Environmental Justice as Justification for Landscape Architectural Design

Abstract

Environmental justice has increasingly become the focus of discussions across many disciplines, but it largely remains a fragmented subject in landscape architecture. This article examines conceptual frameworks and principles of environmental justice applicable to theory and practice. It asserts environmental justice as a moral obligation that is vital to the role of landscape architecture. It advances four arguments. First, a threefold conception of justice—distributive, procedural, and restorative—offers an integrated strategy for achieving social, economic, and ecological values of sustainability in landscape architecture. Second, ethical quandaries, dilemmas, paradoxes, and incompatibilities among divergent values relevant to principles of justice are examined as they apply to decision-making processes in landscape architecture. Third, the article proposes need, responsibility, and care as a convergent basis of environmental justice to support a holistic view of landscape ethics as property and natural rights. It argues that principles of environmental justice could evolve within the frameworks of democratic idealism and ecological humanism in the pragmatic context of landscape architecture. Finally, it discusses how democratic tenets of contemporary landscape architectural design can frame ethical discourses to justify design decision-making processes.