Advancing Environmental Justice Technologies & Technospaces: A Case Study of ChiVes, Open GIS, and Participatory Design

• Environmental Justice (EJ) technologies may be further fortified and refined when connected directly with the communities impacted by environmental injustices. • Grounding EJ technology work in explicit, equity-centered framings remains crucial to advance healthier communities by considering the content of data, how decisions were generated, as well as how resources will be distributed. • When viewed as a technospace, the process of developing and engaging with GIS technologies present new opportunities for exploring, communicating, and contesting our understanding of environmental injustices, how environmental inequalities emerge, as well as serving to advocate for environmental justice. • EJ technoscapes can no longer be conceived as passive products of the interaction of people and technology, but as active participants within EJ initiatives. Environmental Justice (EJ) technologies support stakeholders in mapping, summarizing, and communicating environmental hazards to support vulnerable communities. This landscape can be viewed as a dynamic technospace, where the spatial-temporal, lived experience of engaging with a technological application may influence individuals using the application, as well as the developers and application itself. When viewed as a technospace, the process of developing and engaging with GIS technologies present new opportunities for exploring, communicating, and contesting our understanding of environmental injustices, learning how environmental inequalities emerge, and advocating for environmental justice. The power and fragility of EJ technospaces was exemplified at the start of the second term of the Trump administration with the targeted removal of related governmental websites. We share a new approach to EJ application development as a case study in Chicago, connecting federated data across many stakeholders with nimble, low cost open source technologies and human-centered design. ChiVes is a data and mapping application linking dozens of tract-level social, health, and environmental indicators, serving as a decentralized, Open GIS focused on stakeholder relationships. Iterative development with community engagement enabled the ChiVes application to transform over time. Future research of EJ technospaces would benefit from robust frameworks that better the structural drivers of inequality and examine how these systems generate new insights across the full spectrum of development, design, and user interaction.