"Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship has revealed that communities of color and low-income neighborhoods have been disproportionally affected by 'brown' contaminating facilities and excluded from decision-making on their land. However, traditional EJ studies tend to overlook the fact that residents also fight proactively to achieve long-term equitable revitalization and improve the livability and environmental quality of their neighborhoods through parks, playgrounds, urban agriculture, fresh markets, and improved waste management. This project is built around a collaborative, comparative, and multidisciplinary study of three critical case studies of marginalized neighborhoods organizing for improved environmental and health quality in three cities – Barcelona, Boston, Havana. This research will further develop the nascent environmental justice scholarship in the European Research Area by focusing on how residents make proactive environmental and health claims, defend their vision for improved lasting neighborhood conditions, and address inequalities in environmental planning decisions in cities that encompass a variety of political systems and contexts of marginalization. It will also improve our understanding of how larger processes of urbanization, segregation, and land-use decisions have contributed to creating an identity in impoverished urban neighborhoods and later shaped mobilization. More broadly, this project will strengthen and broaden the fields of political ecology, urban sociology, and environmental governance in the European research community; it will create an international umbrella platform of expert scholars and NGOs working on achieving environmental justice and environmental governance in the United States and Europe; and it will contribute to the training of graduate students in environmental conflicts and environmental justice research, thus promoting scientific excellence and knowledge transfer to the European Research Area."