Isabelle Anguelovski

Urban Climate Adaptation in the Global South Planning in an Emerging Policy Domain

Cities throughout the world face the challenge of preparing for climate change impacts. Since urban climate adaptation is an emerging policy domain, however, few institutions exist to guide cities among the first to take action. Drawing on institutional theory and case study research, this article examines the initiation and development of adaptation planning in two cities in the global south: Durban and Quito. The cases suggest that action in nascent policy domains is motivated by endogenous factors and sustained by taking advantage of opportunities rising and creatively linking new agendas to existing goals, plans, and programs.

Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South

As cities increasingly engage in climate adaptation planning, many are seeking to promote public participation and facilitate the engagement of different civil society actors. Still, the variations that exist among participatory approaches and the merits and tradeoffs associated with each are not well understood. This article examines the experiences of Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India) to assess how civil society actors contribute to adaptation planning and implementation. The results showcase two distinct approaches to public engagement. The first emphasizes participation of experts, affected communities, and a wide array of citizens to sustain broadly inclusive programmes that incorporate local needs and concerns into adaptation processes and outcomes. The second approach focuses on building targeted partnerships between key government, private, and civil society actors to institutionalize robust decision-making structures, enhance abilities to raise funds, and increase means to directly engage with local community and international actors. A critical analysis of these approaches suggests more inclusive planning processes correspond to higher climate equity and justice outcomes in the short term, but the results also indicate that an emphasis on building dedicated multi-sector governance institutions may enhance long-term programme stability, while ensuring that diverse civil society actors have an ongoing voice in climate adaptation planning and implementation. Policy relevance Many local governments in the Global South experience severe capacity and resource constraints. Cities are often required to devolve large-scale planning and decision-making responsibilities, such as those critical to climate adaptation, to different civil society actors. As a result, there needs to be more rigorous assessments of how civil society participation contributes to the adaptation policy and planning process and what local social, political, and economic factors dictate the way cities select different approaches to public engagement. Also, since social equity and justice are key indicators for determining the effectiveness and sustainability of adaptation interventions, urban adaptation plans and policies must also be designed according to local institutional strengths and civic capacities in order to account for the needs of the poor and most vulnerable. Inclusivity, therefore, is critical for ensuring equitable planning processes and just adaptation outcomes.

Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation Critical Perspectives from the Global North and South

A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban adaptation injustices fall into two categories: acts of commission, when interventions negatively affect or displace poor communities, and acts of omission, when they protect and prioritize elite groups at the expense of the urban poor.

From Toxic Sites to Parks as (Green) LULUs? New Challenges of Inequity, Privilege, Gentrification, and Exclusion for Urban Environmental Justice

As marginalized neighborhoods benefit from cleanup and environmental amenities often brought by municipal sustainability planning, recent trends of land revaluation, investments, and gentrification are posing a conundrum and paradox for environmental justice (EJ) activists. In this article, I examine the progression of the urban EJ agenda—from fighting contamination to mobilizing for environmental goods and resisting environmental gentrification—and analyze how the EJ scholarship has reflected upon the complexification of this agenda. I argue that locally unwanted land uses can be reconceptualized from contamination sources to new green amenities because of the displacement they seem to trigger or accelerate.

New Directions in Urban Environmental Justice Rebuilding Community, Addressing Trauma, and Remaking Place

Traditionally, environmental justice studies have examined the disproportionate burden suffered by marginalized populations in regards to contamination or resource extraction. However, to date little is known about how complex underlying goals shape community organization for long-term environmental quality in different cities around the world, and how concerns for health play out in projects such as park creation, gardens, or playground construction. Through an analysis of neighborhood mobilization around environmental projects in Boston, Barcelona, and Havana, I unravel common patterns of activism aimed at rebuilding community and remaking place, thereby addressing physical and psychological dimensions of environmental health.

From Environmental Trauma to Safe Haven: Place Attachment and Place Remaking in Three Marginalized Neighborhoods of Barcelona, Boston, and Havana

In recent years, local activists in the Global North and South have been organizing to improve degraded and abandoned spaces in marginalized neighborhoods by creating parks, playgrounds, urban farms, or community gardens. This paper integrates existing knowledge on urban place attachment and sense of community with scholarship on environmental justice in order to understand the role of place attachment in environmental mobilization in distressed neighborhoods across political systems and urbanization contexts. It examines the different forms of connections that activists develop and express toward neighborhoods with long–time substandard environmental conditions and how their experience of the neighborhood shapes their engagement in environmental revitalization projects. This comparison of three neighborhoods in Barcelona, Boston, and Havana shows that activists in all three places intend for their environmental endeavors to express grief at the loss of community, fears of erasure, and emotional connection and feelings of responsibility to place. To address environmental trauma, they aim to construct nurturing, soothing, “safe havens,” recreate rootedness, and remake place for residents. De Trauma Ambiental a Refugio Seguro: Apego al Lugar y Transformación Espacial en Tres Barrios Marginales en Barcelona, Boston y La Habana(Isabelle Anguelovski) Resumen En años recientes, activistas locales en el norte y sur globales se han ido organizando para mejorar espacios degradados y abandonados en barrios marginales creando parques, zonas recreativas, granjas urbanas o parques comunales. Este artículo integra el conocimiento existente sobre apego al lugar y sentido de comunidad con trabajo académico sobre justicia ambiental para entender el rol del apego al lugar en la movilización ambiental en barrios con esta problemática a través de sistemas políticos y contextos de urbanización. Se examina las formas distintas de conexión que los activistas desarrollan y expresan hacia barrios con condiciones ambientales desfavorables de larga data y en cómo sus experiencias del barrio moldean su compromiso con proyectos de rehabilitación ambiental. Esta comparación de tres barrios en Barcelona, Boston y La Habana muestra que los activistas en estos tres lugares buscan, a través de sus actividades ambientales, expresar nostalgia por la pérdida de la comunidad. Para enfrentar el trauma ambiental, ellos buscan construir “refugios seguros” educativos y calmantes que buscan recrear el enraizamiento y transformar los lugares para los residentes.

Beyond a Livable and Green Neighborhood: Asserting Control, Sovereignty and Transgression in the Casc Antic of Barcelona

During the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low-income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community-based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change - the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technology- and service-focused system, accompanied by rising socioeconomic inequality and displacement in inner-city areas. To date, few studies in the urban environmental arena have been placed within processes of urban change and offer specificity on the purposes, intents and goals that poor and minority residents develop as they understand, resist and challenge their marginality. Why do residents of marginalized neighborhoods and their supporters organize to proactively improve livability and environmental quality? To what extent do the environmental struggles of marginalized communities serve as means to advance more complex political agendas in the city? Through the examination of neighborhood organization for livability in the Casc Antic, I analyze how activists use their environmental endeavors as tools to address stigmas attached to their place, control the land and its boundaries, and build a more transgressive form of democracy.

Assessing green gentrification in historically disenfranchised neighborhoods: a longitudinal and spatial analysis of Barcelona

ABSTRACT To date, little is known about the extent to which the creation of municipal green spaces over an entire city addresses social or racial inequalities in the distribution of environmental amenities – or whether such an agenda creates contributes to green gentrification. In this study, we evaluate the effects of creating 18 green spaces in socially vulnerable neighborhoods of Barcelona during the 1990s and early 2000s. We examined the evolution over time of six socio-demographic gentrification indicators in the areas close to green spaces in comparison with the entire districts. Our results indicate that new parks in the old town and formerly industrialized neighborhoods seem to have experienced green gentrification. In contrast, most economically depressed areas and working-class neighborhoods with less desirable housing stock and more isolated from the city center gained vulnerable residents as they became greener, indicating a possible redistribution and greater concentration of vulnerable residents through the city.

Contesting and Resisting Environmental Gentrification: Responses to New Paradoxes and Challenges for Urban Environmental Justice:

This paper analyzes environmental gentrification (EG), or the exclusion, marginalization, and displacement of long-term residents associated with sustainability planning or green developments and amenities, such as smart growth, public park renovations, and healthy food stores. We consider how activists, communities, and urban planners address these unjust processes and outcomes associated with EG and how these strategies compare to those used by environmental justice (EJ) activists. Our evaluation of relevant literature indicates several similarities with EJ resistance tactics, including collective neighborhood action, community organizing, and direct tactics. We also identify several different strategies enabled by certain urban environmental conditions, such as leveraging environmental policies and taking an active role in neighborhood redevelopment planning processes, collaborating with ‘gentrifiers,’ and creating complementary policies to manage displacement and exclusion. Our analysis indicates a need for more research on how activists can better assert the social and political dimensions of sustainability and their right to the city, and how green and sustainable cities can achieve justice and equity.

Tactical developments for achieving just and sustainable neighborhoods: the role of community-based coalitions and bottom-to-bottom networks in street, technical, and funder activism

Over the past two decades community activists in distressed urban neighborhoods have been organizing to improve environmental quality and livability for residents through parks, playgrounds, gardens, farms, or sports facilities, and this across political systems and contexts of urbanization. To date, however, limited research has been conducted on the development and intricacies of neighborhood activism for long-term environmental justice in marginalized neighborhoods, and little work has been done in a comparative manner and through a place-based approach. Through three historically marginalized neighborhoods in Boston, Barcelona, and Havana, I analyze how internal dynamics and external contexts shape community organization towards improved environmental quality and livability, and how mobilization unfolds over time and space. Findings reveal that activists tend to resort to similar tactical choices to achieve their objectives, including broad and flexible coalitions, and what I call bottom-to-bottom networks encompassing three forms of activism: street activism, technical activism, and funder activism.