Urban environmental justice through the camera: understanding the politics of space and the right to the city

Using the lens of Lefebvre's spatial trialectics, we assess the utility of photo-elicited interviewing for environmental justice, recognising that a view to social spatial analysis is essential to engaging with the historical processes of exclusion and discrimination that are crucial to explaining why unequal distributions of environmental injustice are systemic and not random. Drawing on insights from our own photo-elicited interviewing-based work in the neighbourhood called Parkdale in Toronto, we make two main recommendations for future environmental justice work using photo-elicited interviewing. First, researchers must be open to a broader epistemology, one that draws on a more spatially nuanced and temporally evolving knowledge of the full range of environmental influences on communities. Second, in order to arrive at a more robust critical analysis of social space, researchers should complement photo-elicited interviewing with historical research about the relevant communities and include participants from other comparative communities.