Introduction

As Robert Bullard wrote in his now classic monograph “Dumping in Dixie”, access to clean water is a major part of the environmental justice (EJ) movement in the United States [1]. Bullard’s initial focus addressed surface and groundwater contamination near Superfund and Brownfield sites that have been historically located near politically and economically marginalized communities of color largely in rural areas. Research on water and environmental justice over the past several decades in the United States has accordingly focused on how communities of color, low-income communities, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately exposed to contaminated sources of surface and groundwater and uneven access to clean drinking water [2,3]. Recent events underscore the environmental injustices that orbit around race, class, and water; a tragic example is the Flint, Michigan water crisis of the early 2010s, where immediate and long-term decisions by state officials, combined with decades of institutional racism, led to the dangerous exposure to unsafe drinking water by Black citizens of Flint [4]. While concerns over water quality remain an important academic and public focus, research on efforts to rehabilitate healthy and ecologically intact waterways through biophysical interventions that are attentive to the aspirations of EJ is far less common, particularly in the US context. Given that a growing number of advocacy groups, federal agencies, city governments, and community-based organizations throughout the US are working to rehabilitate rivers towards some degree of ecological and hydrological functioning [5,6], studies of how and why such efforts are integrating EJ into their initiatives are imperative.

River restoration in the United States is a big business, with more than a $1 billion a year directed towards planning, implementation, and monitoring of restoration activities [7,8]. These efforts can be triggered by regulatory concerns to meet federal requirements concerning clean water via the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or US Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) requirements, the need to generate restoration credits in the evolving market-based approaches to restoration, and to enhance riverine aesthetics to spur economic renewal in urban settings. Examples of restorative interventions include riparian and instream revegetation, channel modification, floodplain re-connectivity, and dam removal, among other techniques [9]. Many restoration projects are also working explicitly to integrate EJ concepts and practices into the project design, implementation, and outcomes of river restoration, and asking crucial questions regarding who will benefit from projects’ anticipated outcomes and who should be involved in decision-making [10]. These concerns are particularly cogent in US cities, where decades of segregation, racist zoning regulations, and other sources of political-economic marginalization have resulted in greater exposure and proximity to degraded and altered rivers for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. River restoration efforts in cities, beyond “clean-up” initiatives, have long been neglected by government agencies and conservation organizations, who have perceived urban stream restoration as too complicated or too expensive due to the highly altered nature of the waterways [11]. Worldwide, urban river restoration is thus increasingly seen as a priority by planners, scientists, and advocacy organizations due, in part, to historical patterns of infrastructure development and channel modification in cities [6,12,13].

In recognition of these challenges, the EPA launched the Urban Waters Federal Partnership in conjunction with 15 federal agencies in 2011. Its core mission is to “help urban and metropolitan areas, particularly those that are under-served or economically distressed, connect with their waterways and work to improve them” [14]. The program now encompasses 21 partnerships located in cities across the United States. While the literature on the Urban Waters Partnership website does not explicitly mention EJ, nearly all the partner collectives–typically comprising non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in coalition with community groups, businesses, and state and local government agencies–explicitly include EJ as part of their goals and activities. Yet what EJ might imply for how urban river restoration is designed and carried out is less clear. In contrast, scholars of EJ have long recognized the need to incorporate multiple dimensions of justice—including distributive (focused on how the outcomes of an intervention are distributed), procedural (who has a voice in decision making), and, more recently, recognitional (how cultural difference and historical processes of marginalization among different social groups are acknowledged and addressed)—into investigations of how environmental “goods” and “bads” are distributed throughout society [15]. Yet what does environmentally just urban river restoration entail? We see a vital need for examining not only how EJ is being integrated into urban river restoration (URR) efforts, but also how the multiple dimensions of EJ–distributive, procedural, recognition–are being specifically addressed (or not) within these initiatives.

This paper investigates ongoing efforts in the United States to simultaneously rehabilitate the biophysical integrity of urban rivers while integrating multiple dimensions of environmental justice into the decision-making processes and activities of urban river restoration. We focus our central questions on the Bronx River (NY), the Grand River (MI), and the Los Angeles River (CA). We ask the following:

1. How are the discourses and aspirations of EJ shaping urban river restoration efforts in the US?
2. What are the barriers to and opportunities for integrating distributive, procedural, and recognitional modes of EJ into urban river restoration activities?
3. What do the restoration efforts in our case studies reveal about the possibilities for a more robust integration of EJ into environmental restoration projects?

To address these questions, we next review the literature on urban river restoration and how it aligns with contemporary deliberations on the different dimensions of EJ. We trace research within URR as it evolved from an initial focus on the management aspects of restoration, particularly the appropriate restorative techniques, to more recent calls to include social dimensions within URR activities. Second, we lay out our methods and methodology, detailing the criteria for case selection and offering details on how data collection and analysis were conducted. Third, we present our findings from URR projects in three study sites—the Bronx River (NY), the Grand River (MI), and the Los Angeles River (CA)—to highlight the ways in which the different dimensions of EJ are being integrated (or not) into specific activities associated with river restoration. We then turn to a discussion of our main findings, summarizing the accomplishments and ongoing challenges of URR in the US and elsewhere, focusing in particular on how a multidimensional understanding of EJ might be more effectively integrated into the design and implementation of restoration projects. Finally, we conclude with a brief summary and some potential areas of future research.

Environmental justice and urban river restoration: Review of the literature

At present, the world’s rivers and streams are confronting pressures from altered flows, climate change impacts, multiple forms of pollution, threats to aquatic biota, and accelerating rates of water extraction. In combination, these ongoing impacts make the biophysical status of the world’s waterways a significant and persistent problem. Numerous scholars, policy makers, environmental advocates and civil society organizations have promoted river restoration as vital to nature-society relations at multiple spatial scales [9,16,17] and, as mentioned above, these efforts have recently turned to urban waterways. In spite of a growing literature on urban river restoration (URR), there is increasing realization that the field of URR, both in theory and practice, has in many cases avoided or given scant attention to concerns over environmental justice (EJ).While a range of authors have detailed the multiple dimensions of justice that characterize both scholarship and advocacy in EJ [15,18–22], we focus on distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice, three of the most critical and frequently mentioned types of justice discussed in relation to EJ.

Distributive justice—similar to the concept of equity—deals with the outcomes of decision making and within EJ is concerned primarily with how environmental abuses or amenities are distributed across diverse social groups. In the context of river restoration, it directs attention to whether or not the outcomes of projects (e.g., enhanced ecological functioning, recreational amenities, and economic opportunities) are distributed fairly to all affected urban residents. Although outside the scope of our study, distributive justice in urban river restoration is also concerned with the possibility of green gentrification, and recent research highlights how improvements to urban river corridors can in some cases contribute to the displacement of low-income and minoritized residents [23,24]. Procedural justice deals with whether or not all actors have the capacity and ability to engage in decision-making processes regarding a particular environmental project. Just procedures within river restoration might include comprehensive awareness raising campaigns of project plans, wide-scale participation in project design and implementation by diverse community organizations, influence over a project’s particular contours and how funding is directed, and other inclusive processes that ensure that the voices of communities affected by the project are not only heard but integrated into planning procedures [5]. Concerns over recognitional justice highlight that some social groups are frequently overlooked as potential participants in environmental decision making, and that their specific worldviews and historical experiences are often ignored. Such misrecognition is often connected to historical patterns of marginalization based on social categories such as indigeneity, race, or socio-economic status [25]. In waterway restoration, a failure to recognize the processes that have alienated minoritized communities from rivers can confound efforts to promote justice purely on distributive and procedural grounds [18,26].

Towards the turn of the 20th century, an array of scholars, planners, government agencies, environmental groups, and community organizations in the US began to call more urgently for programs and funding that targeted river restoration, including urban waterways [27]. A key question at this time was what kinds of hydrologic and ecological interventions were technically feasible, economically efficient, and supported by governmental decision-makers [28,29]. These efforts tended to be expert-driven and reliant on scientific knowledge, focusing on biophysical goals such as reduced channel erosion and enhanced channel stability [30]. Many URR projects in the US during this period initially centered on four types of intervention: stormwater management, bank stabilization, channel modification and grade control, and riparian revegetation [29]. There was also growing awareness of a broader toolkit of restoration interventions—both physical and regulatory—that included enhanced fish passage, dam removal, floodplain buyout programs, and more [9]. The social dimensions of waterway restoration, if included at all, revolved around how to effectively mobilize government agencies at federal, state, and local levels to prioritize URR, and how to raise awareness of and support for restoration among undifferentiated urban populaces [28]. Many URR efforts along these lines reflected the interest and goals of government agencies, environmental organizations, and/or other interest groups, to the neglect of less powerful actors [31].

Recent research and practice in URR, however, foreground the social dimensions of environmental projects, emphasize how marginalized communities creatively engage with and even subvert the distributive and procedural aspects of EJ, and, albeit more rare, pay attention to the important role that recognitional justice plays in repair of urban waterways. Several studies clearly show that many URR initiatives in the US, while well-funded and technically sound, are often hampered by a failure to sufficiently engage all stakeholders in project planning and implementation—including low-income communities and communities of color [10,12,13]. Work grounded in political ecology focuses on the political and economic processes operating across several spatial scales that shape restoration efforts in ways that hamper effective integration of EJ elements. For example, efforts to restore Milwaukee’s Kinnickinnic River, a heavily degraded waterway running through largely Black and low-income neighborhoods in the city’s most heavily industrialized zones, are ostensibly aware of the need to enhance procedural justice. Yet Holifield & Schuelke [32] conclude that efforts by project advocates to make the initiative more participatory occur through procedures that are “carefully managed and typically oriented toward building consensus” while glossing over conflicts among different urban actors that arise from decades of environmental racism. Similarly, Kimari and Parish [33] trace how urban river restoration projects in Toronto and Nairobi give more weight to city authorities’ concerns for economic “revitalization” than to the goals of residents who interact with rivers on a daily basis. One of the clear findings of such work is that URR efforts will always be influenced by urban politics that shape outcomes and procedures in ways that often reflect the interests of politically and economically dominant actors, and thus limit opportunities to achieve distributive and procedural forms of justice.

In addition to scholarship highlighting procedural and distributive justice in URR, recent studies also direct attention to recognitional justice, which is arguably more complicated to achieve in urban river restoration projects since it implies acknowledging (and ultimately undoing) decades of environmental injustices foisted on minoritized communities and the institutional structures that hinder transformative changes. Tribal involvement in river restoration projects is a particularly apt example of recognitional justice. For example, river restoration projects on the Elwha, the Klamath, Penobscot, and Ottaway, among others, are driven by recognition of how colonialism and other historical injustices have ruptured Tribal relationships with their rivers. Driven by Indigenous advocates, these projects have to some degree restored autonomous decision-making and legal rights to Tribes while acknowledging their cultural, spiritual, and historical relationships with their rivers (see [34]). In another vein, a recent case study in Atlanta highlights the strategies used by marginalized groups to counter the political and economic weight of state and corporate actors and, in doing so, redefining EJ on their own terms. The South River Watershed Alliance (SAWA), composed of residents from the “highly segregated, majority Black areas” of southeast Atlanta, started as an effort to mitigate sewage overflows contaminating these neighborhoods. During workshops with government agencies in the early 2010s, members of SAWA realized “framing strategy explicitly in terms of EJ seemed to promise little more than token representation of Black residents without meaningful decision-making authority over development affecting their community” ([35], 1598). Perceiving institutionalized efforts at promoting EJ as a script that preserves “business as usual”, SAWA representatives instead adopted a new strategy that affirmed a “right to nature” through canoe outings and other recreational activities even though these had been prohibited by regulations due to poor water quality. The re-framing of river restoration as “ecological appreciation” proved far more effective in mobilizing “middle- and working class suburban Black communities” in southeast Atlanta to engage politically in the project in support of its distributive and procedural aims ([35], 1599).

The Atlanta case underscores that successfully integrating EJ concerns into repairing urban waterways often hinges on how community-based organizations advocating for equitable outcomes and recognition of their unique perspectives on the meaning of “restoration” engage with state actors. Indeed, this points to a recent debate in the geographical literature on the role of state actors in promoting or inhibiting goals of EJ advocated by the hundreds of communities across the US. Some critical EJ scholars argue that activists and their allies working within state institutions (i.e., regulations, bureaucracies) to promote EJ have largely failed to improve the socio-environmental conditions confronted by communities of color and low-income communities disproportionately exposed to environmental insults [36–39]. Under this view, structural racism is so deeply embedded within state institutions, EJ activists must start “seeing the state as an adversary that must be confronted in a manner similar to industry” for meaningful progress towards EJ to occur ([38], 530). In a rejoinder, a recent overview of how to situate the state within EJ theory and practice argues that ultimately the harshest critiques of the state as an institution for fostering EJ underplay the tangible ways that EJ advocates are able to effectively engage state actors and institutions in different kinds of justice-oriented projects. Such critiques also underplay the diverse characteristics of state actors that make them alternately hostile, neutral, or actively supportive towards EJ goals [40]. The Atlanta case explicitly supports the notion that EJ activists are able to effectively pursue EJ in terms of distributive outcomes, fair procedures, and recognition of past injustices in their community by creative engagements with state actors. In addition, research on dam removal underscores that state workers across various jurisdictions often act in ways that support restoration activities and undermine dominant discourses that allow for the inclusion of more justice-oriented perspectives [41].

Although the academic literature on URR highlights the vital need for simultaneously repairing urban waterways and incorporating elements of distributive, procedural, and recognitional elements of EJ, these discussions have been less attuned to how the different dimensions of EJ specifically shape restoration activities. Moreover, this scholarship has not sufficiently addressed the ways in which the integration of EJ goals might bolster (or hinder) efforts at rehabilitating urban waterways in part because there is no blueprint for successful integration, and the scope of a given project may be too constrained by funding, politics, or existing infrastructure. These restoration efforts also occur in differing urban settings where the political and historical contingencies may be unique thereby limiting a uniform combination of EJ and restoration. In addition, there remains a compelling argument for interrogating how state actors become enrolled within specific projects which can perhaps serve as an important template for future efforts. In the cases examined below, government officials play myriad roles, frequently serving as sources of funding, scientific expertise, project design, and other functions [41].

Methodology

This paper uses three study sites to illuminate the multiple ways that discourses and objectives related to EJ are being integrated into urban river restoration in the United States. In a preliminary phase of the research, we initiated Google News alerts in 2021 using the keywords “river restoration” and “rivers and environmental justice” with both alerts continuing to the present. In a preliminary analysis of urban river restoration initiatives in the US, we became aware of the Urban Waterways Federal Partnership, an interagency program launched in 2011 and coordinated through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Of the 21 projects supported through the Partnership, we identified three study sites for more detailed investigation according to the following criteria: projects that maintained a significant focus on biophysical interventions (e.g., dam removal, riparian and instream revegetation, channel modification) as opposed to a water quality focus; and initiatives that explicitly identified environmental justice as a project emphasis. We also focused on projects that were at different stages of formal planning and implementation in order to highlight how conceptions of EJ, and its potential influence on restoration activities, might change over time. Our eventual cases—the Bronx River in the Bronx (NY), the Grand River in Grand Rapids (MI), and the Los Angeles River in Los Angeles (CA)—are as described below at quite different stages, ranging from over two decades of actual restoration activities (Bronx River) to years of planning with little implementation (Grand River) and early planning stages and no implementation (LA River). Lead organizations in all three cases explicitly state the need to integrate the principles of EJ into their restoration activities. For example, one aim of the Bronx & Harlem River UWFP is “to help overburdened and underserved Bronx communities reconnect to their waterways, reduce the negative impacts of urbanization on both water quality and human health, and restore impacted riverfronts while pursuing environmental justice.” Similarly, the Grand River/Grand Rapids UWFP singles out environmental justice as a key Workplan Initiative [42]. While less prominent in official documentation, the LA River Master Plan includes several grassroots EJ organizations as advisory partners [43], especially local community groups who fear the potential of green gentrification. In addition, these urban waterways are all prominent symbols of their cities, and historically have all been examples of the “urban stream syndrome” described by aquatic scientists as waterways subject to decades of extreme alteration and pollution levels [44,45].

Although all three are the focal points of comprehensive restoration initiatives, these efforts are at quite different phases of design and implementation. After several decades of programs of varying intensity, proponents of restoration of the Bronx River have accomplished many of their initial goals in terms of reduced pollution, ecologically and aesthetically enhanced riparian zones, and re-connecting many abutting neighborhoods with the river. The Grand River, in contrast, has for over 15 years been planning an array of interventions to rehabilitate the river for both biophysical and economic goals, but has yet to implement actual restoration actions. Restoration of the Los Angeles River is still largely in the planning and design phases. These cases thus afford the opportunity to explore how distributive, procedural and recognitional justice principles are or are not being effectively integrated into URR initiatives at different moments in project histories.

We gathered information regarding each case initially through a review of regional and local media sources (newspapers, town meeting minutes, engineering reports, etc.). Having received CPHS (Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects) exemption from our institution’s IRB (STUDY00032760), our team also carried out multiple semi-structured interviews (SSIs) with project participants (see S1 Text), primarily for the Grand Rapids (GR) case and to a lesser extent from the Bronx River site. In our original emails to potential interviewees, we mentioned that we were interested in their involvement and perspective on the dam removal process at their site, especially the ways that issues of environmental justice had been incorporated into the restoration process or in what ways it was being considered (or not). In all instances, the interviewees (all adults) agreed by email to be interviewed, although for issues of confidentiality we do not use any names. This confidentiality also prevents us from posting personal data related to the identities of our research participants. We spent several days in Grand Rapids in July 2023 where we interviewed a representative of the Mayor’s office; two staff members of the local Museum that often sponsors key meetings of affected stakeholders; two restoration advocates who launched the dam removal restoration project; a member of the GR Chamber of Commerce involved in the pioneering public-private partnership helping fund restoration; and two staff members of Grand Rapids Whitewater (GRWW), which has become the lead NGO for governing restoration activities. In addition, we interviewed two advocates for GR’s Black community who have been mobilizing efforts for the restoration plan to be more inclusive. In August 2023 we interviewed via Zoom an academic who is a member of the Latinx community in GR and involved in restoration governance. For the Bronx River, one of the authors attended a weekend event sponsored by the Bronx River Alliance in late August 2023, where they conducted semi-structured interviews and participant observation of educational and community-building activities in coordination with the Bronx River Alliance. One team member attended an online meeting organized by the Bronx River Alliance in June 2024 discussing the updated Bronx River Intermunicipal Watershed Management Plan (IWMP). For the LA River, we focused on secondary information (e.g., websites, published statements from key NGOs) in addition to a wide range of media reports since the rolling out of the LA River Master Plan in 1996 (it was updated in 2022). Although our investigation of restoration activities in the case of LA River does not include interviews or participant observation, we relied on the extensive information sources available through secondary literature, public statements from multiple stakeholders, planning documents, and news and other media sources. Thus, while our data concerning the LA River may not be as finely grained in terms of actors’ perspectives, there is sufficient information concerning discussions of EJ within restoration activities that offer valuable insights into our core research questions (see above). All the data for all cases is either contained within the article and/or alluded to in the appropriate source(s) in the bibliography.

We queried interviewees in Grand Rapids and the Bronx about basic information on the history, management design, funding, and implementation of their restoration initiatives, as well as each participant’s views on how EJ objectives were being integrated into the project. We integrated and coded this qualitative information using ATLAS.ti, a commonly used computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). In our coding, we highlighted those themes emerging from project documentation, newspaper articles, and interviews that identified how distributive, procedural, and/or recognitional justice was manifesting within each study site’s URR efforts (see S1 Table). Each instance of distributive, procedural, and/or recognitional justice was identified in project documents, media sources, and interview transcripts based on definitions of those terms (see above) in the academic literature and coded as a relevant variant of the broader category of EJ. These codes were then analyzed in relation to the actor or actors drawing on this form of EJ, the specific restoration activity being proposed (e.g., dam removal, expansion of riparian green spaces), and additional themes related to each study site. In line with our research questions, we also focused on the theme of barriers and opportunities to the different elements of EJ within URR projects. We used the Occurrence and Co-Occurrence function of ATLAS.ti as a way to organize, analyze, and generalize the data [46], which then served as prompts for use during the subsequent interviews.

Results

Restoring the Bronx River: “Bring the community in, because that’s the only way it’ll be sustainable” [SSI, BRA volunteer program assistant]

Efforts to restore the Bronx River in New York City have by several measures yielded impressive results. Accomplishments include a decades-long clean-up of industrial and household waste and debris in the river’s channel and along its banks; improved water quality throughout the watershed; enhanced green spaces accessible to the North and South Bronx’s diverse neighborhoods; effective ecological management through plantings and invasive species removals; participatory planning and educational activities; and governance mechanisms involving the participation of over 80 community partners, businesses, and government agencies [47]. The Bronx River Alliance (BRA) has been the primary coordinating organization for stewardship of the Bronx River since the early 2000s, and the different principles of EJ–including distributive, procedural, and recognitional modes–are informing restoration design and implementation in a number of concrete ways [48] and were undertaken at a time when the tenets of EJ were less well-defined. These principles were forged and incorporated into river restoration through decades of tireless work undertaken by numerous community organizations and advocates of EJ, abetted through key government sponsorship and funding that, although not without challenges, explicitly recognizes the Bronx River as a vital community benefit.

Restoration activities in the Bronx originated in the 1970s, initiated by community advocate Ruth Anderberg and NYPD Inspector Anthony Bouza, whose early advocacy for the river led to the creation in 1974 of the volunteer organization Bronx River Restoration. As Anderberg noted in 1979, “You couldn’t see the river for all the garbage that was in there – you could practically walk across it” [49]. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the BRR secured grants and political support from state and city agencies to continue the physical cleanup and focus on modest improvements in water quality, with an additional goal of seeing native fish species return to the river. Foreshadowing more explicit EJ movements in the 1990s, New York city officials in the 1980s recognized that the “river runs through communities with wide economic disparities, from affluent Westchester villages to South Bronx neighborhoods that are among the poorest in the country” [50]. There was thus at least some official acknowledgement that the river’s extremely poor condition in the South Bronx represented an environmental injustice.

By the late 1990s, efforts to improve water quality and remove visible garbage from the river had proven reasonably successful, and the NYC parks commission launched a multi-year, $10 million effort to enhance and improve the river’s system of parks and greenways in the southern part of the watershed. This was significant because the South Bronx has historically been the site of multiple environmental injustices for the largely Black and Hispanic populations living near the river; it was “lined by industrial sites, highway overpasses and other emblems of the urban landscape” [51]. Under the coordination of BRR, several community organizations, government agencies, schools and local businesses formed the Bronx River Working Group in 1997 with community education and awareness raising centered on the need for river restoration at the center of their mission. In 2001, the Bronx River Working Group incorporated the Bronx River Alliance as a 501(c) [3] non-profit and the BRA has since been the driving actor in ongoing river monitoring, restoration and community programming. Their central goal is to transform the river into a “healthy ecological, recreational, educational, and economic resource for all communities through which the river flows” [47]. The goal of equitably distributing the multifaceted benefits of river restoration has thus been a crucial element of the BRA’s overall mission from its onset.

Environmental justice in Bronx River restoration: Opportunities and constraints

One way the BRA builds procedural justice elements into their governance structures is through inclusion of community members and representatives of neighborhood associations within decision making bodies. For examples, local partners from riverine communities are embedded within all three teams of the Alliance– Greenway, Food Waste, and Ecology–which are co-chaired by community members. According to the BRA Community Outreach Coordinator, the aim of this level of participation is “to really serve as…steering committees for the work that the Bronx River Alliance” undertakes [SSI, 08/29/2023]. Serving as co-chairs “allows [community members] to really…help guide our priorities, and help guide the programming that we run” [SSI, Community Outreach Coordinator, 08/29/2023]. Encouraging this kind of community input has altered, for example, some of the Ecology Team’s priorities by promoting more nature walks, a direct response to community input. An online meeting on 4 June 2024 explicitly sought input from at-large community members throughout the Bronx concerning the Intermunicipal Watershed Management Plan (IWMP), an update to the 2010 IWMP; as one of the BRA conveners put it, “you know your areas and neighborhoods best” and can serve as the eyes and ears of the BRA for identifying issues and opportunities about restoration [PM, 06/04/2024].

One of the more singular aspects of the Bronx River Alliance’s work is the emergence of the Greenway Program, which has been a fulcrum for EJ-inspired collective action for over three decades. In the early 2000s, the Bronx River Working Group envisioned a 23-mile riverine corridor from the East River to the upper watershed’s Kensico Dam as a key component of the river’s overall restoration [15,52]. The guiding vision was focused on “community involvement in cleaning up and revealing a previously hidden river,” a plan that hinged crucially on “bottom up, grassroots political advocacy” in addition to securing sufficient funding ([53], 75–76). The parks eventually created under the umbrella of the greenway—including Concrete Plant Park, Starlight Park, and Hunts Point Riverside Park—were originally conceived in the early 2000s and were a direct response to the activities of community-based EJ organizations such as Banana Kelly, The Point CDC and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ) [54],who successfully opposed the installation of a city-sponsored sewage treatment plant and a waste transfer station in predominantly Black neighborhoods of the South Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s [52]. These groups vociferously represented the interests of people of color and low-income neighborhoods in the planning and implementation of restoration activities. The popularity of the parks and the longstanding commitment of the BRA to procedural, distributive, and recognitional forms of EJ are directly linked to the sustained activities of these community-based organizations who prioritized EJ goals as central to just river restoration.

The EJ campaigns in the early 1990s—that eventually led to expansion of green spaces—often assumed a confrontational stance toward government agencies, yet the architects of Bronx River restoration have also recognized the need for government involvement. As a result, government funding has been crucial to undertake restoration in a way that meets the varying needs of a large and heterogeneous group of communities and participants. River restoration in the South Bronx, a journalist points out, “illustrates how government, although it can be obstructionist and infuriating, is also indispensable to urban improvement” [55]. Former parks commissioner Adrian Benepe estimated that of the $700 million spent on Bronx parks during the administration of NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002–2013), $100 million had “gone to the river and riverside parks;” additional money came into the effort from upper watershed towns such as Yonkers, White Plains, Scarsdale, and Greenburgh following legal settlements over pollution [55]. Most recently, the BRA (in conjunction with NYC Parks) received $10 million-award from the Department of Transportation for an expansion of the Greenway that will link Concrete Plant and Starlight Parks in the South Bronx, underscoring the vital importance of state funding [56].

The BRA’s educational activities and awareness-raising campaigns, particularly those focused on youth, are key expressions of distributive justice, ensuring that the benefits of a cleaner and rehabilitated riverine environment are shared equitably throughout the Bronx, and in particular in the historically disadvantaged communities of the South Bronx. Table 1 gives a sense of the diversity and function of events scheduled to connect people to the river over a one-month period in 2024 and is representative of other events throughout a given year.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 1. Calendar of events sponsored by the Bronx River Alliance, May-June 2024 [47].

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000302.t001

These kinds of activities serve multiple purposes, but perhaps none more so than raising awareness that the Bronx River is a community hub that can offer educational, recreational, environmental, and other kinds of benefits to anyone who wants to become involved. The work of the BRA then is simultaneously focused on equitably distributing the multiple benefits of river restoration throughout the watershed—but especially in the South Bronx region—and on prioritizing inclusionary activities.

With regard to recognitional justice, the BRA and its partners in the city government realized that decades of marginalization of Black and Hispanic communities in the South Bronx required that any restoration activities acknowledge the past environmental injustices experienced by certain neighborhoods and their residents. Following decades of urbanization and industrialization, the river had become from the late 19^th to the mid-20^th century “a sink for dumping sewage, trash, and industrial waste” ([48], 4). By the 1950s and 1960s, loss of manufacturing jobs in the South Bronx combined with white flight to the suburbs of the northern portions of the watershed, as well as government inaction, created conditions where the largely non-white residents of the lower watershed were disproportionately exposed to all kinds of environmental ills. The Bronx River watershed thus has been and remains characterized by deep socio-economic and racial disparities [48]. The BRA clearly recognizes these disparities in their approach, and orients its activities and programming towards neighborhoods in the South Bronx where environmental injustices have historically been the most acute. Moreover, as mentioned above, struggles over EJ in the Bronx during the 1980s and 1990s were a formative element of the eventual institutionalization of the BRA and its activities.

In summary, the BRA undertakes a wide range of activities, all of which to some extent are oriented towards expanding EJ goals. Procedurally, the BRA’s activities typically involve input from the communities most directly affected by past environmental insults as well as, importantly, those residents who stand to gain from increased environmental amenities and education campaigns. Over a decade ago, a NYT journalist aptly captured the ethos of the Bronx River restoration activities:

…compared with headline-making projects in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the unexpected renaissance under way along the south end of the Bronx River flies largely below the radar. Park by park a patchwork of green spaces has been taking shape, the consequence of decades of grinding, grass-roots, community-driven efforts. For the environmentalists, educators, architects and landscape designers involved, the idea has not just been to revitalize a befouled waterway and create new public spaces. It has been to invest Bronx residents, for generations alienated from the water, in the beauty and upkeep of their local river [55].

Despite the measurable successes and general recognition that restoration activities on the Bronx River have attained through this overarching philosophy, there remain important constraints on these initiatives. For instance, comprehensive biophysical restoration of the watershed is most likely unattainable due to the highly urbanized character of the formerly forested basin. In addition, the presence of the Kensico Dam in the upper portion of the watershed in Westchester County (Fig 1) places significant limitations on achieving historical flows in the river. The transferable lessons of the Bronx River’s restoration can be heralded but may be somewhat limited as well. For example, the river’s rehabilitation in a way that prioritizes justice concerns has benefitted from the South Bronx’s long history of active EJ movements, which brought vital attention to the structural nature of White supremacy and environmental racism in the 1980s and 1990s [48]. Many facets of EJ, as a result, have been more fully integrated into the political and governing systems of NYC since the 2000s [57]. Overall, the two decades since the BRA’s creation have been characterized as a period when distributive, procedural, and recognition forms of EJ have been to a certain extent normalized within the organization’s operations and, importantly, in its relations to both government agencies and its partner organizations.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 1. Map of the Bronx River Watershed (Watershed boundary from StreamStats, Roads from US Census Bureau, Park boundaries from NYC Open Data, Waterbodies and State Boundaries from Natural Earth, county boundaries from NYC Open Data, Basemap is World Hillshade (Esri), accessed from:

https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=1b243539f4514b6ba35e7d995890db1d).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000302.g001

Restoring the Grand River: Producing a “river for all”.

The history of the Grand River in Grand Rapids (MI)— referred to as the Grand River corridor as it runs through the city’s downtown—is interwoven with histories of industrialization, demographic changes, and racial inequalities. The first dam on the Grand corridor was built in 1866 and in the following decades large boulders and rocks along the river bed were removed and used in local construction projects, resulting in the disappearance of the city’s namesake rapids by the early 20^th century. The loss of the rapids was quickly followed by the construction of four low-head run-of-river dams (Fig 2) to help regulate water levels with the aim of using the river as a conduit for moving logs downstream. The vision of returning the rapids to the Grand River was first broached in 2008 by two kayaking enthusiasts, who envisioned removing the dams along the river’s downtown corridor and constructing a whitewater park with a standing wave that, taken together, would spur economic opportunity through increased tourism. As we detail below, the initial plan has expanded to include broader aims: economic revitalization of the city’s downtown; a watershed-scale project that includes green corridors and parks throughout the city and associated county; and linked projects to ensure that urban river restoration addresses EJ concerns. The discourses of EJ put forward by a range of actors over the years have influenced the project in various ways, and what was initially a project concerned primarily with restoring hydrologic functioning and creating recreational opportunities transformed into something different: a project where questions surrounding the equitable distribution of benefits of URR and giving previously marginalized groups a voice in governance of the project became amplified.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 2. View of one of the 4 low-head dams on Grand River in downtown Grand River poised for removal (photo taken by F. Magilligan).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000302.g002

As in the Bronx case, historical contingencies have shaped how URR is engaging with different dimensions of EJ within efforts to rehabilitate the Grand River. Grand Rapids (GR) initially attracted Black Americans from the South during the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s for occupations in the lucrative furniture manufacturing sector [58]. However, like many cities in the upper Midwest, GR has had a predominantly White population throughout most of its settler history with upwards of 80 percent of the population being White (non-Hispanic) as recently as 1980. Following the “rust-belt” deindustrialization of the late 20^th century wherein its overall population declined by 10 percent, Grand Rapids has slowly regained its population, reaching a level of just under 200,000 in the 2020 census. These gains have also led to an increasingly diverse population where 20 percent as of the early 2020s identifies as African-American and 16 percent as Latino/Hispanic. Despite the increasingly diverse demographics, the legacies of redlining and other forms of housing market discrimination, in addition to other forms of structural racism, have resulted in highly uneven population distribution based on race (Fig 3), which have important implications for how the benefits and costs of river restoration might be distributed. The Black community, for example, has experienced social and environmental injustices for decades. As emphasized by a local businesswoman and community organizer, “I’m a third generation here [in Grand Rapids]. And this is where we were redlined to over here [pointing to a map], so this is where black people had to live. Right. With all the contaminants from the river, from the factories, from the highway, so we’ve been surrounded by pollutants, the river was one of them” [SSI, 07/14/2023]. The African-American community was historically relegated to low-diversity, more distal neighborhoods (Fig 3); and even as the neighborhoods have become less segregated over time (Fig 3), the African-American population remains significantly removed from the river which has complicated efforts to generate restoration efforts more inclusive of the African-American community.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 3. Maps of racial and ethnic composition of greater Grand Rapids in 1990 (left) and 2020 (right).

Important to notice the greater diversity in the Black neighborhoods from 1990-2020 but still remaining more distal to the Grand River (Base layer from Mixed Metro (mixedmetro.us), Town Boundaries and Lakes from Michigan Open Data, Roads from US Census Bureau, Great Lakes Boundary from USGS).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000302.g003

Environmental justice in LA River restoration: Opportunities and constraints

LA River restoration has created opportunities for communities and advocacy organizations to become involved in urban renewal in new ways, and it has created space to express desires and needs around access to nature and recreational opportunities [76]. The Master Plan describes efforts at procedural justice, noting: “At every step of the process to update the LA River Master Plan, LA County provided opportunities to inform and engage the public. This two-way communication strategy employed a variety of media and activities across the county to ensure that resident concerns and aspirations across geographic, language, and accessibility spectra were recognized and reflected in the plan” ([43], 125). Even with a more inclusive process, there are significant disagreements about what restoration should prioritize and how to achieve EJ goals. Some groups, such as Friends of the LA River (FoLAR), focus on the ecological health of the river and how that affects vulnerable communities. FoLAR envisions “a verdant Los Angeles River that supports vulnerable communities in climate adaptation. The river will be transformed into a dynamic, functioning ecosystem that reduces flood risk, cleans the air, cools temperatures, and supports the biodiversity essential to our collective wellbeing” [77]. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) similarly supports benefitting communities by bringing “ecological processes back to the urban watershed.” The Bowtie Wetland Demonstration, which will “transform a former railyard along the LA River into an open space filled with native plants and walking paths” is an example how environmental advocates seek to integrate ecological and social concerns [78]. These organizations’ lawsuit against LA County reflects dissatisfaction with the process and projects outlined in the Master Plan, particularly with regard to ecological impacts [73].

Other organizations, such as East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ), focus more centrally on justice for communities, advocating for inclusion in decision-making and equitable distribution of benefits, while raising concerns about potential displacements related to river restoration projects. For example, when the Lower LA River Master Plan was finalized in 2017, it included a “Community Stability Toolkit,” which was included because of EYCEJ’s advocacy for a Plan that would maintain the cultural cohesion of communities of color while enhancing economic opportunities [79]. A film produced by EYCEJ specifically engages recognitional justice, calling for “reclaiming the dignity and respect of the river for the South LA river communities” [79]. EYCEJ and other grassroots organizations also oppose some of the more spectacular aspects of the Master Plan, such as the series of platform parks in Southeast LA that would span the LA and Rio Hondo rivers proposed by the late architect Frank Gehry ([80]). Gehry’s project seeks to address the need for green space along a stretch of the river highly burdened by environmental and health hazards by building huge platforms (up to a mile long) that would support trees, grasses, ponds, and trails, creating recreational opportunities for communities and achieving some distributive justice ([81]). He makes the case that there is no way to rehabilitate the river at this site, because the concrete and channelized waterway protects against high flows during flood events. This is also the position of the Master Plan, which argues concrete removal would lead to increased flooding and displacement [43]. Importantly, flood-prone areas in the lower reaches of the river are disproportionately lower income, minoritized communities. A recent study showed that Black residents of LA county are 79 percent more likely than white residents to be living at risk of deep flooding of at least three feet. For Latinos, the figure was 17 percent, and for Asians, 11 percent [82].

Gehry’s vision of how to re-connect communities with the river, given the physical constraints posed by the concrete channel, captures the significant challenges and contestations associated with meeting EJ goals in LA River restoration. While it is unclear whether the platform parks will ever come to fruition, the responses to the proposed project also provide insight into contestation over EJ in river restoration. Many communities and local organizations are concerned that Gehry’s cultural center and platform parks would attract and disproportionately benefit wealthier residents, displacing the lower income residents they were intended to serve and thus undermining distributive justice goals. In LA, high rents and a limited housing stock combined with limited existing green spaces make gentrification in this area a very real concern ([43], 113). Environmental groups oppose the plan because they do not want more concrete, even if it is suspended over the channel. Instead, environmental organizations such FoLAR want to see more focus on “meaningful ecological restoration” [77], which requires channel restoration, including “strategic partial concrete removal” [72] and nature-based flood solutions for much of the river corridor. FoLAR argues that such interventions will have ecological and health benefits, making vulnerable communities more climate resilient, thereby leading to more distributive justice.

A project that stands in contrast to Gehry’s platform parks from an EJ perspective is Taylor Yard, a100-acre, riverfront public access and ecological restoration project, which has an equity strategy at its core [83]. Located at the site of former rail yard (Fig 4), the project is a centerpiece of LA River restoration efforts, with estimates of final costs for transforming the yard reaching as high as $1 billion. A final design was recently selected for the first part of the project, the Paseo del Rio greenway. The 12-acre park will include nature trails, wetlands, viewpoints, and riparian habitat. While this project does not involve the river channel directly, other phases of the Taylor Yard Project, namely the G2 River Park Project, propose more engagement with the river itself. One of the conceptual plans for that project includes a new island in the stream (an opportunity for a more natural split flow, as well as riparian and upland vegetation), with another proposing some channel modification (terraces and a soft edge) [83]. Equity encompasses multiple dimensions of environmental justice in this project, since access to the riverfront addresses historical marginalization and is intended to promote more equitable distribution of the benefits of a restored river. From a procedural justice perspective, the planning process has included area residents, community and environmental groups, business owners, educators, landowners, agency and elected officials, and other local stakeholders.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 4. Map of racial and ethnic composition the Los Angeles watershed (drainage divide in white outline).

Note the proximity of the BIPOC community directly adjacent to the river (Base layer from Mixed Metro (mixedmetro.us), Watershed boundary from StreamStats, Project Locations from LA River Master Plan, Roads from US Census Bureau, Waterbodies from Natural Earth, County Boundaries from LA Open Data).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000302.g004

Both Taylor Yard and Gehry’s platform parks are included in the LA Master Plan. The differing responses to these projects offer interesting insights into the complex role of EJ in urban river restoration. First, Taylor Yard’s planning process has been genuinely inclusive, responding to community-generated ideas and attentive to local needs in the design process. The 100 Acre Partnership, for example, is committed to an “ecologically focused and community driven process” to restore the 100-acre area that comprises Taylor Yard [84]. It is doing this, in part, through the creation of the Community Taylor Yard Equity Strategy, which is working to ensure that equity is “at the core of redevelopment, addressing critical issues like displacement, environmental justice, and economic security” green [85]. In contrast, Gehry’s project risks amplifying unequal power relations in the decision-making process, since the design was conceived and presented without community input. Additionally, while both projects seek to distribute river restoration benefits more equitably, Gehry’s project is also heightening fears of gentrification and displacement, reflecting a failure to acknowledge the misrecognition of historical legacies of environmental injustice in those communities. Taylor Yard does not inspire that same concern, perhaps because recognitional justice is informing what is happening on the ground. The types of green spaces and recreational opportunities are ones desired by the community and not necessarily intended to attract outsiders. But, even with projects that seem to achieve some level of procedural, distributive, or recognitional justice, it is not clear to what extent such interventions can address the structural determinants of ill health and socio-economic marginalization that characterize many of the river’s abutting neighborhoods, raising questions about the limits of river restoration projects to effect transformative change. Finally, the profound physical alteration of the LA River, and the extent to which the city has come to rely on a concrete channel to funnel water to the sea, creates significant limits to the restoration process. Attempts to achieve more robust ecological justice for the river (e.g., removing concrete, reclaiming floodplains) would likely require relocating infrastructure and neighborhoods. While this is true for most urban river restoration projects, a concretized channel amplifies the tension between ecological justice for the river and social justice for people.

Discussion of results

Reflecting on our primary research questions, ongoing efforts at urban river restoration (URR) as practiced on the Grand, Bronx, and Los Angeles Rivers have engaged questions and principles of EJ, but in ways that are highly varied and have arguably not fulfilled their potential for promoting the broad aims of distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice. Across all study sites, the discourses and aspirations of EJ have shaped URR efforts most tangibly by foregrounding concerns over equity across all aspects of restoration governance. In addition, this overt focus on EJ has gone beyond mere rhetoric and has however haltingly invited greater levels of participation from historically underrepresented communities in river restoration planning and activities. In the Bronx River case, EJ advocacy organizations and Black and Latino neighborhood groups played key roles in shaping the implementation of restoration projects. Advocates for Grand Rapids’ Black communities have forcefully inserted their perspectives and aims into forums for restoring the Grand River. And grassroots organizations in LA River have brought to light some of the problematic features of the basin’s Master Plan in terms of exacerbating environmental injustices in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Despite these tangible examples of EJ shaping URR, one of the central results of our research underscores the fact that integrating EJ into URR activities is highly contingent on multiple factors present to varying degrees in the three sites. These include: pre-existing community concerns over EJ that became folded into restoration planning and implementation (Bronx, LA); adequate restoration funding mechanisms at federal, state, and city levels (Bronx, Grand); participation in restoration planning and decision making that is actively sought and meaningful (Bronx, Grand); and institutional capacity and coordination between project managers, community advocacy organizations, and state/federal agencies (all sites). This last factor is particularly salient. Collaborations between state actors and non-state actors in the Bronx case have been effective, partially effective in the Grand River case, and somewhat limited in the LA case (albeit with pockets of success). These contingencies deeply shape both the opportunities for and barriers to the integration of distributive, procedural and recognitional modes of EJ into restoration initiatives. While this result may not be satisfying in terms of generalizable lessons for integrating EJ effectively within urban river restoration, it pointedly highlights that there is no “one size fits all” approach to this integration.

We also set out to identify barriers to and opportunities for integrating the distributive, procedural, and recognitional dimensions of EJ into urban river restoration initiatives. The results here are a mixed bag. For example, an unresolved question relates to the question of whether, in highly urbanized environments where multiple economic and political pressures have marginalized lower income communities and communities of color, the expectation that river restoration will be a tool for achieving greater levels of recognitional, distributive and procedural justice might be unrealistic in the short term. A significant barrier across all study sites thus becomes undoing some of the structural sources of environmental injustice that have accrued over several decades. The Bronx River experience suggests, however, that opportunities exist for achieving distributive (e.g., greater access to river-oriented green spaces for historically underrepresented neighborhoods) and procedural (e.g., multiple pathways for previously marginalized groups to participate in planning and restoration activities) goals, but this achievement requires years of coalition-building, funding, and conscious efforts to build on other, non-river related EJ campaigns. And these broader-scale campaigns hinge crucially on state actors explicitly recognizing past injustices. The Bronx River case also suggests that cautiously and strategically leveraging state actors as allies in URR can enhance aims across the different dimensions of EJ. For the Grand River, the original restoration initiative, characterized as “science based” and focused on generating renewed flows for recreation and economic purposes, provided opportunities for advocacy groups emerging from, for example, Black communities in the city to forcefully demand that the River for All project become more inclusive in terms of project planning (procedural justice) and anticipated economic benefits from restoration (distributive). Yet the actual biophysical restoration of the Grand River has stalled temporarily despite strong alliances with city officials, due to barriers associated with the permitting process. In the case of the highly altered LA River, the trade-offs between the different dimensions of EJ, and between EJ goals and biophysical restoration of the river itself are likely to always be apparent. For example, restoration of the river and river-adjacent neighborhoods through additional green spaces and other environmental amenities may bring recreation and health benefits to communities (achieving distributive aims), but could also lead to negative impacts such as displacement and gentrification, a maldistribution of environmental benefits resulting from a lack of recognition of ways that environmental racism has been institutionalized over many decades within the LA region [38]. An additional barrier to bringing EJ more robustly into URR in the LA River flows out of the years of antagonism between community organizations advocating for EJ and city, state, and federal officials perceived as inattentive to their concerns.

Another key finding relates to the importance of disentangling the different strands of EJ in order to identify the opportunities for more vigorously integrating EJ into URR and other types of restoration projects. Importantly, the distributive, procedural, and recognitional aspects of EJ cannot be uncritically lumped together as “social dimensions” of URR; nor can they be analyzed in isolation. Rather, they overlap and are intertwined. In the case of the Bronx River, efforts to ensure that historically marginalized communities enjoy the benefits of a restored river through access to improved riverside parks reflect both distributive justice and recognitional justice, particularly if the area is one that was previously red-lined and suffered from divestment. Additionally, many scholars see the lack of recognition of diverse cultural identities within a city or other social collective as a significant barrier to achieving distributional objectives of environmental initiatives such as river restoration, even if some level of procedural justice is present [18]. Simply having a “seat at the table” does not automatically secure meaningful participation in shaping a project’s design. These three aspects of EJ also vary depending on several factors: the historical contingencies of the projects and the cities in which they reside; the specific types of restoration activities proposed; the array of regulations, policies, and funding that guide restoration; and the power relations among the different actors engaged in restoration activities. As shown by the Grand River restoration project, there is no guarantee that proclaiming a project equitable in terms of design and implementation will necessarily resonate with urban communities long marginalized and excluded from political and economic decisions. Even in cases where URR initiatives consciously recognize historical patterns of exclusion based on race, gender, and/socio-economic status within a city, there is little likelihood that such recognition will effectively alter the institutional forces driving urban inequalities that have operated for decades.

When examining our three study sites, we also see the different elements of EJ manifesting according to different timelines and different intensities in terms of their ultimate impacts. In the Bronx, where organizations committed to EJ for other purposes played key roles in the formation of the coalition that became the Bronx River Alliance, the distributive, procedural and recognitional aspects of EJ have been deeply integrated into restoration activities in ways that are transformative for many of the community’s residents. This is not to say that biophysical improvements to the river are complete. In the case of the Grand River, proponents of restoration have always considered the river’s revitalization efforts inclusive, yet it was only more recently that key officials in the city government and community organizers discerned that the project’s distributive and procedural justice aims could be enhanced by recognizing the city’s long history of politically and economically marginalizing communities of color. LA River restoration has been more top-down in its planning and design, with opposition ranging from environmentalists who want more in-channel interventions to restore ecological processes, to communities that feel excluded from decision-making. While official documents and the planning process both have an EJ focus, how this will affect individual projects is not yet clear.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest that EJ is being incorporated into urban river restoration projects in the United States in innovative ways, most visibly through procedural and distributive justice initiatives. We also find some evidence of progress towards articulating and achieving recognitional justice, but these achievements are proving particularly challenging in cities with historical legacies of institutional racism, raising questions about the limits of environmental restoration projects to address structural inequities in the urban context. Future research should address some critical questions about the theoretical and practical interconnections between urban river restoration and the concept of environmental justice. One looming question is whether the rehabilitation of urban waterways in the ways described here accomplish biophysical aims (e.g., more natural flow and sediment regimes, upstream-downstream connectivity, enhanced aquatic biodiversity) while simultaneously enhancing EJ in cities? For example, calls for recognitional justice in some project sites—extensive parks, trails, and greenways under the rubric of URR—may actually be diluting efforts to achieve biophysical restoration and the distributive benefits this might confer. Moreover, successfully incorporating EJ into URR may require thinking at larger spatial scales and more holistically versus a singular focus on the urban corridor. Rather than simply seeing it as river restoration of a downtown urban watercourse, we should be emphasizing riverscape restoration that includes more distal and diverse environments and neighborhoods. While our research reveals that there is no single model for incorporating the important and different elements of EJ into efforts at urban river restoration in the US or elsewhere, we argue that our cases offer important conceptual and pragmatic lessons regarding the need to identify and explain historical and local political contexts before meaningful progress can be made on socially just urban river restoration.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments

This research was funded in part by a Seed Grant from the Dartmouth College Rockefeller Center for Public Policy. We would like to thank the numerous individuals who agreed to be interviewed for this research. Lily Pogue and Mia F. Compton-engle helped with data entry, and Aletha Spang provided crucial cartographic assistance.