Rethinking Environmental Justice in Sustainable Cities Insights from Agent-Based Modeling

Selected Contents: 1. Introduction  2. Environmental Justice Research and Agent-Based Modeling  3. An Agent-Based Model For Environmental Justice: The Ej Abm  4. Economic Rationality, Political Rationality, Or Racial Targeting: Focusing On Firm Behavior  5. Residential Choice Constraints  6. Race, Class, And Environmental Disparities  7. Residential Mobility  8. Local Zoning  9. Polluted-Site Remediation  10. All Politics Are Spatial: Integrating An Agent-Based Model With Spatially Explicit Landscape Data Hal T. Nelson, Nicholas L. Cain, And Zining Yang  11. Conclusions

Biography

Heather E. Campbell is Chair of the Department of Politics and Policy and Field Chair for Policy at the Claremont Graduate University, School of School of Social Science, Policy, and Evaluation.

Yushim Kim is an Associate Professor at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University (ASU) in Phoenix. She is interested in complexity-informed research, methods, and applications in the field of public policy and management. She has published refereed articles on environmental justice, public health emergencies, and social welfare fraud.

Adam Eckerd is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP) in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. He conducts research on the complex relationship between government decisions and social outcomes, particularly with respect to environmental justice, public participation, and nonprofit organizations.

"Rethinking Environmental Justice in Sustainable Cities is an important book, not only for its examination of the causes and contexts of environmental injustice in US cities, but also as an exemplar of how agent-based modelling can be used to illuminate questions of major policy significance. The book will be of great value to the rapidly expanding　community of researchers developing computational models to provide advice in a range of policy fields." —Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey, UK.

"For a qualitative researcher who investigates environmental justice primarily through archival material and interview data, this book is certainly thought provoking. The authors advocate the use of Agent Based Modeling, a method of computational simulation, to understand causes of environmental injustice at the systems level. They argue that injustice might be an "emergent" outcome, unintended by any particular actor or the result of malicious intent. Furthermore, emergence could be used to think more critically about environmental policy and planning for purposes of urban sustainability. Whether or not one is a fan of computational simulation, this book is sure to inspire heated debates in the classroom and engage the important issue of EJ from yet another perspective." —Brinda Sarathy, Pitzer College

"Further, Campbell, Kim, and Eckerd have been able to firmly ground their models’ assumptions on existing research (with a focus on the United States) and clearly and convincingly explain and illustrate the value of ABM to model complex behavior that is otherwise difficult to study and understand using more simplistic methods. The book shows that ABM can generate interesting insights for public administrators and policy makers beyond what is possible with methods that do not heed to the complexity of urban systems." --Stefan Verweij, University of Bamberg, Germany