ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have explored the convergences between sustainability policy, planning and gentrification at multiple scales, with assemblages of public, private and civil society actors, and in different urban locations and environments. Identifying and untangling the connections between the production and implementation of urban sustainability policy and planning and gentrification processes in cities allows for more specific analyses regarding environmental gentrification and urban policy development and planning going forward. What is most striking about these connections are the paradoxical associations between the intended objectives of often progressive and environmentally focused sustainability policy and planning initiatives and the inequitable and unjust characteristics and practices of gentrification. Importantly, this is demonstrated in the ways by which assemblages of actors and interests engage with the creation of sustainability policy and planning initiatives that are complementary with and embedded within gentrification. As an emergent form of gentrification, environmental gentrification is defined as the convergence of environmental spaces and practices – environmental spaces such as parks, formalized policy and planning agendas and informal, everyday environmental activities – with the transformations created by rising residential property values, commercial services geared to higher income earners and other affluent amenity spaces in cities. These changes are evident in consumer demand for and policies and planning practices that produce and manage existing green residential neighbourhoods as well as market-geared newly built sustainable communities with ample parks and other environmental infrastructure and a growing interest of property developers in formal sustainable planning and design systems such as LEED and BREEAM. Environmental gentrification is also identified in the growing number of commercial spaces that cater to the tastes of higher income residents interested in environmental issues and environmentally responsible products, such as organic food stores and farmers’ markets with locally sourced items, ‘locavore’ restaurants, and bicycle shops. It also includes the participation of gentrifiers in community-based sustainability activities such as crafting and community gardening as a way to seek out more ‘authentic’, grittier and alternative urban experiences and enact ostensibly progressive personal interests in and 156commitments to mitigating environmental problems. In these ways, we now observe an emergence of gentrified and environmentally friendly enclaves in cities that pose particular concerns for how gentrification will progress in cities. Critiquing gentrification becomes additionally complex and challenging when it includes environmental features and practices that are publicly considered to be progressive, well-meaning, and focused on conserving and protecting the natural environment. While this book demonstrates how urban gentrification processes are augmented by sustainability policy and planning ideas and projects, individual concerns about environmental issues that work to influence and co-create policy and planning initiatives, and public, private and civil society sector practices that combine to produce sustainable urban communities and spaces, it contributes, more broadly, to emergent discourse about environmental gentrification and associated forms of social and environmental inequity and injustice in cities. In light of global and localized governance concerns about the impacts of climate change in cities, multisectoral interest in building resilient and sustainable cities and public awareness about environmental issues, environmental forms of gentrification will continue to shape landscapes and social relations within cities as policies, planning directives and local initiatives further unfold in response to these issues.
