ABSTRACT
Globalizing cities are increasingly using urban sustainability infrastructures such as nature-centered projects to address socioenvironmental and health challenges and harness widespread benefits for citizens, industries and investors. Yet the alliance between urban redevelopment and greening creates a paradox, whereby more access to greening produces or exacerbates green inequalities. While greening certainly provides economic, ecological, health and social benefits to many, it may deepen or create new vulnerabilities and instigate processes of green gentrification that impact historically marginalized residents even in cases of interventions that aim to address inequalities. As a result, urban sustainability infrastructure reproduces environmental privilege for a few. We focus on this green paradox and highlight some of the responses to processes of double injustices (past and new) when so-called “green gaps” are captured as “green rent” through new commercial and residential investments that accompany greening.
