James Jt Connolly

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.

Are green cities healthy and equitable? Unpacking the relationship between health, green space and gentrification

While access and exposure to green spaces has been shown to be beneficial for the health of urban residents, interventions focused on augmenting such access may also catalyse gentrification processes, also known as green gentrification. Drawing from the fields of public health, urban planning and environmental justice, we argue that public health and epidemiology researchers should rely on a more dynamic model of community that accounts for the potential unintended social consequences of upstream health interventions. In our example of green gentrification, the health benefits of greening can only be fully understood relative to the social and political environments in which inequities persist. We point to two key questions regarding the health benefits of newly added green space: Who benefits in the short and long term from greening interventions in lower income or minority neighbourhoods undergoing processes of revitalisation? And, can green cities be both healthy and just? We propose the Green Gentrification and Health Equity model which provides a framework for understanding and testing whether gentrification associated with green space may modify the effect of exposure to green space on health.

From Systems Thinking to Systemic Action: Social Vulnerability and the Institutional Challenge of Urban Resilience: FROM SYSTEMS THINKING TO SYSTEMIC ACTION

When it comes to translating ideas like urban resilience into actions, institutions are slippery by nature—they can serve as a bridge or a barrier, and often both at once. For example, this slippery aspect of institutions fuels the decades-old debate among environmental sociologists over the effect of the global sustainability movement. Some argue that the actions of the global sustainability movement have had the cockeyed effect of reinforcing institutional barriers that protect environmentally unsustainable growth (Gould et al. 2015). Conversely, others argue that the movement created a permanent new institutional bridge between actions associated with private capital accumulation and innovative ideas for environmental preservation (Spaargaren and Mol 1992). A third position argues that institutional contexts are not monolithic: some are more conducive to sustainability transitions and some less (Hansen and Coenen 2015). As urban resilience scholars and advocates translate ideas about how social, ecological, and physical systems work into an action agenda for cities, they find themselves in front of the same variegated institutional contexts faced by the global sustainability movement before them. In addition to their generally slippery nature, the institutions that currently direct urban growth are supported by centuries (relative to the history of capitalist cities) of accumulated rules, laws, norms, mores, incentives, and social relations. These accumulated institutional supports enforce entrenched definitions of what is desirable, acceptable, and who benefits from urban growth. Urban historical institutionalists and political ecologists have mapped the ways that these pathways of institutional accumulation translate into the specific built forms, social geographies, and mechanisms for creating wealth. What can, and should, urban resilience advocates and scholars do in the face of urban institutions that are both slippery in terms of how they connect ideas to actions and deeply entrenched? In this commentary, I argue that prioritizing social vulnerability provides an answer to this question and allows resilience efforts to avoid simple replication of the path taken by the global urban sustainability movement. This is the case because addressing social vulnerability requires addressing institutional barriers that urban sustainability initiatives tend to avoid. By prioritizing economic benefits, sustainability appeals to entrenched interests that are conducive to bridging new ideas with new ways of acting when such a move results in economic growth. If urban resilience adds anything to our current framework for

From landscapes of utopia to the margins of the green urban life: For whom is the new green city?

Today, municipal decision-makers, planners, and investors rely on valuation studies of ecosystem services, public health assessments, and real estate projections to promote a consensual view of urban greening interventions such as new parks, greenways, or greenbelts as a public good with widespread benefits for all residents. However, as new green projects often anchor major investment and high-end development, we ask: Does the green city fulfil its promise for inclusive and far-reaching environmental, health, social, and economic benefits or does it create new environmental inequalities and green mirages? Through case examples of diverse urban greening interventions in cities reflecting different urban development trajectories and baseline environmental conditions and needs (Barcelona, Medellin, and New Orleans), we argue that urban greening interventions increasingly create new dynamics of exclusion, polarization, segregation, and invisibilization. Despite claims about the public good, these interventions take place to the detriment of the most socially and racially marginalized urban groups whose land and landscapes are appropriated through the creation of a ‘green gap’ in property markets. In that sense, green amenities become GreenLULUs (Locally Unwanted Land Uses) and socially vulnerable residents and community groups face a green space paradox, whereby they become excluded from new green amenities they long fought for as part of an environmental justice agenda. Thus, as urban greening consolidates urban sustainability and redevelopment strategies by bringing together private and public investors around a tool for marketing cities with global reach, it also negates a deeper reflection on urban segregation, social hierarchies, racial inequalities, and green privilege.

Can Healthy Cities be made really healthy

Strategies such as the Healthy Cities project aim to place health at the centre of urban interventions. Such programmes seek to create cities with adequate housing and public transportation, quality health care, and safe places to exercise and play. However, these common transversal approaches also carry a risk of perverse effects, especially when the effect of market-oriented regulatory processes and uneven dynamics of policy formation are not considered. As a result, the Healthy Cities project and similar approaches, such as the WHO’s promoted Health in All Policies, might in some cases bolster rather than reduce established trends toward urban social and health inequities. In theory, provision of healthful amenities in cities with the crosscutting policy approach has positive effects on health equity. However, environmental privilege, or inequitable exposure to environmental issues or amenities on the basis of social privilege, is not easily undone in the context of urban growth that concentrates extreme wealth and large exclusion. The gap in family wealth, income, educational achievements, and access to housing continues to widen in many cities worldwide, and is often an expression of deep racial, ethnic, or social class divisions. For example, in Boston, MA, USA, white families have a median net worth of US

New scholarly pathways on green gentrification: What does the urban ‘green turn’ mean and where is it going?

247 500 compared with

From Jacobs to the Just City: A foundation for challenging the green planning orthodoxy

700 for African Americans, which can affect access to housing and mental health resources. Such inequities are often expressed spatially so that lowincome residents and minority populations have worse access to clean air and water, green spaces, healthy and affordable food options, and efficient public transport systems. These differences in exposure and access are one cause of inequities in urban health and one manifestation of environmental privilege—a form of privilege characterised in a socially and racially exclusive manner. When public health interventions are incorporated into varied stakeholder agendas, they risk becoming justifications for actions that expand rather than reduce social inequities. An example of how this scenario might play out is when the US city of Milwaukee, WI, engaged in an extensive greening programme partly to improve the health of residents. During this period, nearly 16 000 homeowners received notice from lenders of impending foreclosure, with African Americans disproportionately affected. In 2013, the city owned and maintained about 900 foreclosed homes and 2700 vacant lots, of which owners had failed to pay property taxes. The city, nonprofit organisations, and businesses have teamed up to convert these sites into gardens and urban agriculture; a prime focus of healthy city interventions to build resilience and provide healthy living environments for residents who can afford them. Similar to Milwaukee, many healthful city interventions, through which added amenities ultimately help to revalorise urban real estate, gain wide support among those who traditionally control decisions on urban land use, especially local government, business, and finance interests. A danger exists of crosscutting health initiatives in cities becoming justifications for new rounds of high-end development and gentrification, but not for intervention on behalf of those who are on the margins of growth cycles. In such a circumstance, health inequities might be exacerbated. Ensuring of healthy and equitable cities requires the incorporation of health and equity as objectives across sectors. Despite the consensus of various stakeholders (eg, public health departments, urban planners, environmental justice activists, and other social justice advocates), the success of the Health in All Policies movement and the development of healthy and equitable cities has proven more difficult than anticipated. The submission of urban planning and social policy to market-oriented regulatory processes is preventing policy interventions from effectively promoting health and environmental equity. For strategies such as Health in All Policies and Healthy Cities to have an impact, crosscutting health initiatives need to become politically unifying agendas for existing social equity and environmental activism in cities to really reduce health inequities.

Assessing Green Gentrification in Historically Disenfranchised Neighborhoods

Scholars in urban political ecology, urban geography, and planning have suggested that urban greening interventions can create elite enclaves of environmental privilege and green gentrification, and exclude lower-income and minority residents from their benefits. Yet, much remains to be understood in regard to the magnitude, scope, and manifestations of green gentrification and the forms of contestation and resistance articulated against it. In this paper, we propose new questions, theoretical approaches, and research design approaches to examine the socio-spatial dynamics and ramifications of green gentrification and parse out why, how, where, and when green gentrification takes place.