Martha Matsuoka

This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity Are Reshaping Metropolitan America

For nearly two decades, progressives have been dismayed by the steady rise of the right in U.S. politics. Often lost in the gloom and doom about American politics is a striking and sometimes underanalyzed phenomenon: the resurgence of progressive politics and movements at a local level. Emphasizing “regional equity,” unusual alliances of labor, community and even business groups have been built around issues of community benefits, housing affordability, and access to transit. Drawing on a wealth of case studies as well as their own experience in the field, Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka point out the promise and pitfalls of this new approach and argue that what they term social movement regionalism can offer an important contribution to the revitalization of progressive politics in America.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Ground-Truth: Methods to Advance Environmental Justice and Researcher–Community Partnerships

Environmental justice advocates often argue that environmental hazards and their health effects vary by neighborhood, income, and race. To assess these patterns and advance preventive policy, their colleagues in the research world often use complex and methodologically sophisticated statistical and geospatial techniques. One way to bridge the gap between the technical work and the expert knowledge of local residents is through community-based participatory research strategies. We document how an environmental justice screening method was coupled with “ground-truthing”—a project in which community members worked with researchers to collect data across six Los Angeles neighborhoods—which demonstrated the clustering of potentially hazardous facilities, high levels of air pollution, and elevated health risks. We discuss recommendations and implications for future research and collaborations between researchers and community-based organizations.

For what it's worth: regional equity, community organizing, and metropolitan America

Regional equity has taken off as a field of research and activism in recent years. Within the general field, three important variants have emerged: community development regionalism, in which the main interest is in using regional levers to promote a new form of community revitalization; policy change regionalism, in which the main emphasis is on shifting government rules to better distribute metropolitan resources; and social movement regionalism, in which the focus is on mobilizing communities for collective action at a regional level. Drawing on a series of case studies from across the country, we argue that all these variants have a role but that social movement regionalism may be particularly effective in productively addressing the inevitable tensions and conflicts that emerge in regional equity strategies, including the relationship to business-oriented regionalism, labor–community alliances, and the role of race. We conclude by speculating on the recent efforts of social movement regionalism to scale up, suggesting that this could present an important contribution to a broader and deeper movement for progressive social change in the United States.