Urban Forests and Environmental Justice. Insights from Padua and Turin

Abstract: Cities around the world are employing strategies to become greener and more sustainable, and urban forests can play a major role in providing environmental benefits. However, it has been found that in many cities those benefits are not equally experienced by citizens, highlighting the importance of examining environmental justice. Environmental justice is commonly conceptualised as composed of three pillars, distributional, procedural and recognition justice. In Italy, there is a wide research gap on environmental justice and specifically on how it is understood and operationalised regarding urban forests. Furthermore, there is a gap of knowledge on how governance interacts with environmental justice. Therefore, this thesis aims at exploring how the three pillars of environmental justice are understood and captured in urban governance, and at assessing how three governance principles, namely participation, inclusiveness, and transparency can impact environmental justice. To do so, a qualitative research approach, with multiple case studies, the cities of Turin and Padua, is adopted. A conceptual framework has been developed to combine the three fundamental pillars of environmental justice, with the three principles of governance. By interviewing ten actors working with the municipalities of Turin and Padua and analysing main planning documents, data and insights are gathered concerning environmental justice and the governance principles and their interaction. The results show environmental justice to be an underdeveloped topic, lacking a coherent and comprehensive conceptualisation in the two case studies, with the distributional pillar being central in both cities. Furthermore, governance principles, although considered fundamental, are only partially implemented to support environmental justice. The almost non-existent possibilities for citizens to meaningfully influence urban forests and their characteristics, coupled with a lack of inclusiveness in decision-making processes, can be indicators of critical issues from the point of view of procedural and recognition justice.