How equitable are urban rail-trails? a review of 11 development plans

Urban rail-trails like New York City’s High Line, Atlanta’s Beltline, and Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail/606 provide greenspace and pedestrian transportation routes in dense cities. But they are also sites of displacement and other injustices for historically excluded communities. Efforts to mitigate these injustices have led contemporary urban rail-trail practitioners to adopt equitable development plans, and this article analyzes how practitioners are incorporating equity into these plans. Using conceptions of distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice to analyze the equitable development planning documents of 11 urban rail-trails in the United States, we develop an equity index to identify how rail-trail practitioners integrate pluralised forms of equity into their plans. Although most of these plans incorporate some components of distributive, procedural and recognitional justice, other components are not consistently addressed. Some plans do not address strategies for mitigating physical displacement, and others do not promote shared governance or identify trail-adjacent historically excluded groups and their histories. The purpose of the equity index is to illustrate that equitable urban rail-trail development has various components that must work together for trails to be just spaces for historically excluded communities. By identifying missing components of equity, the index identifies where equity planning may be improved for existing and future trails. It may be used by residents, policymakers, and practitioners to lobby for different components of justice during the planning process.

以纽约市高线公园（High Line）、亚特兰大环线步道（Beltline）以及芝加哥布鲁明戴尔步道/606步道（Bloomingdale Trail/606）为代表的城市铁路绿道（urban rail-trail），可在高密度城市中提供绿色公共空间与步行交通线路。但对于历史上遭受排斥的社区而言，此类绿道同时也是引发社区置换与其他不公现象的场所。为缓解此类不公问题，当代城市铁路绿道从业者已着手采用公平发展规划方案，本文即分析从业者如何将公平理念融入此类规划当中。本研究以分配正义（distributive justice）、程序正义（procedural justice）与认可正义（recognitional justice）的理论框架为基础，对美国11条城市铁路绿道的公平发展规划文件展开分析，并构建公平指数（equity index）以识别绿道从业者如何将多元公平形式融入其规划方案。尽管多数规划方案涵盖了分配正义、程序正义与认可正义的部分内容，但其余相关维度并未得到一致关注。部分规划未提及缓解物理性社区置换的相关策略，另有部分规划未推动共建共治，也未明确绿道周边历史上遭受排斥的社区群体及其相关历史背景。本公平指数的设计初衷在于阐明：公平导向的城市铁路绿道发展包含多个核心维度，唯有各维度协同联动，方能使绿道成为历史上遭受排斥社区的公平正义空间。通过识别公平规划中缺失的维度，该指数可为现有及未来绿道的公平规划优化方向提供明确指引。居民、政策制定者与绿道从业者均可借助该指数，在规划推进过程中为各类正义维度的落地发声、争取支持。