ABSTRACT
The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 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 the 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 are 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 that prioritize equity in green access, in secure housing and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|50 pages
The social costs of glitzy green urbanism
part 2|62 pages
Compounded risks and impacts of urban greening in post-industrial environments
chapter 8|12 pages
A community fights for its health while battling impending gentrification
chapter 9|12 pages
Resisting green gentrification
part 3|50 pages
(Re)creating unjust racialized landscapes in the green city?
chapter 11|12 pages
A new shade of green
part 4|54 pages
The complex entanglement of greening and multiple other gentrification pressures
chapter 14|13 pages
Ordinary and extraordinary greening
chapter 15|13 pages
Environmental inequities in fast-growing Dublin
part 5|84 pages
(Fragile) green justice victories and gray zones in the just green city