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1. Introduction
Human exposure to environmental harm is a function of various socioeconomic processes that push people toward the threshold of environmental stressors, rather than just a product of accidental environmental impacts [1]. Numerous studies have reported that racial and ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged people are exposed to greater environmental harm [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. This phenomenon has been well documented in environmental justice literature and has been variously termed environmental injustice, environmental racism, or environmental inequality [9]. This paper uses the term environmental justice to refer to the “equal access to a clean environment and equal protection from possible environmental harm irrespective of race, income, class, or any other differentiating feature of socio-economic status” [11] (p. 13).
A number of quantitative environmental justice studies have sought to understand the association between residential segregation and disparities in exposure to environmental health hazards (e.g., air pollution) or health benefits (e.g., green space) among different social groups. However, the heavy use of aggregate data and the narrow focus solely on residential contexts in past studies have led to several methodological problems as well as inconsistent findings on the association. In this review paper, we discuss the limitations of residence- and place-based approaches in segregation and environmental exposure assessment. We then suggest that future environmental justice research should consider spatiotemporal population dynamics and regard individuals as mobile agents in urban spaces in order to address the complexity of the dynamic sociospatial mechanisms underlying unjust environmental exposure among social groups. This in turn calls for a reconceptualization of and new measures for segregation, as well as a redelineation of the individual geographic and temporal contexts in which people actually experience segregation and unequal exposure to environmental factors.
2. Residential Segregation and Disparities in Environmental Exposure
Early environmental justice scholars focused largely on the residential neighborhoods of socially marginalized people and their proximity to noxious resources and facilities [2,12,13,14,15], yet they were engaged in a “chicken-or-egg” debate-whether marginalized people move to an area before toxic chemical sources are introduced, or their communities were intentionally established in areas where toxics already existed [13,16,17,18,19,20]. Helfand and Peyton [14] argued that toxic facilities would likely be established in disadvantaged areas due to their low property and land values and the increased likelihood that socioeconomically marginalized...