The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of twenty-one cities in Europe and North America over a 20 year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts.
Based on fieldwork in ten countries, and on analysis of core planning, policy, and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces, and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies.
The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening is not only physical, but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars, and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning – a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities who prioritise equity in green access, in secure housing, and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.
Author(s): Isabelle Anguelovski, James J. T. Connolly
Series: Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City Series
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 328
City: London
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Positioning urban green injustices
Part 1 The social costs of glitzy green urbanism
Chapter 1 Milan’s private Vertical Forests vs. horizontal urban greening
Chapter 2 Dismantling the just city: The unevenness of green experiences in Amsterdam Noord
Chapter 3 A green capital for all?: Austerity, inequalities and green space in Bristol
Chapter 4 Enacting a rail-to-park project in Valencia Parc Central or the actual construction of green gentrification
Part 2 Compounded risks and impacts of urban greening in post-industrial environments
Chapter 5 Is Cleveland’s vision of a “Green City on a Blue Lake” a path for social equity or green gentrification?
Chapter 6 West Dallas: The “nowhere” that became “somewhere”
Chapter 7 Land remediation in Glasgow’s East End: A “sustainability fix” for whose benefit?
Chapter 8 A community fights for its health while battling impending gentrification: Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco
Chapter 9 Resisting green gentrification: Seattle’s South Park neighborhood struggles for environmental justice
Part 3 (Re)creating unjust racialized landscapes in the green city?
Chapter 10 Reshaping legacies of green and transit justice through the Atlanta Beltline
Chapter 11 A new shade of green: From historic environmental inequalities over green amenities to exclusive green growth in Austin
Chapter 12 The racial inequities of green gentrification in Washington, D.C.
Chapter 13 Addressing green and climate gentrification in East Boston
Part 4 The complex entanglement of greening and multiple other gentrification pressures
Chapter 14 Ordinary and extraordinary greening: Tensions amidst Saint-Henri, Montréal’s development boom
Chapter 15 Environmental inequities in fast-growing Dublin: Combined scarcity of green space and affordable housing for The Liberties
Chapter 16 Barcelona’s greening paradox as an emerging global city and tourism destination
Chapter 17 Competing riskscapes of climate change, gentrification and adaptation in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood
Part 5 (Fragile) green justice victories and gray zones in the just green city
Chapter 18 A green, livable Copenhagen in the shadow of racializing, neoliberalizing politics
Chapter 19 Will “extraordinary gardens” and social housing ensure Nantes is green and affordable for all?
Chapter 20 Prioritizing green and social goals: The progressive Vienna model in jeopardy
Chapter 21 Can community mobilization be inclusive of the Black community in its fight against green gentrification?
Chapter 22 Enacting just urban green futures: Promising policy and planning tools and regulations for Europe and North America
Conclusion: A new tale for the green city?
Index
