Embodying Justice in the Built Environment: Circularity in Practice is a guide and workbook for local governments and community organizations seeking to center justice and equity in their work toward building carbon neutral futures to address climate change. Unjust practices have shaped the built environment, from land dispossession to discriminatory planning, to harmful material extraction and toxic production processes, to wasteful construction and consumption practices. Current building processes have exacerbated injustices embedded in the built environment. This guide and workbook offers the Embodying Justice framework to support justice-oriented practices in the built environment and was developed with the belief that redressing injustices is integral to transitioning cities toward carbon neutrality.

Embodying Justice is a continuous process that recognizes and remedies past and present harm within the built environment while working toward just futures. Embodying Justice requires cities to carefully and comprehensively examine regulations, programs, and practices that affect the built environment’s design, construction, maintenance, repair, replacement, and end-of-life approaches and their impacts on justice. This concept is grounded in these guiding principles: • Justice is reparative. It concerns itself with making right what has been wronged, reconnecting what has been broken, and balancing the imbalanced. • Justice is fair. It equitably distributes social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental benefits and burdens. • Justice is community-driven. It centers historically oppressed and marginalized communities in a collaborative and inclusive process to move toward just futures. • Justice is placed. It is grounded in the specific community context in which it is invoked, rather than an abstract concept. • Justice is not a singular endpoint. It is a continuing process of reflection, acknowledgment, and action. The guide and workbook is designed to engage with five justice domains focused on three essential aspects of addressing Circularity and Waste: 1) Alternatives to Demolition 2) Resource Management and 3) New Construction. A team of researchers at Cornell University, with the support of community leaders, reviewed and analyzed the ”Waste and Circularity” section of the City Policy Framework for Dramatically Reducing Embodied Carbon, which details 52 policies for achieving carbon neutrality goals. While considering the prevalence of injustice and inequity embedded in the built environment, the analysis was then developed into a conceptual framework that forefronts justice and equity principles.