10.1177/0739456X03255431 ARTICLEHarwoodEnvir nmental Justice on the Streets Environmental Justice on the Streets Advocacy Planning as a Tool to Contest Environmental Racism

Most research on environmental racism focuses on the disproportionate exposureto harmful chemicals, pesticides, and other contaminants in the homes, schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces of people of color. However, in addition to these nec-essary studies emphasizing toxic chemical exposure, environmental racism also includes more widely experienced effects of the urban planning process, such as the maldistribution of a wide range of facilities and amenities, including traffic lights, streetlights, and stop signs. Environmental justice organizations link the unequal dis-tribution of resources with environmental racism, yet they have strategically chosen not to place the maldistribution of environmental amenities at the center of the envi-ronmental justice agenda. However, public planners are in a position to address these more everyday instances of environmental racism through the employment of advo-cacy planning. Advocacy planning offers public planners a strategy to promote a more equitable distribution of public resources for special interest groups rather than the more common practice of planning in the name of the public interest, which has been criticized for contributing to environmental racism. Advocacy planners recognize that the instrumental rational planning model—associated with the positivist scientifi