In this paper, we report the results of a three-year research project (2008-2011) that aimed to identify urban environmental health inequities using a photography-mediated qualitative approach adapted for comparative neighbourhood-level assessment. The project took place in Vancouver, Toronto, and Winnipeg, Canada and involved a total of 49 inner city community researchers who compared environmental health conditions in numerous neighbourhoods across each city. Using the social determinants of health as a guiding framework, community researchers observed a wide range of differences in health-influencing private and public spaces, including sanitation services, housing, parks and gardens, art displays, and community services. The comparative process enabled community researchers to articulate in five distinct ways how such observable conditions represented system level inequities. The findings inform efforts to shift environmental health intervention from constricted action within derelict urban districts to more coordinated mobilization for health equity in the city.

Faisant partie d’un projet destiné à identifier les injustices environnementales au Canada, cet article définit une analyse critique de l’espace social afin de comprendre les problèmes de justice environnementale dans une communauté urbaine du Canada. Les injustices environnementales ayant un impact sur des situations géographiques particulières présentent un aspect spatial fixe et très apparent. Cependant, je soutiens qu’il est nécessaire d’avoir une plus large vue d’ensemble de la manière dont les politiques produisent et reproduisent l’espace, afin d’expliquer par quel moyen les manifestations spatiales des transformations politiques et économiques peuvent créer de nouvelles et vivaces injustices environnementales. Dans la première partie de cet article, je souligne quelques-unes des composantes-clés de la conception de la justice environnementale. Ensuite, à partir des travaux critiques élaborés dans le champ de la géographie humaine, en particulier ceux d’Edward Soja et de Henri Lefebvre, j’énumère les limites de l’approche usuelle de l’espace dans la littérature américaine sur la justice environnementale. La plus grande partie de cet article présente mes arguments en faveur d’une vision critique de l’espace social à partir des réflexions issues de mes recherches de terrain dans la communauté de Parkdale à Toronto.As part of the project to name environmental injustices in Canada, this article explores the significance of a critical analysis of social space to understand environmental justice problems in an urban Canadian community. Environmental injustices that impact on particular geographical locations have a readily apparent, fixed spatial aspect. However, I argue that a broader view to the politics of how space is produced and reproduced is necessary to explain the way in which the spatial manifestations of political economic transformations can create new and dynamic environmental injustices (Massey 1993). I at first outline some of the key components of the environmental justice perspective. Then, by drawing on critical work in the area of human geography, in particular Edward Soja’s (1996) and Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) work, I review the limitations of the dominant approach to spatiality in the American environmental justice literature. I then present my arguments in favour of a critical view to social space through a consideration of my field research findings in the Toronto community of Parkdale

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In response to the dominance of green capitalist discourses in Canada’s environmental movement, in this paper, we argue that strategies to improve energy policy must also provide mechanisms to address social conflicts and social disparities. Environmental justice is proposed as an alternative to mainstream environmentalism, one that seeks to address systemic social and spatial exclusion encountered by many racialized immigrants in Toronto as a result of neo-liberal and green capitalist municipal policy and that seeks to position marginalized communities as valued contributors to energy solutions. We examine Toronto-based municipal state initiatives aimed at reducing energy use while concurrently stimulating growth (specifically, green economy/green jobs and ‘smart growth’). By treating these as instruments of green capitalism, we illustrate the utility of environmental justice applied to energy-related problems and as a means to analyze stakeholders’ positions in the context of neo-liberalism and green capitalism, and as opening possibilities for resistance.