity for disadvantaged than advantaged groups. Those who lived in supportive built environments walked more and were more physically active than those who did not, but the effect was about twice as large for advantaged groups. We see this difference because disadvantaged groups walked more in unsupportive built environments and less in supportive built environments, though the latter appears more influential.

Planners increasingly involve stakeholders in co-producing vital planning information by crowdsourcing data using online map-based commenting platforms. Few studies, however, investigate the role and impact of such online platforms on planning outcomes. We evaluate the impact of participant input via a public participation geographic information system (PPGIS), a platform to suggest the placement of new bike share stations in New York City (NY) and Chicago (IL). We conducted 2 analyses to evaluate how close planners built new bike share stations to those suggested on PPGIS platforms. According to our proximity analysis, only a small percentage of built stations were within 100 feet (30m) of suggested stations, but our geospatial analysis showed a substantial clustering of suggested and built stations in both cities that was not likely due to random distribution. We found that the PPGIS platforms have great promise for creating genuine co-production of planning knowledge and insights and that system planners did take account of the suggestions offered online. We did not, however, interview planners in either system, and both cities may be atypical, as is bike share planning; moreover, multiple factors influence where bike stations can be located, so not all suggested stations could be built.

Right sizing has become an essential talking point in discussing next steps for postindustrial and shrinking cities as they struggle to maintain outdated, outsized infrastructure. Yet the literature has been clear that balancing economic and social objectives must be a key part of the discussion, especially given that historical patterns of disinvestment have disproportionately affected socioeconomically disadvantaged and racial/ethnic minority populations. In this Viewpoint, we illuminate concerns on a recent article published in this journal on right sizing that Flint (MI) should have enacted in the wake of its catastrophic water crisis. We present the nature of decline in Flint, as well as evidence from Flint's recent master plan and its history with urban renewal that demonstrates why recommending such a policy not only goes against common urban planning practice but misses the local context in Flint, which is marked by deep-seated apprehension of the inequitable underpinnings of historical urban planning practice.

Health impact assessment (HIA) reports are used by government agencies, other organizations, and stakeholders to evaluate potential health effects of plans/policies/projects. HIAs have the potential to promote anti-racist practices. We developed and used the Tool for the Racial/Ethnic Equity Evaluation of Health Impact Assessments (TREE-HIA) to score 50 U.S. HIA reports on planning-related projects/plans involving parks and greenspaces (2005-2020). More recent and more comprehensive HIA reports addressed racial/ethnic equity to a greater degree (e.g., median TREE-HIA scores: -1.3 in 2009-2012, 4.0 in 2017-2020, where higher scores indicate greater racial/equity considerations). Overall, HIA reports addressed racial/ethnic equity to a lesser degree than expected given the principal tenet of equity guiding HIAs and urban planning alike (42% had negative TREE-HIA scores indicating inadequate racial/ethnic equity consideration). However, the limited number and types of HIAs included in this study may affect generalization to all HIAs.

The negative impact of vacant and abandoned housing in city neighborhoods is extreme, affecting health and quality of life, promoting violence, and leading to further abandonment. One approach to addressing abandoned housing is to intervene with low-cost interventions that provide a visual sense of ownership. We tested whether a low-cost remediation of abandoned and vacant houses or a trash cleanup intervention would make a noticeable difference in the levels of nearby disrepair, disorder, and public safety. The abandoned housing remediation and trash cleanup interventions were a test of compliance with municipal ordinances. We used an experimental design to test the causal effects of the ordinances, and because the scale of abandonment was too large to provide treatment to all abandoned houses in the city. We used systematic social observation methods to rate changes in disrepair, disorder, and litter at housing sites and on the city blocks they were located, and police reported data on gun violence and illegal substance uses. Our experimental design allowed us to see if observed disrepair, disorder, and public safety improved after working windows and doors were installed on abandoned houses compared with a trash cleanup around properties or a no-intervention control condition. Our results showed significant changes in observed disrepair, disorder, and gun violence and illustrate the benefits of experimental evaluations of place-based changes to the built environment.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act required local government recipients of federal money to take meaningful actions to affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH). Current fair housing analysis requirements are copious but do not request an assessment of how land use policies affect the potential for neighborhood integration. A recent California law requires local governments to include AFFH analysis in existing planning processes, and state guidelines encourage the measurement of the spatial distribution of planned sites for low-income housing with respect to opportunity. We propose and evaluate a fair housing land use score (FHLUS) that measures whether local governments' land use policies promote inclusion across neighborhoods. We illustrate the FHLUS by examining zoning and housing plans for three municipalities in California that differ in terms of neighborhood variation in incomes. In all three cases, we found that municipal zoning and housing plans exacerbated patterns of segregation rather than reversed them. Our metric is more precise than existing approaches, but all measures of this phenomenon will be less useful in smaller, more homogenous jurisdictions. The analysis raises important questions about the geographic scale and outcome measures for AFFH analysis and expectations for municipalities of different sizes and levels of diversity.