The Right to the City: Developing a Framework to Analyze Environmental Justice

The unprecedented increase in urban population and the emergence of new issues in the lives of citizens have led to new concepts, such as “right to the city” in the urban planning literature. The answer to many failures of plans and programs in various fields, including environmental justice, can be found in the light of this concept. This paper has focused on the issue of environmental justice through a comprehensive view of the social and economic dimensions of the lives of different groups of city dwellers, and “the right to the city” has been identified as the most appropriate context for this purpose. This descriptive-analytical paper has used documentary studies and a review of the theoretical literature associated with the right to the city and environmental justice to extract the conceptual model indicating the explanation of components and their relationships, using the content analysis model. Finally, the proposed model showed that the establishment of environmental justice in cities requires the realization of the components of the right to the city.