Housing Quality & Environmental Justice

Critical Ecologies

This podcast with Laure Detymowski offers a brief insight on how housing quality and environmental justice have been linked both in the literature and in social and environmental justice campaigns, mostly in the US and Irish contexts. In this discussion, the issue of housing quality is extended to encompass physically and mentally harmful living conditions that may have received less attention than toxic exposure so far such as overcrowding, pest infestation, dampness and other forms of material hazard. While green, climate and other environmental policy is increasingly being implemented along with innovative eco-housing concepts, this generalised green turn has also been criticised as mostly disconnected from existing social inequities. In a context of growing risk of extreme weather event and pandemics, it appears more important than ever to ensure that everyone is included in discussions around what constitutes a safe, healthy, quality home. Failure to secure inclusiveness in these discussions may lead to historically-marginalised social groups continuing to bear the burden of health-damaging, life-threatening housing conditions in the face of existing as well as future hazards and their cumulative effects.