However, greening initiatives can lead to increases in land prices, thereby reducing access to affordable land and pushing poor populations away from working areas, which undermines their well-being and the potential scope of nature-positive solutions. This vicious circle points to the need to complement greening strategies with other measures, such as further land taxation to reduce land speculation, the displacement of people with lower incomes and the commodification of nature (Raja, Morgan and Hall 2017). Retaining and increasing social housing is key to preventing green achievements from being made at the expense of lower-income groups (Rigolon and Németh 2019).
A critical factor in the success of most city-greening initiatives is to plan for gentrification effects before displacement happens. A “just green enough” approach can uncouple environmental regeneration and clean-up from high-end residential and commercial development (Curran and Hamilton eds. 2017). The experience of the Sunset Park neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, illustrates how this looks in practice (Simpson 2019). In this case, Latino community-based organizations are driving greening strategies built on the experience and expertise of the neighbourhood’s working-class foreign-born residents. Combining racial justice activism with climate resilience planning, the group advocates for investments and training for existing small businesses (often Latino-owned) to develop an environmentally sustainable and circular local economy. Similar initiatives in the North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone are working to ensure that a Superfund10 clean-up and other remediation measures do not end up displacing workers and residents in manufacturing areas.
Other examples of balancing environmental sustainability and equity concerns include: v Buenos Aires, where local authorities have undertaken an extensive programme to improve the city’s river basins in order to better handle flood events and protect low-income communities that are most at risk, while also extending access to drinking water (C40 Cities 2019);
v Cape Town, where efforts are being carried out to retrofit poorly insulated homes in low-income communities in order to reduce energy demand and improve the health of many residents susceptible to tuberculosis and other illnesses;
v Barcelona, whose 2018 Climate Plan adopted a strategic focus on citizen involvement in the design of socially- inclusive climate actions that simultaneously address climate challenges and socioeconomic inequality to the benefit of all residents (C40 Cities 2019).
What these experiences have in common is a focus on ensuring that environmental improvements are not pursued at the expense of equity considerations. This calls for an in-depth consideration of nature and social diversity, along with the prevention of green gentrification processes (Anguelovski et al. 2018).
5.5.2 Building equity into environmental sustainability and resilience
Significant and long-standing efforts also exist in instances where city decision makers have included equity considerations into programmes to improve environmental sustainability and resilience. Such efforts often originate following social mobilization and the demand to bring together calls for social and environmental justice. This requires a commitment to opening and sustaining participatory processes that give voice to those who are typically marginalized. Developing an inclusive agenda does not therefore mean placing emphasis on issues to be tackled, but on the groups of people whose experiences matter and on those best-placed to lead the process. Citizen-led change often begins with an identification of historical cases of environmental injustice, including an in-depth analysis of their spatial manifestation and driving forces. As shown in the case of Seattle, Washington (Box 5.6), a sustained and iterative process of collective diagnosis and concerted action can mature over time to tackle interdependent social and environmental challenges.
Box 5.6: Case study – Seattle and the Duwamish Valley Program, United States of America
The city of Seattle has long been at the forefront of advancing environmental sustainability, with its municipal electric utility having become the first large utility in the United States to achieve carbon neutrality. The city is also making good progress to ensure that 30 per cent of all new vehicles are electric by 2030 and its recycling rates are among the highest in the country.11
enough if structural inequalities are not tackled (Coven 2018).
In 2015, Seattle launched the Equity & Environment Initiative (EEI) and subsequently created an Environmental Justice Committee, which included African-American community leaders, low-income residents, foreign-born residents, refugees and those with limited English proficiency. Recognizing that there are gender and age biases in local leadership, emphasis was placed on engaging women and youth from these communities. Constructing new spaces and opportunities for participatory democracy was essential to enable discriminated communities to shape the actions and resources required to support an urban environmental agenda centred on racial equity. This led to the launch of the Duwamish Valley Program (DVP) in 2016, a multidepartmental effort to advance environmental sustainability and equitable development in an area where local dwellers had experienced well-documented injustices for years.
10 The term “Superfund” designates polluted locations in the United States of America which require a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations. In the United States and other countries, such as the United Kingdom, institutionalized mandates are in place to remediate industrial lands for repurposing.
11 Despite these achievements, Seattle, along with other cities on the west coast of the United States and Canada known for their enhanced environmental performance, are still largely dependent on imported wealth, which highlights the importance of addressing their dependency on tourism and its associated high energy-intensive impacts.
Nevertheless, the city’s administration acknowledges that Seattle’s environmental performance will not be
114
GEO for Cities
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146
