Minoritised youth’s environmental justice priorities in a gentrifying context: brokenness and repair

Youth engagement in urban planning research and practice can help reveal their distinct experiences, priorities, and provide direction for future action. Environmental justice scholarship has documented critical insights learned from youth co-researchers. This article adds to this tradition by exploring how youth in Austin, Texas, experience environmental injustice within the context of gentrification. Using photovoice methods, youth researchers identify and discuss these dual challenges. We illustrate how their emphasis on brokenness links and builds on environmental justice, repair and maintenance, and reparative literatures. Findings also highlight how youth actively work to improve their communities, challenging planning scholarship’s tendency to frame youth action as aspirational or as happening in structured, programmatic ways.