Julian Agyeman

Julian Agyeman, born in 1958 in England, is professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in Boston. Before emigrating to the United States he co-founded in 1988 the Black Environment Network, the first British organisation to join environmentalism with ethnic minorities, and in 1996 the journal Local Environment. His career is a bridge between the American environmental justice movement and European sustainable urbanism.

His central concept is just sustainability, which he defined as the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, while living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. He formulated it in Just Sustainabilities (2003), edited with Robert Bullard and Bob Evans, and developed it in Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (2005) and Introducing Just Sustainabilities (2013): environmentalism that ignores inequality produces green gentrification, and social policy that ignores ecology is unsustainable.

Sharing Cities (2015), with Duncan McLaren, proposed the shared city, public space, transport, housing and knowledge, as an alternative both to the platform economy and to individual consumption. Agyeman has also worked on food and the city, culture as a resource of urbanism and the politics of belonging. He is one of the most cited voices at the crossroads of planning, climate and justice.