Critical Sustainability Studies

Green gentrification refers to processes started by the implementation of an environmental planning agenda related to green spaces that lead to the exclusion and displacement of politically disenfranchised residents. Environmental improvements tend to increase quality of life and property values – especially as urban environmental consciousness grows – pricing out vulnerable residents and drawing in new and wealthier residents. It therefore contributes to the reproduction of a condition of environmental injustice (environmental hazards and amenities being disproportionately distributed across neighbourhoods) while espousing an environmental ethic. The study of green gentrification is thus linked to both, gentrification and environmental justice literature. At BCNUEJ we explore the ways in which these contemporary urban environmental management strategies trigger green gentrification and its effects on the most economically vulnerable human population.

• Urban Planning, community (re)development, and environmental justice. (In R. Hollifield, G. Walker, and J. Chakraborty. Handbook of Environmental Justice. London: Routledge, 2018)

• From Jacobs to the Just City: A foundation for challenging the green planning orthodoxy (Cities The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning, 2018)

• Greening cities – To be socially inclusive? About the alleged paradox of society and ecology in cities (Habitat Int., 2017)

• Assessing Green Gentrification in Historically Disenfranchised Neighborhoods: A longitudinal and spatial analysis of Barcelona (Urban Geography, 2017)

• Contesting and Resisting Environmental Gentrification: Responses to New Paradoxes and Challenges for Urban Environmental Justice (Sociological Research Online, 2016)

• From Toxic Sites to Parks as (Green) LULUs? New Challenges of Inequity, Privilege, Gentrification, and Exclusion for Urban Environmental Justice (Journal of Planning Literature, 2015)