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.