ABSTRACT
Environmental justice to fairness in the social distribution of various physical factors that affect quality of life and healthful conditions. It can be applied in assessing differences in the environmental features that various groups of people, defined by income or other social characteristics, currently live with. Evaluating social justice as a routine part of urban planning has proved to be difficult for several reasons. First, the distribution of costs and benefits over segments of a population is at the center of political economy, and the basis of controversy. Second, there are no widely creditable ways of defining what constitutes fairness. A third difficulty in incorporating environmental justice into conventional urban planning practice is methodological. The Central Link project provides an interesting urban case for applying environmental justice analysis for critically evaluating the effectiveness of the methodology used.
