The definition of urban environmental issues, who participates in urban environmental decision making, and who benefits from environmental management have changed significantly over the past 100 years.
Information and knowledge are necessary but insufficient for affecting urban environmental change. Over the course of the past 100 years, there have been three dominant phases in environmental decision making in the United States: 1) private markets and individual decision-making; 2) public institutions, organizational capacity, and professional "experts;" and 3) collaborative decision making. The development of each phase should not be seen as one type of decision making replacing another, since the elites in the City persist, harnessing public institutions, organizations, and technocracy to support their interests. Each type of decision making influences how information and knowledge are legitimized and used to influence the environmental quality of the region. Our research will examine how decision making changed over time: in terms of what is defined as an urban environmental issue, who participates, and who benefits. We will apply this research to the long term relationships among public health, forests, and parks in urban areas. These relationships have not been examined over the long term and have not been addressed in our understanding of land use change.
We will collect data from the following sources: City administrative records and reports, newspaper accounts, and historic and current Census data. We will conduct higher order analyses using the Human Ecosystem Framework by including multiple variables representing biophysical, social, and cultural resources, social institutions, and social order. We will apply our analyses to long term trends in public health, conservation of public lands, management of urban parks, forests, community gardens, environmental justice, the implementation of the City's $1 billion consent decree and restoration of Watershed 263. We will also continue cross-site comparison research with the Piren-Seine Zone Atelier in Paris, France.
