Resilience, justice, environment merge in Prof. Arnold’s Los Angeles research

When it comes to urban infrastructure and justice, many factors come into play.

From access to green areas to “green gentrification,” a multitude of social, economic, and policy factors affect the way communities adapt to change.

That’s what Professor Tony Arnold is studying this fall as he spends time in Los Angeles.

He is a visiting scholar at the UCLA School of Law and is also working with The City Project, an organization that promotes “equal justice, democracy, and livability for all” with a focus on healthy green land use and planning.

With The City Project, Arnold, also a professor in the University of Louisville’s Department of Urban and Public Affairs, will work on a research project combining resilience and justice.

“Resilience is about the capacity of a community to adapt to disturbances and changes without changing its basic systems and processes,” he said. Resilience justice is “the idea that not all communities have equal tools and resources to be adaptive.”

As part of his research project, Arnold will conduct an assessment of the blue/ green infrastructure — such as urban watersheds and parks — in low-income and minority neighborhoods as well as a resilience assessment of those neighborhoods.

“Let’s think about environmental justice as not just toxic waste plants in communities,” he said. “Let’s think more broadly about land-use planning and how the future of communities is defined.”

The project will also catalog the laws and policies governing urban infrastructure in Los Angeles and analyze which entities and leaders have the power to make decisions in that area.

From there, Arnold and The City Project will develop a participatory framework through which communities can influence the policy decisions that will affect them.

“It will have both theoretical and practical applications,” Arnold said about the project. “This will really advance the understanding of the relationship between resilience and justice. This will be something scholars in many fields will find interesting.”

Arnold said his role is to bring big-picture thinking and evidence-based research tools to the project, while The City Project is able to call on its strong community ties to understand the context of the people involved.

But that doesn’t mean that Arnold, who lived in Southern California for nine years before coming to Louisville, is coming to the project purely as an academic. He also is motivated by a sense of justice.

“I want to improve justice in a society (in a way) that is not just remedying, but instead improving how we make policy decisions and improving the adaptive capacity of communities,” he said.