ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how so-called urban greening and sustainability approaches can produce or exacerbate environmental inequities and how select urban communities are beginning to organize against new injustices. It focuses on the US and examines diverse examples of urban environmental inequity produced in the context of neighborhood greening and community (re)development. In the analysis of community-based environmental revitalization in Boston, sustainable community planning in New Orleans, and disaster resilience planning in New York City, the chapter finds that historically marginalized neighborhoods are doubly exposed in the same space to environmental impacts and environmental privilege, that is the disproportionate access to environmental goods and amenities from which upper income classes and whites benefit while more marginalized groups are excluded. The chapter illustrates these historical evolutions and emerging tensions between the right to a cleaner and safer urban environment and the fear of displacement and exclusion through three examples in Boston, New Orleans, and New York.
